4 September 1998: Google is incorporated
Stanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated Google, with an early check from investor Andy Bechtolsheim, and set up shop in a rented garage in Menlo Park. Their search engine ranked pages by how many other sites linked to them, which produced far better results than rivals. The business model came later: tiny text ads matched to searches, which became one of the most profitable inventions of the era.
The lesson: A clearly better product can attract users first, with the money-making model discovered later.
What it meant for investors
$1,000 in Google / Alphabet at the start of 2005 → $41,667 today, vs $5,763 in the S&P 500.
We start the clock at the start of 2005, the first year in our price data after the event. That is 41.7 times the money, and $35,904 more than a plain index fund made over the same years.
What Google / Alphabet teaches: Owning a toll road on a growing activity can be enough; Alphabet's search monopoly kept compounding through crises, lawsuits and repeated predictions of its disruption.
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2005 | $4.80 | $41,667 | $5,763 |
| 2007 | $12.00 | $16,667 | $4,789 |
| 2008 | $17.00 | $11,765 | $4,626 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
What if you bought Google / Alphabet? Every starting year and the full story →
More Google / Alphabet history
- 12 January 2010: Google threatens to leave China
- 29 April 2004: Google files to go public, Dutch auction and all
- 10 August 2015: Google reorganizes itself as Alphabet
- 19 August 2004: Google goes public by auction
- 20 October 2020: US sues Google over search dominance
- 21 October 2004: Google's first report card as a public company
Could you have called it at the time? The wheel picks the year, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick.
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