You know how Nigerian parents always say, “So you want to be forming CEO in my house?” Well, turns out Google actually did start in someone’s house more specifically, Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park, California. Back in 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were broke grad students building a search engine and Susan? She needed to pay her mortgage. So for $1,700 a month, she let them turn her garage into the nerve centre of what would become one of the most powerful tech companies in the world.

That same Susan later joined Google as employee number 16, went on to lead AdSense which, by the way, still makes Google over $100 billion a year and then became the CEO of YouTube, overseeing its rise to over 2 billion monthly users. But here’s the part most people miss: Wojcicki wasn’t just a landlord. She was a believer. She backed an idea before it had traction, a team before it had funding, and a company before it had a proper address.

That’s a power move. As entrepreneurs, we often wait for the ‘perfect’ setup the funding, the logo, the co-working space, the investors. But Google didn’t wait. They started where they were, with what they had and it just so happened to be a garage.

The real lesson? Don’t romanticise the finish line. Respect the garage. That space uncomfortable, messy, maybe even embarrassing might just be the birthplace of your billion-dollar idea..