What were the key decisions that Page and Brin made in the early days of Google
The highest ranked answer on that thread, though it contains some interesting details, is way off.  Managing VCs well was not what made Google successful-- or what makes any startup successful.  The real key decisions were things like realizing search itself was important, at a time when all the other search engines thought it was unsexy, and were trying to get people to start calling them "portals" instead; designing the architecture to work on large numbers of unreliable, cheap computers; understanding how important speed was; making the site uncluttered; deciding to hire only very smart people; etc.  That's what made the company valuable, and if it hadn't been valuable it wouldn't have mattered how well they'd avoided dilution.