Great point! I feel like smartphones were like this too. When the iPhone first came out I scoffed at my buddy for paying $600 for a phone (in an age when a large variety of phones were available for free with contract). Now I can't live without my smartphone.
It is still amazing what they did with what they had, despite the fact that they had more than the average person.
However, there is no denying that they were lucky to have that money in the first place so that they could wait until their company was valued more and they had to give less away to VCs. I wonder how many startups had to give away their autonomy for badly needed cash? A large number no doubt.
From Carl Page's perspective: his brother had not yet sold his startup for hundreds of millions. It is quite a feat that he was able to do it by himself. But if Carl Page did have those hundreds of millions as a possible source of funding, could he have kept his startup from VCs longer and had more autonomy in it, and perhaps sold it for billions?
eGroups wasn't sold to Yahoo until August 2000 (after it IPO'd, actually), 2 years after Google was founded. Larry Page didn't have any more money available than any other Stanford grad student with a professor dad. He did have the experience of having a family member who'd gone through the VC process, but lots of people know people who've taken VC.
