The co-founders of Google are stepping down
as executives of its parent company, Alphabet,
ending a remarkable two decades during which
Larry Page and Sergey Brin shaped a startup
born in a Silicon Valley garage into one of the
largest, most powerful — and, increasingly, most
feared — companies in the world.
Sundar Pichai, who has been leading Google
as CEO for more than four years, will take on
additional duties as Alphabet’s CEO, the position
held by Page. The company isn’t filling Brin’s
position as president.
Page and Brin met as Stanford University
graduate students in 1995 and started the
company soon after.
What started as a way to catalog the growing
internet has now become one of the most
powerful companies in the world. Google
dominates online search and digital advertising
and makes the world’s most widely used
operating system for smartphones, Android. It’s
hard to make it through a whole day without
using one of Google’s services — ranging from