Google IPO banker tracks two-decade journey from Silicon Valley upstart to $2 trillion
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Twenty years ago, as Morgan Stanley banker Michael Grimes was helping lead the public offering for the young company behind the Google search engine, one of the most anticipated IPOs of the decade, he was among the first people offered a new email service. He had his pick of any identifier he wanted, so he asked for michael@gmail.com.
Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, chimed in. Grimes remembers Brin telling him, “Oh no, you don’t want that. Gmail is going to be big. You’ll be spammed forever.”
Grimes told CNBC he does regret passing up the email address. But the IPO helped cement his reputation as “Wall Street’s Silicon Valley whisperer,” just as the tech industry began to reshape investing globally.
He calls the IPO of Google, which has increased by 7,600% over the last two decades, “momentous.”
The cumulative market value of companies Grimes has taken public is in the trillions of dollars. Some were more tumultuous, like Facebook‘s IPO in 2012, and some pioneered innovative new structures, like Spotify‘s direct listing in 2018. But Google’s was groundbreaking.
“It was the start of the next era,” Grimes said. “Google [and other megacaps that followed] changed the way that we work, live and play. They did it in bigger ways than we all thought and now these are trillion-dollar companies right up at the top.”
Now operating under parent Alphabet, the company is worth more than $2 trillion. No longer just search and advertising, the tech giant counts YouTube, Pixel smartphones, cloud computing, self-driving cars and generative artificial intelligence among its many business units. It’s a technology company so expansive that the Department of Justice may be looking to split it up.
Alphabet wasn’t immediately available to comment.
At the time of Google’s IPO 20 years ago, the tech industry was still reeling from the dot-com burst of the early 2000s and investors were cautious. Rather than going with a traditional offering, Google decided on a process called a Dutch auction, intended to democratize the IPO process by allowing a broader range of investors to participate.
The founders’ IPO letter began: “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.” It also introduced Google’s “don’t be evil” philosophy.
Grimes said Brin and Larry Page wanted a level playing field for their IPO: “Their point of view was: Wait, if a young engineer sold some of her vested stock from Cisco or wherever and she wants to put $10,000 into Google, why should she get told she only gets $500 worth or none? Especially if she’s willing to pay one dollar more than the institution.”
“The auction allocations,” Grimes said, “would be determined by price and size. Not by who you are, and that was the fun. That was the fundamental breakthrough.”
Grimes added that some banks and institutions cautioned Google’s co-founders against the unusual process and told them it wasn’t the way things were done. But others, like his team, said they’d build with them.
Winning the coveted “left lead” on the IPO was and still is a competitive race. The Morgan Stanley team embraced the format, built a prototype and tested for a billion bids.
For the road show, they split into three different teams. Co-founders Brin and Page each led their own, and CEO Eric Schmidt led the third.
By most accounts, the IPO was successful. Google overcame a weak IPO market and an unproven offering model to generate a solid first-day return and a market capitalization of over $27 billion. From there, the stock kept appreciating.
But it would take more than a decade for the principles behind Google’s IPO to take off. Consumer technology brands like Facebook (now Meta), Twitter (now X) and LinkedIn (now owned by Microsoft) would go the traditional IPO route. But several of the high-profile listings between 2019 and 2021 did incorporate elements that aligned with Google’s democratizing intent. Airbnb offered hosts the opportunity to buy shares at the IPO price. Uber and Lyft made shares available to its drivers, and Robinhood gave customers access to its IPO.
Assessing the impact of Google’s “don’t be evil” credo — and how it’s aged — is more complicated. Grimes declined to reflect on the Google of today, saying he can’t talk about clients.
Google now stands accused of stifling innovation by U.S. and European regulators, and although the company is at the forefront of the generative AI platform shift, search and advertising — still its bread and butter — is facing its biggest existential threat in decades.
The Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, June 9, 2023.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Silicon Valley executives and financiers publicly opened their wallets in support of President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential run. The early returns in 2025 aren’t great, to say the least.
Following Trump’s sweeping tariff plan announced Wednesday, the Nasdaq suffered steep consecutive daily drops to finish 10% lower for the week, the index’s worst performance since the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020.
The tech industry’s leading CEO’s rushed to contribute to Trump’s inauguration in January and paraded to Washington, D.C., for the event. Since then, it’s been a slog.
The market can always turn around, but economists and investors aren’t optimistic, and concerns are building of a potential recession. The seven most valuable U.S. tech companies lost a combined $1.8 trillion in market cap in two days.
