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Fortune
Fortune
Sasha Rogelberg

Google’s founders didn’t market test Alphabet’s name before launching the now $1.9 trillion juggernaut. Here's the advice Steve Jobs gave Larry Page

Larry Page Steve Jobs Google Alphabet Sergey Brin
Larry Page and Sergey Brin smile in front of old Google servers. (Credit: Kim Kulish/Corbis—Getty Images)

Even from Google’s inception, cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin considered the company’s potential for astronomical growth. Named after “googol,” the term for the numeral 1 with 100 zeros behind it, Google, then just a search engine founded in 1998, would become as large as the internet would allow.

The company has far exceeded the parameters of just the internet. Valued at about $1.9 trillion, Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, ranks No. 1 on Fortune’s 2026 Most Innovative Companies list. Broken into four segments, Alphabet’s reach spans from services like Search and Youtube, to cloud computing, to Waymo, to private equity, to its DeepMind AI research

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