Andy Rubin, the founder of Android had already made a name for himself in mobile technology. In 1999, he co-founded Danger Inc. Microsoft bought Danger in 2008.
Google acquired Android in 2005, before the iPhone was unveiled in January 2007.
The rumor here is Eric was shown an early iPhone product, and saw how much better it was than the then-current beta builds of Android. https://betawiki.net/wiki/Android_1.0_April_2007_build
Chrome was based on WebKit, which was based on KHTML, the browser engine from KDE. The only reason we have WebKit as an open source engine is because Apple had to open source it. https://blogs.kde.org/2007/10/26/web-diplomacy/
They released "just" enough of it that WebKit could be replaced in Safari. That's it. Their patch would not compile or run on Linux. It would be _years_ before KDE had a WebKit browser. KDE took months to implement many changed from WebKit into KHTML.
Sequoia Capital introduced the Where2 team to Google. https://www.smartcompany.com.au/technology/neural-notes-how-...
Sequoia were freaking out. They had signed a term sheet with the Where2 team, and backed out because Yahoo! just released a map product. Yahoo was involved in both Google's early history and the events that led to Google Maps. Yahoo had an early opportunity to license Google's search technology, rather than acquire Google outright. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were introduced to Sequoia investor Michael Moritz through Yahoo co-founder David Filo.
Yahoo CEO Terry Semel reportedly offered around US$3 billion to buy Google, but Page and Brin declined.
Sequoia withdrew its proposed investment in Where 2 in 2008. Thinking Yahoo would dominate the market, and it was not a safe investment.
Sequoia then introduced Where 2 to Google. CIA, Keyhole, it's all a fun little rabbit hole :)