Google I (1996 - 2004)
The story of the single greatest business ever created: Google search.
Acquired fans, this is the episode we've all been waiting for. Ben and David have referenced Google as the greatest business model of all time across multiple shows, and they've finally delivered their deep dive—and what a masterpiece it is.
This marks my first Acquired Briefing for a new episode release. My goal is to publish these briefings within 48 hours of each new episode, and I'm pleased to report this one went live in just 32 hours.
Company Overview
Company Name: Google (now Alphabet Inc.)
Founding Year: 1998
Headquarters Location: Mountain View, California
Core Business and Significance: Google, initially founded as a search engine, evolved into the internet’s front door by providing fast, relevant search results powered by its PageRank algorithm and later expanded into a vast ecosystem of products and services. Its dominance in search, driven by unparalleled technical innovation and a monetization model through AdWords and AdSense, has made it the most profitable U.S. company, generating more net income than peers like Apple and Microsoft.
History and Facts
Timeline
March 1973: Larry Page is born in Lansing, Michigan, to computer science professors Carl and Gloria Page.
August 1973: Sergey Brin is born in Moscow, Soviet Union, to a mathematician father and a NASA researcher mother.
1979–1980: Larry’s family spends a sabbatical year at Stanford, exposing young Larry to Silicon Valley.
1995: Larry Page enrolls in Stanford’s PhD program in computer science, where he meets Sergey Brin, already a PhD student under Terry Winograd.
1996: Larry and Sergey begin the BackRub project, focusing on ranking web pages using backlinks, initially coded in Java by Larry and later in Python by Scott Hassan.
Spring 1997: Larry and Sergey attempt to sell BackRub’s technology to existing search engines like Excite, Infoseek, and Lycos, but are rejected due to misaligned incentives.
1997–1998: BackRub evolves into Google, named after a misspelling of “googol” (10^100), with a simple homepage designed by Sergey using GIMP. Google.com begins handling 10,000 queries daily, straining Stanford’s network.
1998: Google incorporates as Google Inc., raising a $1 million seed round from Andy Bechtolsheim, David Cheriton, Ram Shriram, and Jeff Bezos at a $10 million post-money valuation. The company moves to Susan Wojcicki’s Menlo Park garage.
1999: Google raises a $25 million Series A from Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital at a $100 million valuation, with Michael Moritz and John Doerr joining the board. Omid Kordestani joins as Chief Revenue Officer to build the business model.
June 2000: Google signs a deal with Yahoo to provide organic search results, doubling daily searchers to 14 million and securing $10 million in investment plus $7.2 million in 2001 revenue.
October 2000: Google launches AdWords V1, introducing text-only ads sold via CPM, with Amazon affiliate links as a proof-of-concept for intent-based advertising.
December 2000: Google releases the Google Toolbar, increasing user searches sevenfold by embedding a search box in browsers.
March 2001: Eric Schmidt joins as CEO, forming a leadership triumvirate with Larry (President of Products) and Sergey (President of Technology).
2001: Google achieves profitability with $86 million in revenue and $10 million in profit, primarily from portal deals and early CPM-based ads.
Early 2002: Google launches AdWords V2, incorporating self-serve, cost-per-click (CPC), and second-price auctions, inspired by Overture’s model but enhanced with ad rank based on click-through rates.
May 2002: Google signs a bet-the-company deal with AOL, taking over search and ad services, guaranteeing $100 million in revenue and sharing 85% of ad revenue.
February 2003: Google launches AdSense, extending its ad model to third-party websites, generating over $1 million daily by year-end.
2003: Google’s revenue grows to $1.5 billion with $350 million in operating income, driven by AdWords and AdSense.
April 2004: Google files for its IPO, launching Gmail on April Fool’s Day, offering 1GB of free storage.
August 2004: Google goes public via a Dutch auction, raising $1.7 billion at a $23 billion market cap, despite pricing at $85 per share (below the $108–$135 range).