Apple slid 14% for the week, its biggest drop in more than five years. Tesla, led by top Trump adviser Elon Musk, plunged 9.2% and is now down more than 40% for the year. Musk contributed close to $300 million to help propel Trump back to the White House.
Nvidia, Meta and Amazon all suffered double-digit drops for the week. For Amazon, a ninth straight weekly decline marks its longest such losing streak since 2008.
With Wall Street selling out of risky assets on concern that widespread tariff hikes will punish the U.S. and global economy, the fallout has drifted down to the IPO market. Online lender Klarna and ticketing marketplace StubHub delayed their IPOs due to market turbulence, just weeks after filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and fintech company Chime is also reportedly delaying its listing.
CoreWeave, a provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure, last week became the first venture-backed company to raise more than $1 billion in a U.S. IPO since 2021. But the company slashed its offering, and trading has been very volatile in its opening days on the market. The stock plunged 12% on Friday, leaving it 17% above its offer price but below the bottom of its initial range.
“You couldn’t create a worse market and macro environment to go public,” said Phil Haslett, co-founder of EquityZen, a platform for investing in private companies. “Way too much turbulence. All flights are grounded until further notice.”
CoreWeave investor Mark Klein of SuRo Capital previously told CNBC that the company could be the first in an “IPO parade.” Now he’s backtracking.
“It appears that the IPO parade has been temporarily halted,” Klein told CNBC by email on Friday. “The current tariff situation has prompted these companies to pause and assess its impact.”
‘Cave rapidly’
During last year’s presidential campaign, prominent venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen backed Trump, expecting that his administration would usher in a boom and eliminate some of the hurdles to startup growth set up by the Biden administration. Andreessen and his partner, Ben Horowitz, said in July that their financial support of the Trump campaign was due to what they called a better “little tech agenda.”
A spokesperson for Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment.
Some techies who supported Trump in the campaign have taken to social media to defend their positions.
Venture capitalist Keith Rabois, a managing director at Khosla Ventures, posted on X on Thursday that “Trump Derangement Syndrome has morphed into Tariff Derangement Syndrome.” He said tariffs aren’t inflationary, are effective at reducing fentanyl imports, and he expects that “most other countries will cave and cave rapidly.”
That was before China’s Finance Ministry said on Friday that it will impose a 34% tariff on all goods imported from the U.S. starting on April 10.
At Sequoia Capital, which is the biggest investor in Klarna, outspoken Trump supporter Shaun Maguire, wrote on X, “The first long-term thinking President of my lifetime,” and said in a separate post that, “The price of stocks says almost nothing about the long term health of an economy.”
However, Allianz Chief Economic Advisor Mohamed El-Erian warned on Friday that Trump’s extensive raft of import tariffs are putting the U.S. economy at risk of recession.
“You’ve had a major repricing of growth prospects, with a recession in the U.S. going up to 50% probability, you’ve seen an increase in inflation expectations, up to 3.5%,” he told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro on the sidelines of the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio, Italy.
Former Microsoft CEOs Bill Gates, left, and Steve Ballmer, center, pose for photos with CEO Satya Nadella during an event celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Microsoft on April 4, 2025 in Redmond, Washington.
Stephen Brashear | Getty Images
Meanwhile, executives at tech’s megacap companies were largely silent this week, and their public relations representatives declined to provide comments about their thinking.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was in the awkward position on Friday of celebrating his company’s 50th anniversary at corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Alongside Microsoft’s prior two CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Nadella sat down with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin for a televised interview that was planned well before Trump’s tariff announcement.
When asked about the tariffs at the top of the interview, Nadella effectively dodged the question and avoided expressing his views about whether the new policies will hamper Microsoft’s business.
Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014, acknowledged to Sorkin that “disruption is very hard on people” and that, “as a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good.” Ballmer and Gates are two of the 12 wealthiest people in the world thanks to their Microsoft fortunes.
C-suites may not be able to stay quiet for long, especially if the recent turmoil spills into next week.
Lise Buyer, who previously helped guide Google through its IPO and now works as an adviser to companies going public, said there’s no appetite for risk in the market under these conditions. But there is risk that staffers get jittery, and they’ll surely look to their leaders for some reassurance.
“Until markets settle out and we have the opportunity to access valuation levels, public company CEOs should work to calm potentially distressed employees,” Buyer said in an email. “And private company managements should refine plans to get by on dollars already in the treasury.”
— CNBC’s Hayden Field, Jordan Novet, Leslie Picker, Annie Palmer and Samantha Subin contributed to this report.
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