From the very beginning, Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin thought about the company's potential for astronomical growth. The name derived from "googol," the term for the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros, and the search engine, founded in 1998, was expected to become as large as the internet would allow.

The company has since far exceeded the boundaries of the internet itself. Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company, is now valued at about $1.9 trillion and ranks No. 1 on Fortune's 2026 Most Innovative Companies list. Alphabet's operations are broken into four segments, spanning services such as Search and YouTube, cloud computing, Waymo's autonomous vehicles, private equity, and its DeepMind AI research.

Page, the second-richest person in the world with a net worth of about $295 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, has reaped the rewards of Alphabet's success. He served as Google's CEO from 1997 to 2001 and again from 2011 to 2015, then led Alphabet until 2019. Page remains a board member and shareholder, effectively controlling the company alongside Brin, who has become increasingly involved again in the company's AI efforts. Brin is the world's fourth-wealthiest person, with a net worth of $274 billion.

Wednesday marks the 22nd anniversary of Google's IPO—the company went public on Aug. 19, 2004, selling shares at $85 apiece through a Dutch auction that raised roughly $1.7 billion and valued the business at about $23 billion at the time—and while it has grown immensely over that time, it was Apple cofounder Steve Jobs who imparted prescient wisdom about its future. Alphabet now boasts the second-largest market capitalization in the world.

A mentor's frank counsel

Page visited Jobs toward the end of Jobs' life in 2011 to receive frank advice from his mentor:

"The main thing I stressed was focus," Jobs said, according to Walter Isaacson, author of Jobs' biography. "It's now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they're dragging you down. They're turning you into Microsoft. They're causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great."

Jobs was speaking from hard-won experience: after returning to a struggling Apple in 1997, he pared the company's sprawling product lineup down to a famously simple four-quadrant grid, a purge widely credited with fueling Apple's turnaround. He died on Oct. 5, 2011, at age 56, months after that final conversation with Page.

"He was right," Page told Fortune's former CEO Alan Murray at Fortune's Global Forum in 2015, days after Alphabet's founding in October of that year. "I mean, he did fine as well."

Taking Jobs's advice

Page did listen at first, telling employees to focus on Android products and the now-defunct Google+ (shut down for consumers in 2019). But Alphabet's growth suggested the company was poised for bigger things—and more of them.

The restructuring Page unveiled in 2015 created Alphabet as a holding company above Google, installing Sundar Pichai as the search unit's CEO while Page and Brin ran the parent—a structure Pichai inherited entirely when the founders stepped back from day-to-day roles in 2019.

Alphabet was designed as a container for Google's future ventures, including more esoteric ideas such as glucose-monitoring contact lenses, a project its health sciences unit Verily wound down in 2018. While Page conceded that Jobs was correct on some level, he also believed Alphabet's ventures were interconnected, arguing that energy, telecommunications, and transportation all fit under its umbrella.

"I always thought it was kind of stupid if you have this big company, and you can only do, like, five things," Page said in a 2014 fireside chat with Khosla Ventures, taking a jab at Jobs.

A name chosen without market testing

Page and Brin were so certain of Alphabet's name and purpose that they didn't even market-test it.

"I wanted to have a name that people would be proud to work for," Page said. "But [I] actually didn't want it to be too catchy because the idea really wasn't to have a consumer brand in the way that Google is, but really a brand for companies to be part of."

Alphabet was a brand for its employees and investors, Page said. But he doesn't take credit for the name.

"I chose Google, so [Sergey] chose Alphabet."

Twenty-two years on, the exchange still frames the central tension of Alphabet's story: a company built on doing far more than five things, and the pressure to keep every one of them great.

A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on March 26, 2024.

Source: Fortune