Biography|Larry Page and Sergey Brin — The Nasdaq Screen Where Google Went Public

People remember the Google IPO as a number on a screen. The screen had an address. On 19 August 2004, Google's Class A shares began trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the ticker GOOG. The offering had been priced the night before at 85 dollars a share after Google cut its earlier range of 108 to 135 dollars. The company and selling shareholders floated about 19.6 million shares and raised about 1.67 billion dollars. Shares opened near 100 dollars and closed at about 100.34 dollars. The Dutch-auction format was meant to let a wider set of buyers set the price. It still made co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin paper billionaires on the first day. Nasdaq's public face in New York is MarketSite, the cylindrical LED tower at the northwest corner of 4 Times Square, at 43rd Street and Broadway. The tower opened for the millennium and is the place visitors still photograph when a Nasdaq listing becomes news. Page and Brin were not standing here as floor traders. The listing itself is what this corner records. The garage on Santa Margarita Avenue and the Gates Building at Stanford are earlier chapters. This is the day the private research project became a public company. Photo: NASA, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (Nasdaq MarketSite, Times Square)