Why Alphabet has come to be and why we're stoked!

SERGEY (Brin) and I wrote in the original founders letter 11 years ago: "Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one."

In that spirit, we also said that you could expect us to make "smaller bets in areas that might seem very speculative or even strange when compared to our current businesses". From the start, we have always strived to do more, and to do important and meaningful things with the resources we have.

We did a lot of things that seemed crazy at the time. Many of those crazy things now have over a billion users, such as Google Maps, YouTube, Chrome and Android.