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Acquired · Google · Overview

Google

Treated as a four-part company across the catalogue.

$100K Andy Bechtolsheim's first check~$350B Alphabet revenue (FY2024)~$50B Google Cloud revenue3B+ Active Android devices
Overview · other companiesNVIDIAGoogleAmazonMetaMicrosoftBerkshire HathawayTSMCQualcommAppleNetflixSpotifyDisney

Major events · 1996–2025

200020052010201520202025
FoundingProductStrategic shiftIPOAcquired co.Acquired covered
  1. 1996Founding

    BackRub / PageRank research at Stanford

    Page and Brin's research project ranks web pages by their inbound link structure, the insight that becomes PageRank and then Google.

    Acquired Google Part I

  2. 1998Founding

    Google Inc. incorporated

    Bechtolsheim's $100,000 check to a company that did not yet exist forces incorporation. First office: Susan Wojcicki's Menlo Park garage.

    Acquired Google Part I

  3. 2000Product

    AdWords launches (350-advertiser beta)

    Google's first ad product, October 2000. Still partly negotiated and hand-entered; the self-serve auction comes later.

    Acquired Google Part I

  4. 2002Strategic shift

    AdWords v2 — the self-serve CPC auction

    Google adopts the pay-per-click, highest-bidder-wins, self-serve auction GoTo / Overture pioneered, and pairs it with relevance. The monetization engine is set.

    Acquired Google Part I

  5. 2004-08IPO

    IPO via Dutch auction; dual-class structure

    Google goes public in a Dutch-auction IPO and adopts a dual-class share structure borrowed from media families. The dual class became the tech-IPO default; the Dutch auction did not.

    Acquired Google Part I

  6. 2005-07Acquired co.

    Acquires Android for $50M

    Larry Page buys Andy Rubin's struggling OS startup eighteen months before the iPhone reveal, then runs Google's distribution playbook on it.

    Acquired Google Part II

  7. 2006Acquired co.

    Acquires YouTube ($1.65B)

    Buys the video platform that becomes a second advertising and attention engine alongside search.

    Acquired Google Part II

  8. 2008Product

    Chrome launches

    A free browser that ends Microsoft's Internet Explorer grip on the web and keeps Google search the default entry point.

    Acquired Google Part II

  9. 2014-01Acquired co.

    Acquires DeepMind (~$650M)

    Buys the London AI lab the hosts call 'the YouTube of AI' — the acquisition they argue led, downstream, to OpenAI, ChatGPT, Anthropic, and Gemini.

    Acquired Google Part III

  10. 2015Strategic shift

    Alphabet restructure

    Google reorganizes under the Alphabet holding company, separating the core search-ads business from the loss-making 'other bets.'

    Acquired Google Part II

  11. 2017Strategic shift

    'Attention Is All You Need' — the Transformer

    Google researchers publish the Transformer architecture that underpins every modern large language model, including the ones built by rivals.

    Acquired Google Part III + Vaswani et al. (2017)

  12. 2023Product

    Gemini and the AI-first stack

    Google merges Brain and DeepMind and ships Gemini, run on its own cloud and its own TPUs — model, chip, and distribution owned end to end.

    Acquired Google Part III

  13. 2025Acquired covered

    Acquired's three-part Google series

    Ben and David trace the arc from PageRank to the search-ad auction to the AI stack across Origins of Search, Alphabet, and The AI Company.

    https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/google-the-ai-company

Origin

Founded1998FoundersLarry Page, Sergey BrinLocationMenlo Park, California (Susan Wojcicki's garage)

Rank the web on its own link structure (PageRank) to organize the world's information, then monetize intent at the moment of search with a self-serve ad auction.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin met as Stanford PhD students; their BackRub research scored pages by who links to them, which became PageRank and then Google. The company nearly stayed a licensing project until Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a $100,000 check to 'Google Inc.' before the entity legally existed. The organic-search breakthrough had no business model for years; Google found it by adapting the pay-per-click search auction GoTo / Overture had pioneered, then compounding it on a data-and-marketplace flywheel.

Key facts

Andy Bechtolsheim's first check

$100K

Alphabet revenue (FY2024)

~$350B

Google Cloud revenue

~$50B

Active Android devices

3B+

Android acquisition price

$50M

DeepMind acquisition

~$650M

Revenue at the Alphabet restructure (2015)

$75B

Episodes · 4 covering this company

Hooks from these episodes

Google is profitable enough to build its own data centres, its own servers, and its own undersea cables — which gives it cost advantages competitors can't replicate even with the same architectural decisions.

The four-part Google series treats the company as four businesses, not one.