Background

Ethnicity: Larry Page's father is English with some Irish, distant German and French ancestry. His mother is Ashkenazi Jewish.

Larry Page was born on March 26, 1973, in East Lansing, Michigan. His father, Carl Page, was a pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence, and his mother taught computer programming. His older brother, Carl Page, Jr., also became a successful Internet entrepreneur. They also have a younger sister.

Education

The Page family home was full of first-generation personal computers and scientific magazines, and young Larry, as he was called, immersed himself in them. Larry Page attended a Montessori school in the primary grades and later graduated from East Lansing High School in 1991 and pursued a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan.

He was an honors student at the University of Michigan, where he also participated in the university’s solar car team, reflecting another lifelong interest: sustainable transportation technology.

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering, he began graduate studies in computer science at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. It was there that he first undertook the project of analyzing patterns of linkage among different sites on the World Wide Web. It was also at Stanford that he first met fellow computer science graduate student Sergey Brin and recruited him to join his research project. Even though he enrolled for a Ph.D. at Stanford University, he could not complete it because of his business ventures.

Career

At Stanford, Page first undertook the project of analyzing patterns of linkage among different sites on the World Wide Web. It was also at Stanford that he first met fellow computer science graduate student Sergey Brin and recruited him to join his research project.

The Internet and the World Wide Web were just taking shape as major forces in telecommunication when Larry Page entered Stanford. Larry Page wanted to devise a method for determining how many other Web pages linked to anyone given page. Existing facilities for exploring the Web could only rank search results by the frequency of the appearance of a given word on any page of the Web. Searches often produced endless lists of websites of very little pertinence to the user’s query. Page soon found that ranking websites by the number of links leading to it from other sites was a far more useful measure of a Web document’s relevance to a user’s search criteria. To explore the possibilities of his new "PageRank" mechanism more fully, he called on the data mining expertise of his classmate, Sergey Brin.

Together, Page and Brin wrote the paper "Dynamic Data Mining: A New Architecture for Data with High Dimensionality," and followed it with "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine." The latter paper quickly became one of the most downloaded scientific documents in the history of the Internet. For a time, Page and Brin ran the prototype of their search engine, which they named "BackRub," on an assortment of inexpensive personal computers stored in Larry Page’s dorm room. Word quickly spread beyond the walls of Stanford that the two graduate students had created something far more useful than existing search technology.

They registered the domain name google.com in 1997. The domain name was derived from the term "googol," the very large number written as a one followed by 100 zeros, an expression of the vast universe of data the Google search engine was designed to explore. After raising $1 million from family, friends, and other investors, the pair launched the company in 1998. Page and Brin incorporated Google as a privately held company and relocated their servers from Larry Page’s dorm room to a friend’s garage in Menlo Park, California. Having completed their master’s degrees, they took a leave of absence from the Ph.D. program to concentrate on building their business. At first, Larry Page served as the company’s CEO, Sergey Brin as its president. The next year Google received $25 million of venture capital funding and was processing 500,000 queries per day.

After quickly outgrowing a series of office locations, the company leased a complex of buildings in Mountain View, California in 1999. Google has since purchased the entire property, known as the GooglePlex, one of the most unusual and innovative workplaces in the world, replete with exercise and recreational facilities. Google even became a verb - to "Google" someone or something meant to search for it via the engine, but it was most commonly used in reference to checking out the Web presence of potential dates.

In 2000, Google began selling text-based advertisements associated with search keywords. The text-only ads on their graphics-free homepage kept their download time to the bare minimum, and their ability to deliver ads directly related to the interests of the user made the ad space highly valuable.

That same year, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, still enrolled as Ph.D. candidates at Stanford, attended the Academy of Achievement’s International Achievement Summit in London, England as graduate student delegates. The interview recorded at that time can be read on this website. They returned to the annual event in 2004 as recipients of the Academy’s Golden Plate Award.

By 2001, a vast number of once-promising Internet startups had folded, but Google was growing explosively and turning a profit. Page and Brin recruited Novell executive Eric Schmidt to serve as CEO, with Larry Page taking the role of President for Products and Sergey Brin as President for Technology. The three have run the enterprise as a triumvirate ever since.

