Google shocked nearly everyone when it made the surprise announcement that it was reorganizing itself into a conglomerate of companies called Alphabet last year, but the idea had been kicking around CEO Larry Page's inner circle well before that.

According to a profile of Alphabet in Bloomberg, Page began offloading responsibilities for Google's core business to Sundar Pichai in 2014 and assembled his own group of close advisers to tackle wild ideas and new areas for Google to explore.

Page called the group Javelin, according to the Bloomberg profile, where he came up with wild ideas like creating smart cities, which eventually became the Alphabet company Sidewalk Labs.

In addition to crazy ideas though, Javelin laid the groundwork for a conglomeration of individual tech and science companies under the Alphabet umbrella.