Larry Page Born: Google's Co-Founder and Architect

Larry Page was twelve when he decided he wanted to invent things. Born on March 26, 1973, in East Lansing, Michigan, to two computer science professors at Michigan State University, Page grew up surrounded by technology and academic ambition. His childhood home was littered with computers and science magazines, and he later credited a biography of Nikola Tesla with inspiring his belief that invention without commercialization was a waste. At Stanford's computer science doctoral program, Page met Sergey Brin, and the two began collaborating on a research project about the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web. Page's key insight was that the web's link structure could be analyzed like academic citations: a page linked to by many other pages was more authoritative, just as a paper cited by many researchers was more influential. He called this idea PageRank, a pun on his own name. Page and Brin incorporated Google in September 1998, operating from a garage in Menlo Park, California, with an initial investment of $100,000 from Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. Google's search results were so dramatically better than existing engines like AltaVista and Yahoo that adoption was explosive. By 2004, Google processed 200 million searches daily and went public at $85 per share, a valuation that made both founders billionaires in their early thirties. Page served as CEO twice, stepping aside for Eric Schmidt from 2001 to 2011, then returning to lead the creation of Alphabet, Google's parent company, in 2015. Under his direction, Google expanded into email, maps, mobile operating systems, self-driving cars, and artificial intelligence. Page stepped back from daily operations in 2019, having built one of the most valuable companies in human history from a graduate school project about counting links.