Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Google (Alphabet Inc.)
In one quick glance: Google started as a student side-project in a cluttered garage and grew into a $1.8-trillion company that shapes how billions of people search, watch videos, navigate streets, store photos and—more recently—explore AI.
Table of contents
- The Garage Story
- Early Products That Won the Web
- Big Acquisitions and Why They Mattered
- Who Runs Google and What They Earn
- How Google Makes Its Money (with pie chart)
- Life and Perks Inside Google
- Challenges: The Monopoly Cases and New Rivals
- Final Reasons to Aim for a Job at Google
1 The Garage Story — Where It All Began
In 1995, graduate student Larry Page visited Stanford University. Sergey Brin was asked to show him around. They argued all day but liked each other’s sharp ideas. A year later, they built a program called Backrub to rank web pages by links. It worked so well that Stanford’s network kept crashing.
Wanting a fresh name, they chose Google, a play on the math word “googol” (a 1 followed by 100 zeros). Susan Wojcicki, who later ran YouTube, rented them her Menlo Park garage. Angel investor Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a $100 000 cheque on the spot after a quick demo. On 4 September 1998 Google Inc. was born.
By 1999, Google served 500 000 searches a day; by late 2000 it was the default search box for the web.
2 Early Products That Won the Web
| Year | Product | Why It Stood Out |
|---|---|---|
| 2000 | AdWords | Self-serve ads that funded Google’s free services. |
| 2001 | Image Search | First tool to find pictures at scale. |
| 2004 | Gmail | Shocked users with 1 GB free e-mail when rivals gave 4 MB. |
| 2005 | Google Maps and the Android buy (see Acquisitions) | Made navigation and smart-phones Google-friendly. |
| 2012 | Knowledge Graph | Showed quick answers beside search links. |
| 2016 | Google Assistant | Voice AI in phones and smart speakers. |
| 2023 | Gemini AI | Google’s multi-modal chat rival to GPT-4. |
These launches built trust: people realised Google solved real-life problems, not just search.
3 Big Acquisitions and Why They Mattered
(See horizontal bar chart above for prices.)
| Year | Target | Price | How It Helped |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2005 | Android Inc. | ≈ $50 M | Gave Google a phone OS now on 70 % of the world’s smart-phones. |
| 2006 | YouTube | $1.65 B | Turned into the world’s video town square and a $45 B a-year business. |
| 2007 | DoubleClick | $3.1 B | Added display-ad tech and cemented Google’s ad empire. |
| 2011 | Motorola Mobility | $12.5 B | Helped defend Android with patents, then resold hardware to Lenovo. |
| 2014 | Nest | $3.2 B | Brought smart-home devices and design talent. |
| 2019 | Looker | $2.6 B | Strengthened Google Cloud’s analytics tools. |
| 2021 | Fitbit | $2.1 B | Entered wearables and health data. |
| 2022 | Mandiant | $5.4 B | Boosted cloud security skills against hacks. |
| 2025* | Wiz (agreed) | $32 B | Could super-charge Google Cloud’s security and be its largest deal ever. |
*Pending regulatory approval.
Take-away: Google buys when speed matters more than building from scratch.
4 Who Runs Google and What They Earn
| Leader | Role Today | Key Fact | Latest Reported Pay |
|---|---|---|---|
| Larry Page | Board member, co-founder | Loves flying electric aircraft | Keeps a $1 salary; wealth from shares. |
| Sergey Brin | Board member, co-founder | Tests AI projects in Google X | Also takes $1 salary. |
| Sundar Pichai | CEO since 2015 | Rose from product manager to chief | Earned $226 M in 2022, $218 M in stock. |
| Eric Schmidt | Former CEO (2001-11) | Guided IPO and “Don’t be evil” mantra | Stock bonuses once topped $100 M a year. |
Simple lesson: high stock, low base pay keeps leaders focused on long-term growth.
5 How Google Makes Its Money
Look at the pie chart for Q4 2024:
- Search & Other Ads: $54 B (about 56 % of the quarter).
- YouTube Ads: $10.5 B (11 %).
- Google Cloud: $12 B (12 %) and growing 30 % year-on-year.
- Subscriptions, Play Store, Devices: $11.6 B.
- Other Bets (Waymo, Verily, X): $0.4 B but they hold future moon-shots.
Full-year 2024: about $350 B revenue; ads still ~75 %.
Net income: roughly $100 B, showing strong margins.
The regional bar chart shows almost half of sales come from the United States, with Europe, Middle East & Africa next.
Market facts (23 Apr 2025): market cap ≈ $1.88 T, share price $153.9.
Employees: ~183 000 worldwide.
6 Life and Perks Inside Google
- Impact: Your work can touch billions of users daily—few firms match that reach.
- Learning: “20 % time” lets you test side ideas; many turn into real products like Gmail.
- Culture: Weekly “TGIF” all-hands with leaders invite open questions.
- Perks: Free gourmet food, on-site health care, parental leave, mental-health support, global mobility.
- Pay: Median engineer package ≈ $200 K cash + stock refreshers each year.
- Ratings: Glassdoor score 4.3/5 and constant “Best Place to Work” awards.
- Mobility: You can switch from YouTube to Waymo to DeepMind without quitting.
- Alumni clout: Ex-Googlers often raise funding faster thanks to the brand.
7 Challenges: Monopoly Cases and New Rivals
Success means scrutiny.
- April 2025: U.S. judge ruled Google illegally monopolised parts of the ad-tech stack; remedies (maybe a spin-off of Google Ad Manager) are still under debate.
- Search antitrust: A separate DoJ case says Google pays billions to be default on phones; verdict pending.
- Why this matters to staff: Even if Google must separate some units, core skills—AI, cloud, ads—remain in high demand.
Meanwhile, competition comes from TikTok for video, ChatGPT for answers, and AWS/Microsoft in cloud. Google answers by doubling-down on AI (Gemini), buying security firms (Mandiant, Wiz) and investing in new chips (TPUs).
8 Final Reasons to Aim for a Job at Google
- Mission: “Organise the world’s information.” Still exciting in an AI age.
- Resources: Few places let you train models on thousands of TPUs overnight.
- Freedom: Side projects can become billion-dollar products.
- Stability + Growth: Even with legal battles, revenue and profits keep rising.
- Global Reach: Work in Mountain View today, move to Zürich, Sydney or Bengaluru tomorrow.
- Community: Googlers often describe the campus as a college town with world-class peers.
Take-away in plain words
If you like learning fast, solving big problems and working with friendly people on products that billions use, Google is a hard company to beat. Its history shows bold bets (YouTube, Android) pay off, its culture rewards curiosity, and even the challenges ahead make it an exciting place to build a career.
