Background

Brin was born on August 21, 1973, in Moscow in the Soviet Union, to Russian Jewish parents, Yevgenia and Mikhail Brin, both graduates of Moscow State University (MSU). Brin and his family emigrated to the United States to escape Jewish persecution in 1979. His father is a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, and his mother a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Education

First, Sergey attended the Mishkan Torah Hebrew School with the other Jewish kids. He did not like to study there as he was bullied for his thick Russian accent. After some time, Sergey begged his parents to transfer him to a different school. They encouraged him to study the elementary school at Paint Branch Montessori School in Adelphi, Maryland. Sergey’s parents became friends with the school’s director, Patty Barshay, who later became a mentor of Sergey. Now, Sergey Brin considers that studying at that school was one of the key factors of his success. Barshay described Sergey Brin as outgoing, self-confident, and fascinated by numbers and mathematics.

He sometimes was getting bored, as the classes of mathematics seemed too simple for him. This fact is not surprising, as the young genius was getting an additional education at home. Parents not only helped Sergey to retain the knowledge of the Russian language but also encouraged his interest in mathematics and computer science. In the early 1980s, the availability of personal computers was still rare. Sergey Brin’s first computer Commodore 64 he received from his father as a present for his birthday when he turned nine years old. Soon, Sergey surprised his schoolteachers by submitting an unusual project prepared on the computer and printed out on the printer.

After graduating from Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt, Maryland, where he had studied for three years, Sergey Brin enrolled at the University of Maryland in 1990, at the age of 15. In 1993, at the age of 19, Brin received his double bachelor’s degree in computer systems and mathematics with honors and earned a prestigious scholarship of the National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, which covered his following education.

Sergey Brin continued his education at Stanford University, which is the most prestigious high-tech university of the United States, located in California’s Silicon Valley. Some American universities allow Bachelor students to apply directly to the doctoral program and receive a Master’s degree while studying. Thus, such universities can encourage their talented students into long-term projects so that the students may concentrate on their research.

Sergey Brin liked mathematics, but he had no clue how would this passion turn out. His list of the selected disciplines was surprising: dancing, yachting, swimming, gymnastics, etc. His father recalls that when he asked his son whether he was going to sign up for some advanced courses, Sergey replied that he had already enrolled in advanced swimming.

From the beginning of studying at Stanford University, Sergey Brin demonstrated an interest in Internet technologies and search engines. He authored and co-authored a number of papers relating to the methods of information extraction from unstructured sources, and information retrieval in large collections of texts and scientific data. Also, he developed software, which converted experimental work created using a word processor TeX, into HTML format.

In 1993, Sergey Brin created a software application that would crawl Playboy’s Web site, download the latest images, and set them as a screensaver. However, Brin was forced to remove the screensaver, after a female student complained.

The crucial moment in the biography of Sergey Brin happened in March 1995 when he met Lawrence “Larry” Page at the spring meeting of the prospective Ph.D.s in Computer Science, who later became the CEO of Google. In the summer of 1995, Sergey Brin was assigned to accompany Larry Page on campus. Initially, they were not happy with each other, and they were arguing and furiously discussing any topic.

However, soon they discovered that both of them were extremely interested in the problem of extracting information from large data sets. Sergey and Larry became friends, and in January 1996, in preparation for writing doctoral theses, they began to work together on a research project designed to improve the methods of finding information on the Internet fundamentally. They presumed that the most popular data was the most useful. Therefore, young scientists hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the liaison between websites and ranked them according to their popularity must have been more efficient than the existing ranking methods of other search engines. The modern search engines’ ranking principles of websites depended on the frequency of the word appearance on the page.

In the middle of 1998, Brin and Page paused their studies at Stanford University. Their parents were not pleased with this decision.

Career

In the fall of 1997, Larry and Sergey brainstormed a catchier name of BackRub. They turned to their mate Sean Anderson for help. Anderson suggested the name Googolplex, a huge number, the digit 1 followed by 10 to 100 degrees. Sergey and Larry liked the name and proposed to shorten it to Googol. The word googol indicates the digit 1 followed by 100 zeros.

Soon, one of their office colleagues noticed that they had misspelled googol number and pointed out on it. However, the Google.com had been already registered.

During the first half of 1998, Sergey and Larry were involved in the development of a new and promising search engine technology. Larry Page’s dorm room at Stanford University served as the data center while the Sergey Brin’s dorm room - the business office.

They noticed that Google became too popular among Stanford students, and they started thinking about how to expand Google beyond the Stanford walls. First, they attempted to sell their idea to AltaVista for $1 million but Paul Flaherty, the inventor of AltaVista, rejected their proposal. Sergey and Larry also tried to sell it to Yahoo!, Excite, but things turned out a different way.

