Sergey Brin Born: Google Co-Founder Who Organized the Internet

Sergey Brin co-founded Google with Larry Page while both were Stanford PhD students, developing the PageRank algorithm that organized the internet's chaos into usable search results. Born in Moscow in 1973, he emigrated to the United States with his family at age six, fleeing Soviet antisemitism. His father was a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, and Brin inherited both his mathematical aptitude and his wariness of concentrated government power. He met Page at Stanford's computer science orientation in 1995, and their collaboration produced a research paper on a new approach to web search that ranked pages by the number and quality of links pointing to them rather than by keyword frequency alone. They built the first Google prototype in a Stanford dorm room, running it on servers cobbled together from discounted hardware. The company incorporated in September 1998 in a garage in Menlo Park, California, with an initial investment of one hundred thousand dollars from Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. Google's IPO in 2004 valued the company at twenty-three billion dollars. Brin oversaw the company's special projects division, which became Google X and later simply X, the lab responsible for self-driving cars, Google Glass, internet-beaming balloons, and other ambitious experiments. He and Page restructured the company as Alphabet in 2015, with Google as its largest subsidiary. Brin stepped back from day-to-day management in 2019 but remains a controlling shareholder and board member. The company they built became the world's dominant gateway to information, processing over 8.5 billion searches per day and touching billions of lives through its products.