Google was a company built on the values of its founders, who harbored ambitions to build a powerful corporation that would impact the entire world, at the same time loathing the bureaucracy and commitments that running such a company would entail.

Google was not pre-ordained to become a trillion-dollar business. In 2002, for example, the budding search engine company was treated with some skepticism. The New York Times titled a piece from that year, “Google’s Toughest Search Is for a Business Model,” summarizing the market’s concerns. One Salomon Smith Barney analyst more directly articulat