Google

About

Google was founded on September 4, 1998, by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University ¹². The search engine originated as a research project called “BackRub” in 1996, which analyzed the relationships between websites using backlinks to determine relevance ¹².

The company was incorporated in a garage in Menlo Park, California, after receiving an initial $100,000 check from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems — written before Google was even legally incorporated ²³. Page and Brin raised approximately $1 million from angel investors in 1998 and secured a $25 million Series A round in June 1999 from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital ²⁴.

Eric Schmidt was hired as CEO in August 2001 ¹. Google went public on August 19, 2004, using a Dutch auction IPO process, pricing shares at $85 and raising $1.67 billion, giving the company a market capitalization of over $23 billion ²⁵.

In October 2015, Google restructured under a new parent holding company called Alphabet Inc., with Sundar Pichai becoming CEO of Google ⁶. As of March 2026, Alphabet has a market capitalization of approximately $3.67 trillion, making it the world’s third most valuable company ⁷.

Funding History

What Investors Say

Ron Conway learned about Google from Stanford professor David Cheriton at a holiday party in December 1998 ⁸¹⁰. Conway pursued the founders persistently: “I called them every month for five months and finally got my audition with Larry and Sergey” ¹⁰. When they finally met, Page and Brin set a condition: “We’ll let you invest if you can get Sequoia” ¹⁰. Conway brokered the introduction between Google’s founders and Sequoia Capital, earning his allocation in the process ¹⁰.

Conway’s assessment of the founders reflected his broader investing philosophy: “Is this person a leader? Is this person rifle-focused and obsessed by the product?” ¹⁰.

Andy Bechtolsheim wrote the first check to Google — $100,000 — after a brief demo on the porch of a Stanford faculty member’s house, before the company was even incorporated ²³.

Jeff Bezos invested $250,000 in Google in 1998. When asked why, Bezos has said: “I just fell in love with Larry and Sergey” ¹¹.

What Founders Say

Larry Page on Google’s origins: “We didn’t start out to do a search engine at all. In late 1995, I started collecting the links on the Web, because my advisor and I decided that would be a good thing to do. We didn’t know exactly what I was going to do with it, but it seemed like no one was really looking at the links on the Web” ¹².

Page and Brin in their 2004 IPO letter to investors: “We hoped, but did not expect, it would reach its current size and influence. Our intense and enduring interest was to objectively help people find information efficiently” ¹².

On their early working relationship, Page recalled: “Sergey is pretty social; he likes meeting people. I thought he was pretty obnoxious. He had really strong opinions about things, and I guess I did, too” ¹³. But Brin explained: “Obviously we spent a lot of time talking to each other, so there was something there. We had a kind of bantering thing going” ¹³.

Larry Page on the mission: “Basically, our goal is to organize the world’s information and to make it universally accessible and useful” ¹².

Sources