By early 2004 Google was one of the most-visited Web sites in the world. Its servers handled some 138,000 search queries per minute or about two hundred million daily. Analysts believed it was taking in approximately $1 billion in revenues annually, and the company finally announced plans to become a publicly-traded company with an initial public offering (IPO) of stock. Google’s initial public offering in 2004 raised $1.67 billion, giving the company a market capitalization of $23 billion. A number of Google employees with shares in the company became millionaires overnight, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin found themselves multibillionaires at age 27. Google was an immediate favorite with individual investors, and the stock price has soared. All three top executives - Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt - reduced their annual salaries to a dollar a year and refused bonuses, tying their personal wealth directly to the company’s performance in the stock market. In 2004, Google launched Orkut, a social networking site, and introduced Google Desktop search, the philanthropic wing of Google was formed to contribute towards social issues and causes.

The year 2005 was quite productive for Google. Google Maps, Blogger Mobile, Google Reader, and iGoogle were released that year. By the end of 2006, Google had over 10,000 employees and annual revenues well over $10 billion. Various estimates place Larry Page and Sergey Brin among the two dozen richest people on Earth, and the dozen richest Americans.

In addition to its in-house product development, Google has also grown through strategic acquisitions of hardware and software companies with innovative video, teleconferencing, and social networking products. In 2006, Google purchased the most popular website for user-submitted streaming videos, YouTube, for $1.65 billion in stock. Prior to the sale, YouTube’s earnings were negligible, but Google quickly turned it into a profit center.

The following year, Google acquired the software company DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. DoubleClick technology directs display advertising to users based on their search behavior. DoubleClick complements the formidable arsenal of technologies that Google has deployed to revolutionize online advertising. AdWords places advertising on third-party websites, on a cost-per-click or cost-per-view basis. Google Analytics enables the owners of websites to study the traffic to their sites. AdSense allows these owners to display advertising on their sites; they are then paid by the advertisers on a per-click basis.

In recent years, Google has introduced a number of popular new services and applications, including a toolbar that allows users to perform searches from their desktops, without visiting the Google website. The website itself enables searches for the video and still imagery as well as text. Google Maps is a popular navigation tool, while Google Earth allows users to access satellite imagery to zoom in on locations all over the world. The most ambitious project of all, Google Book Search, aims to make the contents of vast libraries of books available and searchable online.

Google also provides a free web-based email service, Gmail, which offers its users far more storage space than most other services. The company now offers a suite of business tools, including word processing and spreadsheet applications, at a fraction of the cost of competing office software packages. Google has created its own Web browser, Google Chrome, as well as the popular Picasa photo organization and editing software.

A philanthropic arm, Google.org, focuses on climate change and global issues of poverty and public health. The company has run an online poll to select nonprofit initiatives to receive $10 million in Google.org donations. One of Google.org’s principal projects is the development of a 100-mile-a-gallon hybrid automobile. As a company, Google maintains a commitment to environmentally sustainable technology. It has the largest solar power capacity of any corporate campus in the United States, and even the grounds of its green campus are grazed by a flock of goats. Google has negotiated 20-year power contracts with wind farms in Iowa, and in 2010 acquired a 20 percent stake in two wind farms built by NextEra Energy Resources in North Dakota.

In 2011, Eric Schmidt stepped aside as CEO of Google, and Larry Page, then 38 years old, took the helm of the company he founded 13 years before. Schmidt remained with the company as executive chairman. As Google’s new CEO, Larry Page pledged to make Google "a big company that has the nimbleness and soul and passion of a startup."

Later that year, Google initiated its largest acquisition yet, buying Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. Motorola had been a principal manufacturer of phones running Google’s Android operating system, and the merger gave Google ownership of significant patents in the mobile phone sector. Within two years of closing the deal, Google later sold the company to Lenovo of Japan, while keeping control of the all-important patents. Google continues to make strategic acquisitions of startups in the fields of gaming, virtual reality, online music, image recognition, and artificial intelligence.

The Google Brain Project, initiated in 2011, has used Google’s massive reserves of data and its distributed computing infrastructure to develop a large-scale artificial neural network, capable of interpreting visual, written, or auditory data and learning from its own mistakes. Elements of this technology are now used in the speech recognition feature of the Android Operating System.

