<P> Following the closing of the $25 million financing round, Sequoia encouraged Brin and Page to hire a CEO . Brin and Page ultimately acquiesced and hired Eric Schmidt as Google's first CEO in March 2001 . </P> <P> In October 2003, while discussing a possible initial public offering of shares (IPO), Microsoft approached the company about a possible partnership or merger . The deal never materialized . In January 2004, Google announced the hiring of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group to arrange an IPO . The IPO was projected to raise as much as $4 billion . </P> <P> Google's initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004 . A total of 19,605,052 shares were offered at a price of $85 per share . Of that, 14,142,135 (another mathematical reference as √ 2 ≈ 1.4142135) were floated by Google and 5,462,917 by selling stockholders . The sale raised US $1.67 billion, and gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion . Many of Google's employees became instant paper millionaires . Yahoo!, a competitor of Google, also benefited from the IPO because it owns 2.7 million shares of Google . </P> <P> The company was listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbol GOOG . When Alphabet was created as Google's parent company, it retained Google's stock price history and ticker symbol . </P>

When did google go public and what was the price