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Larry Page’s brother Carl Page had experience with venture capitalists, having sold eGroups to Yahoo for $432 million. Because of Carl Page’s experience with venture capitalists Page and Brin were extremely unwilling to cede control over their company to investors.
Learning the lessons of Carl Page, Page and Brin delayed venture capital financing until they were almost profitable, resulting in a higher valuation and less loss of control over their company; Google’s VC round valuation was extremely high by historical standards and this reflected their bargaining position at the time. They played two prominent separate venture capitalist firms against each other to minimize their loss of control and to maximize valuation and double the number of social connections the company had access to. Page and Brin issued themselves special Class-B shares which held 10 votes per share compared to the 1 vote per share of the Class-A and common stock. This effectively eliminated the possibility of investor take-over of the company by shareholder vote, as each founder had more votes than all the outstanding shares of Class-A and common stock. Sergey and Larry were also extremely careful about choosing their board members and put an emphasis on retaining control of the board.

The one concession Page and Brin made was an agreement to bring on an outside CEO. However they delayed doing this for years and antagonized all prospective CEO candidates, merely meeting with them to placate their VC investors. Under pressure from the VC, Page and Brin took on Eric Schmidt as CEO, but only after examining a large number of candidates. Page and Brin put an unusual amount of time into CEO selection and chose to delay taking on a CEO until they found one who was compatible with and would not adversely affect their company culture. Eric Schmidt was probably a particularly good fit with Google’s culture because of his tenure at Sun.
Retaining control over the company proved to be crucial to Google’s success. Most of the early company revenues came from enterprise search, and the investors and Eric Schmidt pressured the company to drop consumer facing search and to focus on the enterprise market. However Page and Brin disregarded this advice as they anticipated the growth of a market for online advertisement. At the time this decision was being made, the New York Times was quoting experts as saying “No one will ever make $250 million dollars a year from online advertising.”  It has also been said that Page and Brin disregarded pressure from investors to copy Yahoo! and diversify Google into a portal site, deciding instead to focus on the core search and advertising market.
Another key decision Google made was to keep their financials absolutely secret. Page and Brin learned something from the Internet Explorer and Netscape browser wars and had a healthy fear of Microsoft coming in and crushing them. They therefore kept their financials absolutely secret, did no marketing, did not evangelize their product and hid the fact that they were making money at all. Not even employees in the company had access to the financial information due to the fear that knowledge about the profitability of search could spur competition with Microsoft.
Another key decision in the company’s history was achieving early profitability, and going for an IPO, using the funds to acquire and build an advertising network. Google would not have been as successful as it is today if it had chosen to be acquired instead of achieving profitability and doing an IPO. It has been suggested that Google’s hand was forced in the decision to IPO rather than undergoing acquisition be
cause it was unable to find a company interested in purchasing them.
Lessons to be learned:

1. Choose a market that is exploding in size:  mobile devices, cloud computing, (anything else to add to this list?)
2. Google was not the first search engine, YouTube was not the first video sharing website, Facebook was not the first social network. Everyone knew that the search engine market was “mature” and that it was impossible for a new entrant to compete with Yahoo! and Altavista. Google came in and annihilated them anyway. Find competitive advantage and leverage technology.
3. Maintain control of your company. If you cannot resist pressure from your investors to do the wrong things, your company will fail. Where would Google be today if it had left the consumer search market and focused solely on enterprise document search? Where would it be if it had copied Yahoo! and became a portal site?
4. Early revenues and profitability are extremely important and give you a better bargaining position with investors.  Google became profitable in its third year of operation according to its SEC form S-1 filing.
5. Take as long as necessary to find the perfect CEO. When you are a startup and only have 5 million a year in revenue the CEOs you have access to will not be as good as the ones you will be able to acquire later. Do not be pressured into taking on a CEO who is not the right fit for the company you are building. Aggressively leverage high profile VC investor connections to gain access to competent high level talent.
6. Company culture is extremely important to attracting talent. Paul Buchheit who invented Gmail left his job at Intel and took a pay cut to join Google. Everyone working at Google at the time “knew” that Google was going to be crushed by Altavista and Yahoo. Paul Buchheit quit his job at Intel to take a pay cut to work at a company he thought was doomed, because “Google was more fun” than working at Intel. Culture is more important than compensation for attracting star employees and you should leverage it.

“Honestly, I was pretty sure AltaVista was going to destroy Google” -Paul Buchheit, pg.  174 “Founders at Work” http://amzn.to/93eUFo
As Keith Rabois mentioned, “Googled: The End of the World as We Know It” http://amzn.to/9YCbm9 is an absolutely great book.  Especially for understanding Google’s corporate strategy, internal decisions and how Google obtained dominance as the world’s largest media company.