In 2013, the company introduced Google Glass, a hands-free voice-activated computer built into a pair of eyeglasses, with a display projected into the eye and an audio speaker audible only to the wearer. Google Glass enables the wearer to take pictures, record video, dictate messages, navigate, and access other information without significantly obstructing the natural field of vision. Google made prototypes available on a limited basis through 2015, before withdrawing the product for further experimentation.

Google reorganized its multifarious interests as a holding company, Alphabet Inc., in 2015, with Google as its principal subsidiary. Larry Page and Eric Schmidt retained their roles as CEO and executive chairman, respectively, at the new parent company and named a new CEO to head Google.

The restructuring gave Page and Brin the opportunity to step away from day-to-day operations of the company they founded, and the CEO was noticeably absent from Alphabet's meetings and quarterly earnings calls. In that role, Page spent much of his time researching new technologies.

On December 3, 2019, Page and Brin announced that they were stepping down from their roles as CEO and president of Alphabet, handing the reins to Pichai. Brin and Page continue to serve on Alphabet’s board; as the two largest stockholders they retain a controlling interest in Alphabet and all its subsidiaries, including Google.

Achievements

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  Larry Page is one of the most powerful people in the world. Larry Page’s biggest work is the formation of Google. Google, founded in 1998, is the world's leading search engine, serving millions of users worldwide. Besides search, Google offers many other products and services like Gmail, Blogger, Google Maps, Picasa, etc.
  
  Today, Google remains the Internet’s most visited website, employing well over a million servers around the world to process over 3.5 billion search requests every day. With a reported net worth of $64.6 billion, former Alphabet CEO Larry Page is the seventh-richest person in the world.
  
  In 2002, Page and Brin were named in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Technology Review TR100 for being among the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35. Also that year, Larry Page was named a World Economic Forum Global Leader for Tomorrow.
  
  In 2009, Page received an honorary doctorate from the University of Michigan. In August 2017, Page was awarded honorary citizenship of Agrigento, Italy.

Works

More photos

• design

  • Google 1998

Religion

Although Larry was born to a Jewish mother, he was not raised under any religious tenets. As a result, he does not follow any organized religion.

Views

Page has given money to campaigns in California supporting same-sex marriage and alternative energy. His biggest contribution on record was a $1 million donation in 2006 to help support Proposition 87, a ballot measure that would have taxed oil producers in the state in order to raise funds for research into alternative energy. Page is a clean energy advocate; his Palo Alto home uses fuel cells and geothermal energy.

Page also dedicates part of his wealth to causes he believes in. He's a personal investor in Planetary Resources, which aims to mine asteroids; Tesla; and Twigtale, personalized children's book startup founded by his sister-in-law. In 2006, he also started The Carl Victor Page Memorial Foundation in honor of his father.

These days, Page seems most interested in flying cars. Page has reportedly invested $100 million of his own money in "Zee.Aero," an aircraft company working on a "revolutionary new form of transportation." Page is also an investor in Kitty Hawk, a mysterious flying-car startup. The company recently built a fully electric, single-person aircraft.

When asked about freedom of information, Page said that in hundreds of countries in the world, Google is speaking to the leaders, specifically Chairman Eric Schmidt, to keep a dialogue open about protecting users’ privacy as well as keeping your freedom of speech intact. Speaking of emerging markets, our own Josh Constine asked Page about the democratization of access on the Internet, and the CEO’s response focused around bringing more smartphones to those markets.

He has donated a reported $20 million to a vocal-cord nerve-function research program at Massachusetts General Hospital. His family foundation, named for his father, has donated $15 million to combat the epidemic of Ebola virus in West Africa.

Quotations: "The Star Trek computer doesn't seem that interesting. They ask it random questions, it thinks for a while. I think we can do better than that."

"Excellence matters. I’ve pushed hard to increase our velocity, improve our execution, and focus on the big bets that will make a difference in the world."

"You never lose a dream, it just incubates as a hobby."

"It is easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. Since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition."

"Optimism is important. You have to be a little silly about the goals you are going to set. You should try to do things that most people would not do."

"If you have a product that’s really gaining a lot of usage, then it’s probably a good idea."

"Sometimes it’s important to wake up and stop dreaming. When a really great dream shows up, grab it."

"I have a simple algorithm, which is, wherever you see paid researchers instead of grad students, that's not where you want to be doing research."

"It’s quite complicated and sounds circular, but we’ve worked out a way of calculating a web site’s importance."

