Acquired · Google · History
History
Google was founded in 1998 (Menlo Park, California (Susan Wojcicki's garage)). The timeline below traces every inflection point Acquired identified — founding, leadership changes, strategic pivots, crises, cultural moments.
The story
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.
Inflection points · grouped by decade
1990s
- 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]
- 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]
2000s
- 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]
- 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]
- 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]
- 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]
- 2006Acquired co.
Acquires YouTube ($1.65B)
Buys the video platform that becomes a second advertising and attention engine alongside search.
[Acquired Google Part II]
- 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]
2010s
- 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]
- 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]
- 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)]
2020s
- 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]
- 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]