Forced Arbitration at Google: The End of a Controversial Employment Practice

In 1996, Larry Page (Page) and Sergey Brin (Brin), students of Stanford University, started a project called ‘Backrub’ to organize internet search results better. The project was started off in a suburban garage. In 1998, Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, became the first investor to invest US$100,000 in the project. Backed by a few more investors, Page and Brin renamed the project Google, bought the domain Google.com, and officially incorporated it in September 1998. The company continued to attract more investors year after year. In 1999, Google received funding of US$25 million from venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital...