With Brin’s help, the idea turned into PageRank, the foundational algorithm of Google Search. These days, Google is the largest tech company run under Alphabet, though the brand’s scope was slimmed down during the restructuring. This gave Google – and other Alphabet brands – increased freedom to focus on their individual core missions. Overseeing key products, Raghavan’s stake of 68,528 shares underscores his influence in shaping the future of Google’s services. Larry Page and Sergey Brin own about 14% of Google’s publicly listed shares and 56% of the company’s super-voting stock.
Advertising
Alphabet was founded as a search engine company in 1998 under the name Google Inc. Since then, Google has become the world’s most popular search engine, owning 91% of the global search market. Alphabet has been amping up its efforts to innovate in the artificial intelligence space and incorporate AI into its products — a key priority for its investors. The new company would be called Alphabet, and it would remove Page and Brin from any day-to-day operations at Google proper and elevate them to CEO and president, respectively, of what is effectively a holding company. The process made Google’s financials a bit easier to parse as the various experimental divisions got broken out from Google proper.
The company offers performance advertising, which allows advertisers to connect with their users with measurable results. It also sells brand advertising, which aims to enhance users’ awareness and affinity with brands. Advertising is thus a core part of Alphabet’s strategy and has guided many of its acquisition decisions, such as the purchase of DoubleClick in 2008 (see below).
Seven major companies owned by Alphabet are YouTube, Waze, DoubleClick, Nest, Looker, Fitbit, and Mandiant. “We are creating a corporate structure that is designed for stability over long time horizons. By investing in Google, you are placing an unusual long term bet on the team, especially Sergey and me, and on our innovative approach,” Page wrote. One particularly notable aspect of Google’s IPO was Page and Brin’s decision to create a so-called super-voting Class B stock that only they, Schmidt, and a handful of other executives were granted. That Class B stock came with 10 times the voting power of a Class A share, meaning Page and Brin would hoard just over 50 percent of it as a way to maintain control of the company in perpetuity, and that remains the case even today following their official departure. Just a few years after hiring Schmidt, Google was on a fast-moving rocket to the upper echelon of not just the tech industry, but the broader American business landscape.
This is perhaps the last time the public will ever see Google’s co-founders speaking in front of a crowd, and that feels more certain to be the case after Tuesday’s announcement. But Page and Brin, although they are no longer involved in the company’s operations, do remain in control of the company given their super-voting class shares. By the summer of 2015, Google was a remarkably different company than when Page had reassumed his CEO role four years prior.
Page and Brin both have been taken with Teslas
Within a year after they met, in 1996, they began working on a new search engine called BackRub, which they later renamed to Google. DoubleClick was founded in 1996 and became one of the stock-market stars of the dot-com era and a leader in the first generation of online advertising during the 1990s. Private equity firm Hellman & Friedman paid $1.1 billion in a “take-private” transaction to become majority owners of the company in 2005. Alphabet has become one of the world’s largest technology conglomerates, with a market capitalization of $2.05 trillion as of Aug. 22, 2024. The company posted a net income of $73.80 billion on revenue of $307.39 billion for 2023.
Sundar Pichai
It filed for an initial public offering, which took place in August of 2004 and raised $1.7 billion, giving Google a valuation of $27 billion. It’s a fitting end for two of the most mysterious tech leaders of a generation, who are both exiting their company as it hovers near $1 trillion in market cap. The search giant has faced increasing scrutiny from employees, media organizations, activists, regulators, and lawmakers since Page and Brin first stepped back in the summer of 2015. And many of those controversies are problems of Page and Brin’s creation, either because the duo didn’t foresee the ways in which Google could do harm or because they explicitly steered the company in a who own google now direction that flouted standard corporate ethics. The founders of Google are the two Ph.D. students from Stanford University in California, namely Larry Page and Sergey Brin. This duo met in 1995 while working on a research project on the World Wide Web (WWW).
- Google was officially launched on 4 September 1998 from their friend’s garage in Menlo Park, California, United States.
- Page’s Carl Victor Page Memorial Foundation disbursed nearly $200 million to charities in 2021, of which 99% went to the National Philanthropic Trust, a donor-advised fund.
- But Page and Brin, although they are no longer involved in the company’s operations, do remain in control of the company given their super-voting class shares.
- But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.
So much so that Yahoo was willing to pay up to $3 billion for it, a then-unconscionable amount of money for a startup with what Yahoo CEO Terry Semel considered lackluster revenue. After officially incorporating and launching Google to the public in 1998, Page and Brin were overseeing one of the fastest-growing companies in corporate history. Especially after Page’s high-profile attempt earlier that year to fire all of Google’s project managers, a move the company eventually reversed in an embarrassing public refutation of his leadership.