Chapter Six - From Dominating the Web to Dreaming Beyond It

CHAPTER SIX

From Dominating the Web to Dreaming Beyond It

BY THE 2010S, Google had become more than a search engine.

It was the bloodstream of the internet.
And Larry and Sergey?
They were still engineering students at heart, just now with unlimited funding, global infrastructure, and the ability to say yes to ideas no one else dared touch.

Which is how we got… moonshots.

Literal and metaphorical.

Google X, later rebranded simply X, was the secretive skunkworks lab where mad science became official strategy.

Self-driving cars.
Internet-beaming balloons.
Smart contact lenses.
AI that could learn to recognize cats from scratch (don’t laugh, it worked).

X wasn’t just R&D.
It was ambition, unchained.

If Google Search was the product, X was the soul.

And behind it all was the unspoken belief:
If we don’t try to build the future… someone else will. And they might get it wrong.

Meanwhile, the Cloud Wars began.

Amazon had AWS.
Microsoft had Azure.
And Google… had catching up to do.

Despite building some of the most advanced data infrastructure on Earth, Google was late to the cloud party.

They had the tools.
They had the AI.
But they lacked the enterprise mindset, the suit-and-tie polish that corporate clients trusted.

Still, Larry and Sergey didn’t panic.
They hired ex-VMware CEO Diane Greene.
They scaled up.
They rebranded.
They played the long game.

Because if there’s one thing Google knew how to do, it was turn raw information into something powerful.

But things were changing.

Larry and Sergey, once hands-on and in the trenches, started pulling back.

Eric Schmidt, the adult in the room since 2001, had already stepped aside as CEO in 2011.
Sundar Pichai was quietly rising through the ranks.
First Chrome. Then Android. Then… everything.

Google wasn’t just a company anymore.
It was a conglomerate.
And it needed structure.

So in 2015, they did something unexpected:

They created a parent company.

Alphabet.

It was clean.
It was modular.
It allowed wild bets like Calico (anti-aging) and Verily (health tech) to live next to cash cows like YouTube and Ads.

It also gave Larry and Sergey exactly what they wanted:
Freedom.

Freedom to step out of the spotlight.
Freedom to tinker.
Freedom to think, again, like founders.

They weren’t running a company anymore.

They were… overseeing an empire.

And beneath them, their greatest experiment continued to evolve:

Billions of searches.
Millions of hours of video.
Mountains of data.
A planet’s worth of questions, all funneled through the thing they built.

And they still weren’t done.