Larry Page, Google Co-Founder and Former Alphabet Chief Executive

Larry Page is a co-founder of Google and a director of its parent company, Alphabet, a board he has sat on since 1998. He ran Google as chief executive in two separate periods and then served as the first chief executive of Alphabet from October 2015 to December 2019.

He no longer holds a management job, but he still chairs the Executive Committee of Alphabet’s board, according to the company’s 2026 proxy statement. The business he started in a Stanford computer lab reported more than $400 billion in yearly revenue for the first time in 2025.

Education

Page studied engineering at the University of Michigan and earned a Bachelor of Science with a concentration in computer engineering. His Google Research profile notes that he finished the degree with honours and later served on the National Advisory Committee of the university’s College of Engineering.

He then moved to Stanford University, where he completed a Master of Science in computer science. He entered the doctoral program there as well, but took leave after the master’s degree to work on the search project that became Google.

Career

Google’s own account of its history places the start in 1995 at Stanford. Page was weighing graduate study at the university, and Sergey Brin, already a student there, was given the job of showing him around.

By 1996 the two had teamed up to build a search engine. Its first name was Backrub, and its central idea was to judge the importance of a web page by the links that pointed to it. The project was soon renamed Google.

In January 1998 Page filed a patent application titled “Method for node ranking in a linked database”. The patent named him as the inventor, was assigned to Stanford University and was granted in September 2001.

The same year, Page and Brin set out their design in an academic paper, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, published in the journal Computer Networks. It described a working prototype that used the link structure of the web to crawl, index and rank pages, with a database of at least 24 million pages.

In August 1998 Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, wrote a check for $100,000 and Google Inc. was incorporated. The small team worked out of a garage in Menlo Park, California, rented from Susan Wojcicki, who became employee number 16 and later ran YouTube.

Page was Google’s first chief executive, holding the post from September 1998 to July 2001, according to Alphabet’s filings. His Google Research profile says the company grew past 200 employees and reached profitability during that first stretch.

In 2001 he became President, Products, a role he kept for almost ten years. In that period he shared day-to-day running of the company with Brin and with Eric Schmidt, who was chief executive.

When Google prepared to list its shares in 2004, Page and Brin wrote a letter to future investors explaining how they planned to run the business. The letter set out a long-term approach and warned buyers that the company would not behave like a typical listed firm.

Page returned to the chief executive’s office in April 2011 and led Google until October 2015. In January 2014, during that second term, Google agreed to buy DeepMind, the London artificial intelligence company now known as Google DeepMind.

In 2015 Page announced a new holding company, Alphabet, with Google as its largest unit. He became chief executive of Alphabet, Brin became its president, and Sundar Pichai took over as chief executive of Google.

In December 2019 Page and Brin said they would step back from daily management. Pichai, whose path is covered in our profile Sundar Pichai: Biography, Companies, and Career Journey, became chief executive of both Google and Alphabet.

Current Roles

• Co-founder of Google.
• Member of the board of directors of Alphabet Inc., counting his time on the Google board since 1998.
• Chair of the Executive Committee of the Alphabet board.

Key Achievements

Ranking the web by its links

The core of early Google was the idea that a link from one page to another works like a vote, and that some votes count more than others. Page’s patent on node ranking in a linked database, filed in 1998 and granted in 2001, set out that method in formal terms.

Building Google from a garage

Page and Brin moved a student project into a rented garage in 1998 with a first investment of $100,000. Within three years the company had more than 200 staff and was profitable, before Page handed the chief executive role to Schmidt.

• 1996: search engine first built under the name Backrub.
• 1998: Google Inc. incorporated in August.
• 2001: more than 200 employees.

Creating Alphabet

The 2015 restructuring split Google’s core internet business from its newer and riskier projects, which were grouped under Alphabet as separate companies. Page described the new parent in his announcement letter as “mostly a collection of companies”.

A planned hand-over

In their joint letter of December 2019, the two co-founders said Alphabet and Google no longer needed two chief executives and a president. The change left Pichai in charge of both companies, with Page and Brin staying on as board members and shareholders.

The Company in Numbers

• Alphabet revenue: $402.8 billion in 2025, up 15 percent from $350.0 billion in 2024.
• Alphabet net income: $132.2 billion in 2025.
• Employees: 190,820 at the end of 2025.
• Google Cloud: annual revenue run rate of more than $70 billion at the end of 2025.
• Paid subscriptions across Google consumer services: more than 325 million at the end of 2025.
• Gemini app: more than 750 million monthly active users in the fourth quarter of 2025.

Awards and Honours

• 2002: named a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum.
• 2004: Marconi Prize, shared with Sergey Brin.
• 2004: elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

The Marconi Society’s citation for the prize credits the two founders with an invention that changed the way information is retrieved.

In Their Own Words

In the 2004 letter to future shareholders, written with Brin, Page stated: “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.”

Announcing Alphabet in 2015, Page wrote that he was “really excited to be running Alphabet as CEO with help from my capable partner, Sergey, as President.”

Page’s co-founder is profiled separately in our page on Sergey Brin. Google’s original mission, in the company’s own words, is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

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