Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a $100,000 check to a company that did not legally exist, so Larry Page and Sergey Brin filed incorporation papers in California on September 4, 1998 — and the company has since celebrated its birthday on four separate dates

Andy Bechtolsheim had made up his mind before the demo was over. What Larry Page and Sergey Brin did not have was anywhere to put the money.

The meeting happened early on an August morning in 1998, on the front porch of David Cheriton's house in Palo Alto. Cheriton taught computer science at Stanford; Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, had somewhere else to be and wanted the short version. The two graduate students showed him a search engine that ranked web pages by counting the links pointing at them. Bechtolsheim went out to his car, came back with a checkbook, and wrote out $100,000 to Google Inc.

There was no Google Inc.

Who wrote Google's first check

Bechtolsheim did, and the payee line on it is the reason this date exists at all. A check made out to a corporation can be deposited by that corporation and by nobody else, and the corporation named on this one had never been registered in any state. By Brin's telling of the exchange, he pointed out that they had no bank account. Deposit it when you get one, Bechtolsheim told him.

Cheriton wrote a second check for the same amount. Jeff Bezos and Ram Shriram came into the same round, though published accounts of who put in how much do not agree. Bechtolsheim's is the check everyone retells, because of the ordering problem it created: the investment arrived first, and the company had to be built underneath it.

So Page and Brin filed articles of incorporation with the California Secretary of State on September 4, 1998, and opened an account the check could finally go into.

When was Google founded?

That Friday, if what you mean is the day the paperwork went in. Google's own corporate history page said so in as many words for years: on September 4 the company filed for incorporation in California, and shortly afterward the founders opened a bank account and deposited Bechtolsheim's check. The company's Doodle archive says the same thing from a different angle, dating the very first Doodle to August 30, 1998 and describing it as "less than a week before Google was officially incorporated." The securities filings have carried the same flat sentence since 2004, first under Google's name and now Alphabet's: incorporated in California in September 1998, reincorporated in Delaware in August 2003.

Not every reference work lands on the 4th. EBSCO's research entry gives September 7 instead, and a few technology-history sites try to reconcile the two by saying the papers went in on Friday the 4th and the incorporation was dated to the following Monday.

Check a 1998 calendar and that reconciliation collapses. Monday, September 7 was Labor Day, and the Secretary of State does not date-stamp filings on a state holiday.

Why is Google's birthday in late September?

Because the company chose a date, then kept choosing others. The first birthday Doodle went up on September 27, 2002. The following year's ran on the 8th, and the one after that on the 7th, as IBTimes and several other outlets have traced. Since 2006 it has been the 27th every time, which corresponds to neither the incorporation filing nor the domain registration. Asked to account for the drift, Google has said it is "not sure even we know."

The domain is its own near miss. Google.com was registered on September 15, 1997, nearly a year before there was a company to own it. David Koller, who wrote the story down at Stanford in January 2004 from Sean Anderson's account, credits it to a whiteboard session between Anderson and Page: Anderson floated "googolplex," Page cut it to "googol," and Anderson, checking availability from his terminal, typed the wrong letters. Koller's line is that Anderson "is not an infallible speller."

What was BackRub?

The same search engine under a much worse name.

Page and Brin ran it on Stanford's network from 1996, ranking pages by the links pointing back at them, which is where the name came from. The homepage carried a scanned image of a hand and credited Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg among the people who had helped. Hassan wrote a good deal of the early crawler and moved on before there was any company to hold stock in; he later founded eGroups and the robotics lab Willow Garage.

Some of the hardware survives. Stanford's InfoLab still exhibits the original storage assembly, ten four-gigabyte drives giving forty gigabytes in total, and notes on its exhibit page that crawling the web for its link structure "required an enormous amount of storage in comparison with typical student projects at that time." The casing was Lego, which Google confirms on its own about page. It was lab equipment in the Gates building basement, went on display there in 2003, and moved to the Octagon of the Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center in 2010.

What was in the Menlo Park garage?

A ping pong table and bright blue carpet, by Google's own description of it.

Susan Wojcicki had bought the house at 232 Santa Margarita Avenue for roughly $600,000 after finishing her MBA, and she rented the garage to Page and Brin for $1,700 a month to help cover the mortgage. She told ABC News in 2007 that it was "a very humble house, less than 2,000 square feet." Use of the washer and dryer came with the rent. As the payroll grew the company took three ground-floor bedrooms as well, and a whiteboard in one of them announced it as the worldwide headquarters. Craig Silverstein, another Stanford doctoral student, was employee number one; Wojcicki was number sixteen, and went on to run YouTube. They were into an office on University Avenue in Palo Alto by February 1999, with eight employees.

What the record does not settle

Several of the best details here rest on one person's memory.

The check is usually said to have sat in a desk drawer for about two weeks while the corporation was assembled around it, a detail traceable to retellings rather than to anything on file. The near-sale to Excite holds up better: Vinod Khosla told it from a conference stage in 2010, eleven years after the fact, but George Bell (Excite's chief executive at the time) gave his own account in 2014, remembering a condition that Excite tear out the search stack it already had.

One detail needs no hedging, though people hedge it anyway. The hand on the BackRub page really is Page's, and he said so himself in the project's FAQ in 1997.

The gap between the two kinds of claim is worth keeping in view.

What the check bought

Alphabet, the holding company assembled over Google in 2015, reported revenues of $402.8 billion for 2025, the first year the number cleared $400 billion, and counted 190,820 employees at the end of December. StatCounter puts Google's share of worldwide search near 90 percent, about where it has sat for a decade. That share is now a legal matter as well as a commercial one: Judge Amit Mehta ruled in 2024 that the company had illegally maintained a monopoly in general search, and his remedies order in September 2025 spared Chrome while barring exclusive default deals and opening some search data to rivals. Both sides have appealed.

What Bechtolsheim bought on that porch was a single proposition, that the best way to rank a page is to count who links to it. Twenty-eight years later, the company is budgeting on the order of $180 billion in capital spending for one year alone, much of it aimed at answering questions without showing anyone a list of links at all. Whether the thing he wrote the check for outlives the thing it paid for is the question the next few years get to settle.

Sources

• Google, "How we started and where we are today" (about.google), and the Google Doodles archive entry for the Burning Man Festival doodle (doodles.google)
• Stanford InfoLab, "The Original GOOGLE Computer Storage" museum exhibit pages
• David Koller, "Origin of the name 'Google'" (Stanford, January 2004)
• Philipp Lenssen, "Before Google There Was BackRub," Google Blogoscoped (December 2007)
• Alphabet Inc., "Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2025 Results," SEC Exhibit 99.1 (February 4, 2026)
• Wikipedia, "History of Google," "Google," and "Andy Bechtolsheim"