Narrative
Google’s origin story, as detailed by Ben and David, is a tale of audacious ambition, technical brilliance, and strategic opportunism, born in the crucible of Stanford’s academic environment during the internet’s explosive growth in the mid-1990s. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both sons of intellectual powerhouses, met in 1995 at Stanford, where their instant chemistry—marked by intellectual sparring and shared vision—laid the foundation for Google. Larry, influenced by his parents’ computer science expertise and a childhood sabbatical in Silicon Valley, arrived with a burning desire to build a world-changing company, stating at age 12 that he would start a company to “make the world better.” Sergey, a precocious mathematician who fled Soviet oppression, brought a zany creativity and technical rigor honed at the University of Maryland and an internship at Wolfram Research. Their partnership, described as a rare “one plus one equals a hundred” synergy, was catalyzed by a chance meeting at a Stanford event organized by Anna Patterson, where they bonded over drinks funded by Charles Schwab.
The genesis of Google was BackRub, a 1996 research project to rank web pages using backlinks, inspired by academic citation analysis. Initially, Larry proposed a decentralized web annotation system, but the challenge of ranking annotations led to the breakthrough of PageRank, named after Larry himself. This algorithm, which weighted pages based on the authority of linking sites and anchor text metadata, was a radical departure from the keyword-stuffing approaches of contemporaries like AltaVista and Excite. The technical challenge of crawling the entire web to map backlinks was daunting but feasible in 1996–1997, as the internet was still small enough for two graduate students to index on Stanford’s infrastructure—often “borrowing” computers from loading docks. In 1997, Larry and Sergey shopped BackRub to existing search engines like Excite, Yahoo, Infoseek, and Lycos, aiming to license the technology for $1 million. These efforts failed due to a fundamental conflict of interest: incumbents prioritized page views for banner ads, whereas BackRub’s efficient search reduced time spent on their sites, as seen in Excite’s CEO rejecting a deal because it would “kneecap” their business model.
Search was not seen as an interesting industry in the late 1990s because it lacked a clear path to significant revenue, overshadowed by the portal model that dominated the internet. Portals like Yahoo, AOL, and Netscape were viewed as the internet’s front door, offering curated directories, content, and services that maximized user engagement and page views, which drove revenue through banner ads (CPM-based). Search engines, by contrast, were considered a backwater, often relegated to backfilling portal results with limited monetization potential. Ben and David note that search companies like AltaVista and Inktomi were vendors to portals, earning modest fees for organic results, while the high costs of indexing and infrastructure (e.g., AltaVista’s expensive DEC hardware) made search capital-intensive and unattractive. Yahoo, with its $20 billion market cap by 1998, epitomized the portal model’s success, relying on human-curated directories that users preferred for navigating a smaller web. Google’s rejection of this model, coupled with its minimalist homepage and aversion to banner ads, was a bold pivot to building its own search engine, betting on search’s future dominance as the web scaled exponentially (723% annual growth from 1993–1996).
By 1998, Google.com was processing 10,000 queries daily, overwhelming Stanford’s network and necessitating incorporation. The seed round, sparked by Andy Bechtolsheim’s impromptu $100,000 check, included investments from David Cheriton, Ram Shriram, and Jeff Bezos, reflecting Google’s early allure despite its lack of revenue. The company moved to Susan Wojcicki’s Menlo Park garage, marking its transition from a research project to a startup. The 1999 Series A, led by Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia, valued Google at $100 million—a staggering figure for a revenue-less startup in the dot-com bubble. The hiring of Omid Kordestani and engineers like Urs Hölzle and Jeff Dean was pivotal, enabling Google to scale its infrastructure using commodity hardware and a distributed file system, achieving cost efficiencies that competitors like Inktomi, with their expensive Sun servers, couldn’t match. The 2000 Yahoo deal, providing $10 million in investment and $7.2 million in 2001 revenue, was a lifeline through the dot-com crash, training millions to associate “Powered by Google” with quality search.
The episode’s core narrative arc is Google’s reinvention of the search business model, inspired by Overture’s pay-per-click (CPC) and auction-based advertising but perfected with AdWords V2 in 2002. Ben and David highlight how Google’s ad rank algorithm, combining CPC bids with click-through rates, aligned incentives for users, advertisers, and Google itself, maximizing relevance and revenue. The 2002 AOL deal, a high-stakes bet guaranteeing $100 million in revenue, transformed Google into a paid search leader, leveraging AOL’s 34 million users to deepen its ad inventory. AdSense, launched in 2003, extended this model to third-party websites, creating a new revenue stream and empowering small publishers. Google’s aggressive distribution tactics, such as the Google Toolbar and partnerships with Adobe, RealNetworks, and Firefox, cemented its dominance by embedding search into users’ browsers. By 2004, Google’s $1.5 billion in revenue and $350 million in operating income underscored its financial prowess, leading to a contentious but transformative IPO. The Dutch auction, despite mispricing at $85 per share, introduced a dual-class share structure, ensuring Larry and Sergey’s control. Ben and David frame this as the “building of the castle,” a foundation for Google’s empire, with its revenue-per-user growth and network effects creating an unassailable moat.
