Google IPO banker tracks two-decade journey from Silicon Valley upstart to $2 trillion

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 [email protected].

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