After several unlucky attempts of selling it, they created a business plan and started looking for angel investors who would provide funds for an exchange of ownership portion of their company. David Cheriton, their computer science professor, introduced them to Andy Bechtolsheim, who was a Vice President of Cisco Systems (later co-founder of Sun Microsystems). He was very interested in the idea and wrote out a check for $100,000.

On September 7, 1998, Google was incorporated as a limited liability company, Google Inc. Larry Page became CEO, and Sergey Brin became President. Their first office was a rented garage from Susan Wojcicki, a sister of Sergey Brin’s girlfriend Anne Wojcicki, which was located in Menlo Park, California. Despite this, Google processed around 10,000 requests per day PC Magazine featured it on the list of Top 100 Best Websites and Search Engines of 1998. Soon Craig Silverstein joined their team as the first Google employee. In the following year, the company moved into the new office in Palo Alto.

In June 1999, Brin and Page managed to convince two competing venture capital firms - Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers - to fund Google and attracted investments of $25 million. According to David A. Vise, the co-author of The Google Storybook, it was a classic maneuver “divide and conquer.” It allowed Brin and Page to prevent the possibility of significant influence from any of the investors, despite the fact that the representatives of the two venture capital firms have entered the board of directors.

To become a profitable company Sergey and Larry decided to display sponsored advertisements, but not on the homepage. Instead, they agreed to show highlighted links separated from organic search results. In the US, advertisers spent billions of dollars on outdoor advertising; however, sometimes it was not quite effective. Brin and Page offered a solution to display sponsored adverts based on the searches of users. If users searched on Google for more information about cars, they could click on a sponsored link to learn more. Thus, on October 23, 2000, the partners released Google AdWords, an online advertising service.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page bore the burden of managing the company, until the moment when the number of its employees did not exceed two hundred people. In August 2001, Larry Page transferred the competence of CEO to Eric Schmidt, a veteran of the industry, who was Chief Technology Officer at Sun Microsystems and Chief Executive Officer of Novell. Sergey Brin became President of Technology, and Larry Page was responsible for product development.

Nevertheless, they were keeping an eye on everything happening with Google, and no significant decision could be taken without their approval. In the case of a disagreement, the partners had to discuss a controversial issue vis-à-vis and adopt a universal statement.

Within just one month after becoming a new Google CEO, Eric Schmidt helped Google to make its first profit. By the end of 2001, Google’s revenue reached $85 million. Finally, Google became a profitable company.

In May 2000, Sergey Brin and Larry Page started the overseas expansion of Google services. Soon Google operated in ten languages: Danish, Portuguese, Finnish, Spanish, German, Italian, Swedish, French, Dutch, and Norwegian. Four months later Sergey and Larry added Chinese, Korean and Japanese. By 2002, Google operated in 72 different languages.

In August 2001, Brin and Page opened their first international office in Japan. One of the success factors was the deal between Google and AOL in May 2002. According to the agreement, AOL would use Google’s Custom Search and display sponsored links in AOL search results to reach its 34 million users. This contract helped Google to become a major search engine on the Internet, winning considerable market share from Amazon, Yahoo!, and eBay. In March 2004, the company moved into a new headquarters building located in Mountain View. The campus was named the Googleplex. Sergey and Larry created a relaxed and fun atmosphere at the Googleplex: they provided their employees with free massages, pool tables, free food, free laundry, etc.

On August 19, 2004, Google entered the IPO market with its shares on NASDAQ (GOOG) with $85 per stock. By the end of the day, more than 19 million stock share had been sold, and the stock price skyrocketed to almost $100. In August 2005, the price per share increased to around $300. By October 2007, a stock price grew up to $600. Thus, Brin and Page attracted more than $3 billion in cash for the company and became billionaires.

Before the IPO, there was an incident with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). SEC could have forced Google to delay the IPO for the fact of publication of an interview with its founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page in September 2004 issue of Playboy Magazine in the “quiet period.” A quiet period is a period when federal securities laws limit what information a company and related parties can announce to the public. Google announced its IPO on April 29, 2004. However, according to Playboy Magazine officials, Sergey and Larry granted the interview yet on April 22, 2004. To resolve this situation, the SEC asked the Google team to incorporate the entire Playboy interview as an appendix to its prospectus.

Google regularly develops new services. On June 18, 2003, Google introduced Google AdSense, a platform that allowed publishers to display targeted advertisements and generate revenue on a per-click or per-impression basis. On February 8, 2005, Brin and Larry introduced Google Maps, a web mapping service, co-founded by Jens Eilstrup Rasmussen and Lars Rasmussen. On October 9, 2006, Google Inc. purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. YouTube is a video-sharing service initially founded by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim.

