They created BackRub, a reference to the backlinks reaching back from the site you saw to the site you had just been on. In August 1998, Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the cofounders of Sun Microsystems, famously wrote a $100,000 check to “Google, Inc.” before the company was even incorporated. Less well known is that they moments later received a second $100,000 check from Stanford professor David Cheriton, on whose porch they had met Andy.