AdWords: Creation and Evolution
Google’s AdWords, launched in October 2000, was a pivotal innovation that transformed search monetization, evolving from a rudimentary CPM-based system to a sophisticated, auction-driven model that Ben and David call “the most magical economic transaction ever known to man.” The creation of AdWords addressed a critical problem: Google’s lack of a scalable revenue model despite its growing user base and infrastructure costs. In 1999, with minimal revenue (e.g., $20,000 from Red Hat), Google faced pressure to monetize its viral search product without compromising user experience. Larry and Sergey, averse to banner ads that slowed pages and cluttered interfaces, tasked early employee Salar Kamangar and engineer Jeff Dean with developing a text-only ad system. The initial proof-of-concept used Amazon affiliate links, dynamically generating ads for book-related queries, proving that intent-based advertising could drive clicks and conversions. This addressed the core issue of aligning monetization with Google’s user-centric mission, avoiding the portal model’s reliance on page views.
AdWords V1, launched in October 2000 with 350 advertisers, used a cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) model, sold manually via fax to Madison Avenue agencies. This limited scalability, as it restricted advertisers to large players and failed to capture the full economic value of user intent. The breakthrough came with AdWords V2 in early 2002, heavily inspired by Overture (originally GoTo), which had pioneered pay-per-click (CPC) and auction-based advertising. Overture’s model, launched in 1998, allowed advertisers to bid on keywords, paying only for clicks, with a self-serve platform that scaled to 8,000 advertisers by 1999. However, Overture’s system prioritized the highest bidder, risking irrelevant ads. Google, led by Salar Kamangar, borrowed CPC and auctions but introduced ad rank, a novel algorithm combining bid amounts with click-through rates (CTR) to ensure ad relevance. This ensured that ads were not only commercially viable but also useful to users, aligning with Google’s mission.
A key innovation was the second-price auction, adopted in 2002, where the winning bidder paid only one cent above the second-highest bid. This, inspired by economic literature (e.g., Vickrey auctions), encouraged advertisers to bid their true value without fear of overpaying, fostering trust and efficiency. Ben and David note that Cheryl Sandberg, who joined in 2001, struggled to explain this to advertisers until her mentor, Larry Summers, likened it to Federal Reserve treasury bond auctions. The transition to AdWords V2, dubbed “Project Sunset,” was painful, risking $86 million in 2001 revenue, but it paid off spectacularly. By 2002, Google’s revenue soared to $440 million, driven by AdWords’ scalability to thousands of advertisers, including small businesses, via its self-serve platform.
AdWords’ evolution from V1 to V2 solved scalability and quality issues while creating a “magical” economic model. Ben and David emphasize that ad rank maximized Google’s revenue by optimizing for both bid price and CTR, an expected value calculation that ensured the highest-paying, most relevant ads won. This aligned incentives: advertisers paid less for high-CTR ads, users saw relevant ads, and Google maximized revenue. The second-price auction further stored “potential energy,” as Ben describes, by leaving money on the table short-term to build long-term trust. AdWords’ integration with Google’s infrastructure—leveraging distributed computing and real-time auctions—enabled it to scale globally, handling millions of queries daily. By 2003, AdWords’ 85% gross margin underpinned Google’s $1.5 billion revenue, making it the backbone of the “greatest business model ever discovered,” as its liquidity-driven revenue growth fueled aggressive distribution strategies like the AOL deal.
AdSense: Extending Search Monetization
Launched in February 2003, AdSense was Google’s second major business line, extending its AdWords model to third-party websites and revolutionizing online monetization. Ben and David describe AdSense as a “brilliant insight” to monetize internet content beyond search queries, addressing the limitation that Google’s revenue was tied to search events, which represented only a fraction of users’ online time. Building on AdWords’ infrastructure, AdSense used Google’s PageRank and ad-ranking algorithms to analyze webpage content and serve relevant text ads, matching ads to the context rather than user intent. Engineered by Jeff Dean in six weeks, AdSense initially tested on Google Groups and sites like HowStuffWorks.com, where high-intent content aligned with commercial queries. By dropping simple HTML code, publishers earned 67–80% of ad revenue, democratizing monetization for small websites. By year-end, AdSense generated over $1 million daily, adding $500 million to Google’s 2003 revenue of $1.5 billion, though at lower margins than AdWords’ 85%. This created a new revenue stream, deepened Google’s advertiser pool, and foreshadowed YouTube’s creator model, despite early publisher tensions over content aggregation.