On June 28, 2011, Google introduced a social networking service under the name Google+ to compete with Facebook. As of March 2015, Google+ had 300 million monthly active users. Unfortunately, Google+ did not become so popular as Facebook. As of March 31, 2015, Facebook had 1.415 billion monthly active users.

In 2012, Brin has been involved with the Project Glass program and has demoed eyeglass prototypes. Project Glass is a research and development program by Google to develop an augmented reality head-mounted display (HMD). The intended purpose of Project Glass products would be the hands-free displaying of information currently available to most smartphone users and allowing for interaction with the Internet via natural language voice commands

As of May 27, 2015, Sergey Brin holds a position of Director of Special Projects at Google known as Google X, the secretive division of Google that focuses on high-risk projects, such as Google Glass, airborne wind turbines, smart contact lenses. Larry Page is the Google CEO and heads the company with confidence.

On August 10, 2015, Larry Page announced in a blog post that they are turning Google into a subsidiary of companies called Alphabet. Alphabet, Inc. will include such companies as Google, Nest, Fiber, Google X, Life Sciences, Calico, etc. The page will serve as Alphabet CEO, with fellow Google co-founder Sergey Brin serving as president. Sundar Pichai, formerly Google’s vice president in charge of products, will be appointed as CEO of Google.

Sergey Brin is an author and co-author of dozens of publications for the leading American academic journals; he also regularly performs at various national and international academic, business and technology forums. Sergey Brin often speaks to the press, on television, talking about his views on search technology and the IT industry itself.

On December 3, 2019, Brin and Page announced that they were stepping down from their day-to-day roles at Alphabet, though they were expected to remain involved in the company as its two largest individual shareholders.

Achievements

• 

  In May 2000, the Google team received a Webby Award and People’s Choice Award for the technical achievement. The following month, Google officially became the world’s largest search engine with the announcement of reaching 1 billion URL in its index.
  
  In 2002, Brin, along with Larry Page, was named the MIT Technology Review TR100, as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35. In 2003, both Brin and Page received an honorary MBA from IE Business School "for embodying the entrepreneurial spirit and lending momentum to the creation of new businesses..." In 2004, they received the Marconi Foundation Prize, the "Highest Award in Engineering", and were elected Fellows of the Marconi Foundation at Columbia University. "In announcing their selection, John Jay Iselin, the Foundation's president, congratulated the two men for their invention that has fundamentally changed the way information is retrieved today."
  
  In 2003, Brin and Page were both Award Recipients and National Finalists for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award. In 2004, Brin received the Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate Award with Larry Page at a ceremony in Chicago, Illinois.
  
  In November 2009, Forbes decided Brin and Page were the fifth most powerful people in the world. In November 2016, Brin was ranked No. 13 on Forbes' "Billionaires" list, and No. 10 among U.S. billionaires who made the list. As of 2018, his personal fortune exceeded $50 billion.

Works

More photos

• design

  • Google

  • Google Glass

  • Google Self-Driving Car

Religion

Sergey Brin's religious views aren’t known. Brin has been raised in a Jewish family, but some sources claim that he is an atheist.

Politics

Sergey Brin made an extraordinary call to America’s politicians today: he pleaded for them to denounce political parties. “Please withdraw from your respective parties and govern as independents in name and in spirit,” he wrote on Google+.

Despite this, Brin has given $30,800 to the Democratic National Committee over the course of this cycle. He's also given $5,000 to Obama's re-election campaign.

Speaking about the presidential election result in 2016, Brin compared the Donald Trump election to the rise of fascism. Brin told the crowd that Americans with "routine jobs" were more likely to vote for Trump than those who have "non-routine jobs." He said: "There's actually a lot of historical precedent for boredom being a huge factor in vote choice. And actually in building extremism. We've done a lot of work on extremism that shows a high correlation with boredom." He added that the elevation of Trump was not consistent with what the company stands for.

Views

Google’s success has always been seen in the simplicity it has to offer. Both in its business products and social networking options, Sergey Brin has been recorded as saying that technology has complicated products for many people and Google aims to provide an easy, user-friendly option that people have chosen over the chaotic multiple options of its competitors. To put it in his own words: “We are focused on features, not products. We eliminated future products that would have made the complexity problem worse. We don’t want to have 20 different products that work in 20 different ways. I was getting lost at our site keeping track of everything. I would rather have a smaller set of products that have a shared set of features”.

In September 2007, Sergey Brin and Larry Page sponsored the Google Lunar XPrize with the reward of $30 million to anyone who would build a private spacecraft and land it on the moon. In June 2008, Brin announced his intention to fly to the International Space Station (ISS) as a space tourist. He made a deposit of $5 million to Space Adventures, which would secure him a seat on the ISS. Space Adventures President Tom Shelley said that ISS could have a vacant seat for Brin in 2017.

