Finance History | 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway — Eighty-Five Dollars After the Auction Cleared

People treat Alphabet as a holding company and Google as a search bar.

The listing that made the shares public was priced in an auction, not in a banker dinner.

On 19 August 2004 Google Inc. sold Class A stock on Nasdaq under the ticker GOOG.

The clearing price was 85 dollars a share, at the bottom of a range that had already been cut from 108 to 135 dollars.

The firm and selling shareholders floated 19.6 million shares and raised 1.67 billion dollars in 2004 currency.

Google itself sold about 14.1 million shares. Insiders sold about 5.5 million after cutting a larger planned sale.

A Dutch auction lets bidders name a price and a quantity.

The issuer then sets one clearing price that sells the whole book. Every winning bid pays that same price.

Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston ran the books. The method was meant to reduce the usual first-day discount that transfers money from the issuer to favored accounts.

Trading opened near 100 dollars and closed at 100.34 dollars on 19 August 2004. The pop was smaller than a conventional underpriced debut and larger than a perfectly cleared book.

The campus at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View was already the company's home.

Alphabet Inc. later became the listed parent. Class A and Class C shares both sit in the S and P 500.

The pin is the public edge of the Googleplex. The interiors are working offices.

The mechanism is an auction that tried to let demand set the first price, so the company, not the allocation list, would keep more of the proceeds.

Photo: David Nagle, 12 August 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Outside the Googleplex, Mountain View.