Sergey Brin
– From Russian Immigrant to $100 Billion
The Shocking Story of a Boy Sergey Brin Who Ran Away From Russia and Built the World’s Most Powerful Search Engine
Some are born with opportunity.
Sergey Brin was born in the Soviet Union.
That one fact – the country, the system, the era – defined everything that followed. It affected the way that his family thought about liberty. It influenced the way his father viewed education. And it shaped the way Sergey himself would think about access to information years later, what it means when people can find anything they want to know and what it means when they cannot.
The man who helped build Google“>Google didn’t start with money or connections or the quiet confidence of someone who always knew success was coming.
He came with a suitcase, a new language and a country that had been telling his family they were not welcome for years.
Life in the U.S.S.R.
Sergey Mikhailovich Brin was born on August 21, 1973, in Moscow, Russia, then part of the Soviet Union.
His family was Jewish, and in the Soviet Union of the 1970s, being Jewish meant being subject to a certain, grindy kind of discrimination that reached into every part of life.
His father, Mikhail Brin, was a gifted mathematician who had wanted to study astronomy — but Jewish students were effectively barred from the physics department at Moscow State University. The discrimination was not subtle. That was policy.
Instead, Mikhail Brin became an economist, working in a system that limited what he could do and where he could go. His mother Eugenia was a researcher for the Soviet oil agency.
They were intelligent, educated people living in a system that prevented people like them from getting too far.
In 1977, Mikhail Brin took a trip to a math conference in Warsaw — a rare opportunity for Soviet citizens to travel — and got an actual view of the world beyond Russia. What he saw convinced him he had to get his family away.
Years passed. You couldn’t just buy a plane ticket and leave the Soviet Union. No applications, no permits, no waiting, no very real chance of Mikhail losing his job by applying to emigrate — the exit visa was never issued. Job lost. But he applied anyway.
The Brin family emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States in 1979.
Sergey Brin was six years’ old.
The American Childhood
The family moved to Maryland where Mikhail Brin later became a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland.
Sergey Brin adapted to his new country with surprising speed. He quickly learned English, adapted to American schools and showed an early, obvious gift for mathematics—a gift his father nurtured, teaching him math at home and instilling the sort of rigorous, exacting thinking that would come to define Sergey’s approach to problems.
Sergey Brin got his first computer – a Commodore 64 – when he was nine years old. By the standards of the early 1980s, it was a remarkable machine. For a mathematically minded nine-year-old with a nose for systems, it was a window into a world that would one day be his entire career.
He was a prodigy, but not a coasting one. He laboured. “He asked. He saw beyond the obvious answer to the more interesting one underneath.
He graduated high school at seventeen and enrolled at the University of Maryland, where he earned his undergraduate degree in mathematics and computer science in just three years. He was nineteen.
Then he went to Stanford.
The Meeting That Changed Everything
In 1993 Sergey Brin came to Stanford University to start his PhD in computer science.
In 1995, he was asked to give a tour of campus to a prospective student. That student was named Larry Page.
Most reckonings had the two not getting along straight away. They were both brilliant, both opinionated, and both perfectly comfortable arguing about everything. In those early conversations they argued all the time – about technology, about ideas, about how to go about solving problems.
But something about that friction sparked.
They started working together on a research project that started as an academic exercise, as so many world-changing ideas do. The project was on the structure of the World Wide Web, in particular on how to determine which web pages were most important and most relevant to a given search query.
The search engines of the mid-1990s were primitive by today’s standards. They counted mostly how many times a keyword appeared on a page and ranked the results. It was easy to game the system, and often returned useless results.
Brin and Page were not so sure.
What if instead of counting keywords you ranked pages by how many other pages linked to them – and weighted those links by the importance of the pages doing the linking? A page that many important pages linked to was probably more valuable than a page that no one linked to, no matter how many times a keyword was mentioned in its text.
They named the system PageRank, after Larry Page.
They called the search engine Backrub—and later, Google. The name was derived from “googol”, the name for the number one followed by one hundred zeros in mathematics. It indicated the size of the information they wanted to order.
Google Building
Google Inc. was founded in 1998 by Sergey Brin and Page in a friend’s garage in Menlo Park, California.
They got $100,000 in seed money from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, who wrote them a check before they had even formally incorporated the company — reportedly after a ten-minute demonstration that made him realize he was looking at something truly important.
It was the kind of chaos and excitement that only early days can bring. The team was tiny. The office was a garage. The equipment was makeshift. It was always overloaded. At first, Google’s servers were cobbled together from cheap parts, held together by ingenuity and necessity.
But this was doing the job. It was better than anything else out there and people took notice.
Google’s growth was spectacular. Within a year it was doing millions of searches a day. Within a few years it was the world’s top internet search engine.
“google” became a verb — people did not search for things online, they googled them — and that linguistic shift said everything about how thoroughly the product had entered daily life.
2004: Google goes public. The company was valued at $23bn when it floated. At age thirty, Sergey Brin was now one of the richest men on the planet.
Beyond Google
Sergey Brin was never one to rest on his laurels.
He was at Google, leading Google X, the research arm of Google that was working on secret projects like self-driving cars, Google Glass and Project Loon, an effort to bring internet access to remote areas by using balloons in the stratosphere.
In 2015, Google was restructured into a new parent company called Alphabet Inc. Brin became president of Alphabet and Page became CEO.
He has also been very involved in things outside of technology, on a personal level. When he discovered he had a genetic mutation that made it much more likely he would develop Parkinson’s disease, Brin pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to Parkinson’s research, making him one of the largest private funders of research into neurological diseases in the world.
The Meaning of His Story
At its core, Sergey Brin story is a story of what happens when someone who has known the absence of freedom dedicates their life to increasing access to information.
The boy who grew up in a country where information was controlled, where some people were systematically excluded from knowledge and opportunity, built a company whose stated mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.
And that’s not by accident.
It is a six year old with a suitcase. Fifty years later. Still making sure no one has to live in the dark.
Sergey Brin · Born August 21, 1973 · Moscow, Russia Co-founder of Google · Net Worth $100+ Billion
Immigrated to USA 1979. ·Stanford PhD drop-out
Founded 1998 · Changed the world forever.
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