Quotations: “Too many rules stifle innovation.”

"I was fortunate to be at Stanford, and I was really interested in data mining, which means analyzing large amounts of data, discovering patterns and trends."

“Any conversation I have about innovation starts with the ultimate goal.”

"Solving big problems is easier than solving little problems."

"Having come from a totalitarian country, the Soviet Union, and having seen the hardships that my family endured–both while there and trying to leave - I certainly am particularly sensitive to the stifling of individual liberties."

“Obviously, everyone wants to be successful, but I want to be looked back on as very innovative, very trusted and ethical and ultimately making a big difference in the world.”

"When it’s too easy to get money, then you get a lot of noise mixed in with the real innovation and entrepreneurship. Tough times bring out the best parts of Silicon Valley."

"We came up with the notion that not all web pages are created equal. People are - but not web pages."

"Technology is an inherent democratizer. Because of the evolution of hardware and software, you’re able to scale up almost anything. It means that in our lifetime everyone may have tools of equal power."

“You can make money doing evil.”

“I would like to see anyone be able to achieve their dreams, and that’s what this organization does.”

“We will make machines that can reason, think and do things better than we can.”

“The only way you are going to have success is to have lots of failures first.”

Membership

Sergey Brin and his wife Anne Wojcicki founded and run The Brin Wojcicki Foundation. The foundation has pledged and donated money to many different causes ranging from the Michael J. Fox Foundation for a Parkinson’s cure, to $500,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation in costs for Wikipedia.

Personality

Despite being billionaires, Brin and Page both live relatively modestly. They have reportedly both driven the environmentally friendly Toyota Prius, a partly electric-powered car that many Mother Earth-oriented Americans use. They tend to dress in t-shirts and jeans - typical boys-next-door.

Sergey Brin prefers to wear jeans, sneakers, and a sports jacket, so he still buys products at Costco and always looks at the price tags.

Brin also has a wild sense of humor, according to early Google employee Douglas Edwards. "He conducted job interviews once dressed as a cow," Edwards told Fast Company. As an April Fools' joke, he once told pregnant Google employees that he would be offering birthing classes.

Physical Characteristics: Brin's height is 5 ft 8 in. He has dark brown eyes and dark brown hair.

Quotes from others about the person

• Sergey’s the Google playboy. He was known for getting his fingers caught in the cookie jar with employees that worked for the company in the masseuse room. He got around." - Charlie Ayers

Interests

• Politicians

  Barack Obama

• Writers

  Neal Stephenson

• Sport & Clubs

  roller hockey, gymnastics

Connections

In 2007, Sergey Brin married a biotech analyst named Anne Wojcicki. Brin’s wife is actively interested in spreading health information and the couple co-founded a company named “23andMe” that is devoted to research about the human genome project. They have a son (born 2008) and a daughter (born 2011) but the couple separated in 2013.

Father:

Michael Brin

Michael Brin is a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland.

Mother:

Eugenia Brin

Eugenia Brin is a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Wife:

Anne Wojcicki

Anne E. Wojcicki is an American entrepreneur and the co-founder and chief executive officer of the personal genomics company 23andMe.

Friend:

Amanda Rosenberg

Friend:

Sheyene Gerardi

colleague:

Larry Page

Lawrence Edward Page is an American computer scientist and Internet entrepreneur who co-founded Google with Sergey Brin.

colleague:

Eric Schmidt

Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an American businessman and software engineer. He is known for being the Executive Chairman of Google from 2001 to 2015 and Alphabet Inc. from 2015 to 2017. In 2017, Forbes ranked Schmidt as the 119th-richest person in the world, with an estimated wealth of US$11.1 billion

colleague:

Sundar Pichai

Pichai is the chief executive officer (CEO) of Google Inc. Formerly the Product Chief of Google, Pichai's current role was announced on August 10, 2015, as part of the restructuring process that made Alphabet Inc. into Google's parent company, and he assumed the position on October 2, 2015.

References

• The Google Guys: Inside the Brilliant Minds of Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin
• Sergey Brin
• Google Speaks: Secrets of the World's Greatest Entrepreneurs, Sergey Brin and Larry Page
• The Gatekeepers: Sergey Brin Larry Page and Google
• Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, and Google
• Focus On: 100 Most Popular Soviet Emigrants to the United States: Mila Kunis, Sergey Brin, Yul Brynner, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Regina Spektor, Marina Oswald ... Odadjian, Eugene Mirman, Julia Ioffe, etc.
• Google: How Larry Page & Sergey Brin Changed the Way We Search the Web
• The Google Boys: Sergey Brin and Larry Page In Their Own Words
• How Google Works