"If you look at things like Google Now also. Maybe you want to just have [a question] answered for you before you ask it."

"It's hard to keep things moving. And that's always a big trick. I think for me, the key is setting really big goals. And, you know, with YouTube, I think we've had tremendous leadership, both with the founders and now with Salar, who's been running it."

"Sometimes it’s important to wake up and stop dreaming. When a really great dream shows up, grab it."

"I don't know how long I would've stayed, to be honest."

"Have a healthy disregard for the impossible."

"If you’re changing the world, you’re working on important things. You’re excited to get up in the morning."

"You don’t need to have a 100 person company to develop that idea."

"Always deliver more than expected."

"If you’re not some things that are crazy, then you’re doing the wrong things."

"Always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting."

"Anything you can imagine probably is doable, you just have to imagine it and work on it."

"It’s very hard to fail completely if you aim high enough."

"Lots of companies don’t succeed over time. What do they fundamentally do wrong? They usually miss the future."

Membership

• 

  American Academy Arts & Sciences

• 

  National Academy of Engineering

• 

  Eta Kappa Nu

Personality

Larry Page’s childhood is the reason behind his love for computers and technology. Coming from a home where both his parents were related to the computer science field, their home used to be filled with all sorts of gadgets, computers, and science magazines. By the time Larry was aged 6 he began playing with tech items in the house and not long after, became a computer literate. He also satisfied his curiosity by investing quality time in reading, an activity which made him resolved to be an inventor after he read the biography of Nikola Tesla. It was from here that he, at the age of six, started to show an interest in science-related things. He eventually became the first child in his elementary school to submit an assignment in a word-processed form.

Larry Page is a self-confessed adventure-seeker and likes various outdoor sports, especially Kite Boarding. He also visits Necker Island, Alaska, and Sir Richard Branson's private island to indulge in his favorite sport. Page also loves traveling to Alaska in his private jet every time he needs to relax. Larry Page owns a luxurious expedition yacht named "Senses" completed by German boat-makers Schweers. The 193-ft yacht cost him approximately $45 million.

Physical Characteristics: Since 1999, Larry Page experienced difficulties with his voice. By 2013, both of his vocal cords had become paralyzed, possibly due to an autoimmune disorder.

Interests

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Nikola Tesla

• Writers

  My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla by Nikola Tesla, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard P. Feynman, What Do You Care What Other People Think? by Richard P. Feynman, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard P. Feynman, Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

• Sport & Clubs

  Kite Boarding

Connections

In 2007, Page married Lucinda Southworth on Necker Island, the Caribbean island owned by Richard Branson. Southworth is a research scientist and the sister of actress and model Carrie Southworth. Their wedding was a lavish affair. 600 guests were flown to the island in a private jet and many A-listers were part of the wedding, such as U2 lead singer Bono, Leonardo Dicaprio, and Johnny Depp, to name a few.

Page and Southworth have two children, born in 2009 and 2011.

Father:

Carl Victor Page

Mother:

Gloria Page

Spouse:

Lucy Southworth

Larry and Lucy began dating in 2006 and got married months later in 2007.

Sister:

Beverly Page

Brother:

Carl Victor Page Jr.

Larry was raised alongside his elder brother Carl Victor Page, Jr, who is also a computer entrepreneur.

colleague:

Sergey Brin

Page and Brin met at Stanford University in 1995, as both were in the school’s computer science graduate program.

Friend:

Elon Musk

Elon Musk has been friends with the cofounders of Google for a long time. Over the years, Musk and Page especially have become close friends - Musk even sometimes sleeps at Page's house when he's in town, and Page once said he'd rather leave his money to Musk than give it away to charity.

Acquaintance:

Steve Jobs

Larry Page was friendly with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs off and on.

Friend:

Leonardo DiCaprio

References

• Larry Page
• The Google Guys: Inside the Brilliant Minds of Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin
• Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World
• The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
• Google Speaks: Secrets of the World's Greatest Entrepreneurs, Sergey Brin and Larry Page
• Sergey Brin and Larry Page: Founders of Google
• Google: How Larry Page & Sergey Brin Changed the Way We Search the Web
• Forbes Special Magazine Issue October 6 2008 400 RICHEST PEOPLE IN AMERICA Michael Bloomberg Diane Hendricks Sergey Brian Larry Page Robert Kraft Peter Thiel
• Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, and Google