Alphabet: Larry and Sergei exit stage left

Sundar Pichai. © Google.

On Tuesday, Google announced that its very discreet co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are relinquishing their positions at the head of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, and handing over responsibility to Google’s current CEO, Sundar Pichai. Page and Brin will keep an interest in the future of the company as stockholders and members of the Board. “Sundar brings humility and a deep passion for technology to our users, partners and our employees every day”, wrote messieurs Brin and Page in a letter announcing the change of leadership of their company, which they created in a garage in 1998. The Alphabet soup, which covers just about the whole of Silicon Valley, includes Google as well as a myriad of other high- and new-technology companies that employ 100,000 people the world over, including YouTube, DeepMind, Nest Labs, Meka Robotics, Waymo, Sidewalk Labs, among many, many others: since 2001, Alphabet has acquired a whopping 230 companies.

⇨ Axios, Scott Rosenberg, “At Google, twilight of the founders.”