Distribution: The Virtuous Cycle
Google’s aggressive distribution strategy, as Ben and David emphasize, created a self-reinforcing cycle that cemented its dominance: securing distribution drove search volume, which increased keyword bids, raised auction prices, boosted revenue, and enabled more distribution investment. The Google Toolbar, launched in December 2000, embedded a search box in browsers, increasing user searches sevenfold and raising annual revenue per user from $2 to $10+. Google paid partners like Adobe, RealNetworks, and Dell to bundle the Toolbar, often at 100% revenue share, as higher search volume attracted more advertisers, driving up bids in AdWords’ auctions. This increased revenue per search, as larger advertiser pools ensured better price discovery and bids on niche keywords, maintaining AdWords’ 85% margins. The 2002 AOL deal, guaranteeing $100 million and sharing 85% of ad revenue, leveraged AOL’s 34 million users to deepen ad inventory, further raising margins by ensuring more relevant ads. This cycle—distribution, searches, bids, revenue, reinvestment—allowed Google to outspend competitors, making it uneconomical for rivals like Overture or Microsoft to match, solidifying Google’s position as the internet’s front door.
Notable Facts
Unique Partnership: Larry and Sergey’s equal co-founder dynamic, described as a rare “soulmate” partnership, drove Google’s vision and execution, distinguishing it from founder hierarchies at companies like Microsoft or Nvidia.
Infrastructure Innovation: Google’s use of commodity hardware and distributed file systems, with failure rates over 10% compared to the industry’s 3–4%, enabled cost-efficient scaling, making it the world’s largest computer manufacturer by the early 2000s.
Dot-Com Survival: The 2000 Yahoo deal, providing $10 million in investment and $7.2 million in 2001 revenue, was critical in bridging Google through the dot-com crash when venture capital dried up.
AdWords Breakthrough: The ad rank algorithm, combining CPC bids with click-through rates, was mathematically optimal for revenue maximization, aligning incentives for advertisers and users.
Cultural Ethos: Google’s “healthy disregard for the impossible” and 20% time policy fostered innovations like Google News and Gmail, reflecting a campus-like, high-IQ environment.
Financial / User Metrics
1999 Revenue: Minimal, with $20,000 from a Red Hat enterprise search deal.
2001 Revenue: $86 million, primarily from portal deals (e.g., Yahoo, Netscape) and early CPM-based ads, with $10 million in profit.
2002 Revenue: $440 million, driven by the transition to AdWords V2 and the AOL deal, with $185 million in operating income.
2003 Revenue: $1.5 billion, with $350 million in operating income, including $500 million from AdSense at lower margins (67–80% shared with publishers).
2003 Gross Margin: AdWords maintained an 85% gross margin, while AdSense’s lower margins reduced overall profitability.
User Metrics (1998): Google.com handled 10,000 queries daily, straining Stanford’s network.
User Metrics (2000): 14 million daily searchers post-Yahoo deal.
User Metrics (2002): Google Toolbar users generated seven times more searches than non-Toolbar users, with annual revenue per user (ARPU) rising from $2 to $10+.
IPO (2004): Raised $1.7 billion at a $23 billion market cap, with shares priced at $85 (popping to $100 on day one).
Transaction
IPO Details
Date: August 2004
Parties: Google, underwritten by WR Hambrecht, Morgan Stanley, and Credit Suisse, using a Dutch auction process with software partially developed by Google engineers.
Deal Size: $1.7 billion raised through the issuance of 19.6 million shares.
Valuation: $23 billion market cap at $85 per share (initial range: $108–$135).
