In 1998, Sergey and Larry released a paper, named The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, that would change the world forever. On this paper, the inner parts of Google was put out, including PageRank algorithm, the algorithm drives Google until today. An happy coincidence here, the algorithm that indexes pages was named after one of its co-founder, Larry Page.

Through Google’s history, Sergey and Larry transitioned through different roles in the company. Sergey was President and Larry was CEO of Google in the early days. Later on Larry stepped down as CEO and became President of Products, as Eric Schmidt joined the team. Then Larry energized the CEO role again back in 2011.

The off-the-charts growth pushed Google’s boundaries. The company got so big that they created an umbrella company called Alphabet and they had to change roles again. Sergey moved into President of Alphabet as Larry Page assumed the role of CEO of Alphabet, having Sundar Pichai as CEO of Google.

Now they both are leaving Alphabet and it just shows how mature the company that they founded has become, and it can now live on its own.

A quote from the official press release:

Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in September 1998. Since then, the company has grown to more than 100,000 employees worldwide, with a wide range of popular products and platforms like Search, Maps, Ads, Gmail, Android, Chrome, Google Cloud and YouTube. In October 2015, Alphabet became the parent holding company of Google.