Who Founded Google?
Google is a giant technology company in the US with its corporate headquarters in California. The company moved its offices in 1999 to Palo Alto in California, where other major Silicon Valley companies are located. In 2000, Google replaced Inktomi to become Yahoo’s default search engine. At the time, Yahoo was one of the most popular websites. Currently, Google is involved in cloud computing, online advertising, search engine, software technologies, and hardware technologies. It is one of the "Big Four" tech companies, the other three being Amazon, Facebook, and Apple.
Founders Of Google
Google traces its origins to January 1996, when it began as a research project carried out by Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Scott Hassan, who were Ph.D. students at Stanford University. Hassan was credited with the writing of the original code of the Google search engine as the lead programmer. The first employee was Craig Silverstein, who was also a Ph.D. student at Stanford University. They worked from a garage in Menlo Park, California, that belonged to a friend. Larry Page and Sergey Brin own about 14% of Google’s shares and control about 56% voting power through supervoting stock.
Initial Public Offering (IPO)
The company’s initial public offering (IPO) was floated on August 19, 2004. In the same year, Eric Schmidt, Brin, and Page indicated that they would work for the company until 2024. In 2001, Eric Schmidt was fronted by investors to be part of the management and was hired as the Chairman and the CEO. At IPO, Google floated 19,605,052 shares, and each was going for $85. The underwriters were Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, and shares were sold online. The IPO gave the company a market capitalization of about $23 billion.
Acquisitions
Google acquired YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion, and the deal began in October 2006 and was finalized in November of the same year. In 2007, Google also acquired DoubleClick, and it transferred to Google all the relationships that DoubleClick had with advertising agencies and web publishers. DoubleClick was acquired for $3.1 billion. In 2011, Google made the largest acquisition ever, when it was announced that the company would be acquiring Motorola Mobility. In 2013, the deal was finalized when Motorola was bought for $12.5 billion. However, in 2014, Motorola was sold to Lenovo, Chinese, a Chinese electronics company for $2.91 billion. Earlier, Google had sold Motorola’s business of set-top box and cable modem to Aris Group.
Reorganization
In 2015, Google was restructured, and a new parent company was created known as Alphabet Inc. All the subsidiaries that were formerly under Google were moved to Alphabet Inc. Larry Page became CEO while Sergey Brin became the president. Currently, Alphabet Inc is the fifth largest technology company in the world in terms of revenue, and it is among the most valuable companies across the world. The subsidiaries within alphabet Inc now include Google, DeepMind, GV, X Development, Calico Nest, Fibre, CapitalG, Loon, Wing, Waymo, Verily, Sidewalk Labs, Makani, and Jigsaw.