Strategic Rationale: The IPO was necessitated by the SEC’s 500-shareholder rule, requiring public financial disclosure as Google exceeded 500 shareholders, and pressure from VCs (Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia) for liquidity post-dot-com crash. Larry and Sergey, wary of losing control and exposing financials to competitors like Microsoft, adopted a dual-class share structure (Class A and B shares, with founders retaining super-voting rights) to maintain strategic autonomy. The Dutch auction, inspired by WR Hambrecht’s Bill Hambrecht, aimed to democratize access, avoid IPO pops that benefited investment banks’ clients, and ensure fair pricing by letting the market set the share price through a reverse auction.
Short-Term Impact: The IPO was widely perceived as a failure due to mispricing, with shares priced at $85 (below the $108–$135 range) and popping 18% to $100 on day one, indicating Google left significant value on the table. The Dutch auction confused institutional and retail investors, who were unfamiliar with the process, and logistical complexities (e.g., Google’s software integration) led to lower-than-expected demand. The process made approximately 1,000 of Google’s 2,000 employees millionaires, boosting morale but highlighting the wealth transfer to public investors.
Long-Term Impact: Despite initial criticism, the IPO provided $1.7 billion in cash, which Google never spent due to its profitability, fueling further innovation (e.g., Gmail, Maps). The dual-class structure, a first for tech, became a standard for founder-led companies (e.g., Meta, Snapchat), ensuring Larry and Sergey’s control. By 2025, Google’s market cap reached $2.1 trillion, a 100x increase (excluding dividends), validating the IPO’s strategic success despite its execution flaws. No major tech IPO has since used a Dutch auction due to its complexity and mispricing risk.
GoTo Attempted Acquisition
Date: Pre-Series A, likely 1998–1999.
Parties: GoTo (Overture’s predecessor), Google.
Deal Size: $200 million proposed by Larry and Sergey.
Strategic Rationale: GoTo’s founder, Bill Gross, saw a potential merger of Google’s superior organic search (PageRank) with GoTo’s paid search model as a “match made in heaven” to combine informational and commercial queries. Larry and Sergey pitched the deal to capitalize on their technology’s value before raising venture capital.
Outcome: GoTo’s board rejected the $200 million offer, viewing it as dilutive to their $2 billion public company, given Google’s zero revenue. Ben and David note this was a missed opportunity, as Google’s subsequent growth suggests it would have transformed GoTo.
Impact: The rejection allowed Google to remain independent, raise its Series A at $100 million valuation, and develop AdWords, ultimately outpacing Overture and dominating search.
Other Transactions
Yahoo Deal (June 2000): Google provided organic search results for Yahoo, receiving $10 million in investment and $7.2 million in 2001 revenue. This deal doubled daily searchers to 14 million and established Google’s brand via “Powered by Google” branding.
AOL Deal (May 2002): Google took over AOL’s search and ad services, guaranteeing $100 million in revenue and sharing 85% of ad revenue. AOL received warrants for 7.4 million shares at $3 each ($22 million total). The deal shifted ad inventory from Overture to Google, significantly boosting liquidity and revenue ($35 million in 2002, $200 million in 2003).
Powers
Ben and David discuss Hamilton Helmer’s 7 Powers, identifying “scale economies” and “branding” as Google’s primary powers, with scale economies referred to as “super scale economies” and branding described as a “weak” power. They briefly consider “counter-positioning” but ultimately exclude it, concluding that scale economies and branding define Google’s persistent differential returns in this period.
Scale Economies: Google’s infrastructure, built on commodity hardware and distributed systems, amortized fixed costs across a growing user base. Uniquely, Google’s auction-based model increased revenue per search as scale grew, due to better price discovery and more advertisers bidding on niche keywords. Ben and David call this “super scale economies,” noting it allowed Google to outspend competitors on distribution (e.g., 85–100% revenue shares). Examples include the AOL deal’s $100 million guarantee and Toolbar bundling with Adobe and RealNetworks, which competitors like Inktomi and Overture couldn’t match due to their higher-cost models.
Branding (Weak): Ben and David highlight Google’s brand of trust, speed, and “googly” fun, which fostered user loyalty and attracted top talent. They note that users, including Ben, were avid Google fans from 2002–2006, wearing Google shirts and reading Google blogs, akin to Apple’s fandom. This “employment brand” drew high-IQ talent willing to “do anything” to work at Google, critical for hiring engineers like Jeff Dean. However, they describe branding as a weak power, as advertisers, rational actors, did not pay more due to the brand, unlike luxury brands like Hermès. Its impact was secondary to scale economies, primarily aiding talent acquisition and user stickiness.
Counter-Positioning (Discussed but Excluded): Ben and David explore counter-positioning, noting Google’s user-centric search (fast, relevant results) contrasted with portals like Yahoo, which prioritized page views for banner ads. Excite’s rejection of BackRub highlighted this misalignment, as portals couldn’t adopt Google’s model without sacrificing core revenue. However, they conclude this was less a distinct power than a byproduct of Google’s superior technology and market creation, as search was a new industry without a strong incumbent.
Scale economies and branding reinforced Google’s dominance. Scale economies enabled aggressive traffic acquisition and high margins (85% for AdWords), creating a virtuous cycle of user growth, advertiser liquidity, and revenue. Branding, though weak, ensured user stickiness and talent acquisition, supporting Google’s technical and cultural edge.
Playbook
Best Original Algorithm Insight: PageRank’s backlink-based ranking delivered superior organic search results, creating a fast, clean UX that users loved.
Best Execution of Search Advertising: AdWords V2’s self-serve, CPC, and ad rank system, refined from Overture’s model, aligned incentives for advertisers, users, and Google, maximizing revenue and relevance.
Clever Infrastructure Advantages: Using commodity hardware and distributed systems (e.g., GFS, MapReduce), Google scaled cheaply, achieving 85% gross margins on AdWords and global reach.
Hiring World-Class Talent: Google attracted engineers like Jeff Dean and Urs Hölzle, even during the dot-com bubble, due to its novel technical challenges and vision. Post-crash, it “Hoovered up” top talent.
Culture of Thinking Big: A “healthy disregard for the impossible” and 20% time fostered innovations like Google News and Gmail, driven by inexperienced but high-IQ talent in a campus-like environment.
Self-Reinforcing Data Network Effects: More users improved search relevance (e.g., via bounce rates, synonyms), creating a flywheel that competitors couldn’t replicate.
Scalable Mission: The mission to “organize the world’s information” was altruistic yet monetizable, attracting talent and guiding strategy.
These themes drove Google’s strategy by prioritizing user experience, technical excellence, and aggressive growth. The algorithm and ad model ensured market leadership, while infrastructure and talent enabled scalability. Data network effects and the mission reinforced long-term dominance, though challenges included potential regulatory scrutiny and competition from Microsoft.
Quintessence
Ben and David identify two quintessence themes, capturing the essence of Google’s story:
Increasing Returns to Scale: Google’s auction-based model not only reduced unit costs but increased revenue per search as user and advertiser pools grew. This insight, termed “super scale economies,” allowed Google to invest heavily in distribution (e.g., AOL’s 85% revenue share, Toolbar bundling), creating an unassailable lead. Ben calls this “the most unique insight” of the episode, driving Google’s dominance.
Being “That Company”: Quoting Justin Rosenstein, Ben and David frame Google as a once-in-a-generation company, akin to Microsoft in the 1980s or Facebook in the 2000s, where employees had outsized impact and the company was poised to change the world. Google’s combination of vision, talent, and execution made it “that company” in the early 2000s.
Carveouts
Ben’s Carveouts:
The Rehearsal, Season 2 (HBO): Nathan Fielder’s satirical show about reducing plane crashes through elaborate simulations, praised for its extreme commitment to comedy.
Your Friends and Neighbors (Apple TV): A beautifully shot drama starring Jon Hamm, likened to Succession with an unexpected twist.
Andor, Season 2 (Disney+): A Star Wars series that starts slowly but delivers some of the best canon content in its final eight episodes.
David’s Carveouts:
Gamecraft, Season 3 (Podcast): Mitch and Blake’s gaming industry podcast, praised for its depth and commitment.
Nintendo Switch 2 vs. Steam Deck Dilemma: David is torn between purchasing a Switch 2 (reserved at Nintendo’s San Francisco store) or a Steam Deck, promising to report back with his decision and a tweeted picture.
Additional Notes
Episode Metadata:
Number: Summer 2025, Episode 2
Title: Google
Duration: 3 hours, 39 minutes, 29 seconds
Release Date: June 29, 2025
Source: Acquired website and Apple Podcasts
Related Episodes: The episode references prior Acquired episodes on Amazon (Jeff Bezos’s investment), Microsoft (competitive threat), and Google Earth (distribution strategy). It sets up a multi-part Google series, with part two teased to cover Gmail and AI developments.