Sergey Brin
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sergey Brin
Born
Sergey Mikhailovich BrinAugust 21, 1973 (1973-08-21) (age 36)
Moscow,
Soviet UnionEducation
Univ. of Maryland (B.S., 1993)Stanford University (M.S., 1995)
Alma materUniversity of MarylandStanford UniversityOccupation
Computer scientist, technology innovator, entrepreneur
Employer
Google, Inc., Mountain View, CaliforniaTitle: Co-founder and President
Salary
USD free of wage (2008)
[1][2]Net worth
▼ US$12.0 billion
[3]Known for
co-founder of Google, Inc.world's largest internet company
Religious beliefs
JewishSpouse(s)
Anne Wojcicki[4]Children
1
Website
stanford.edu/~sergeySergey Brin (born
August 21,
1973, in
Moscow,
Soviet Union) is a Russian-born American
computer scientist[5] best known as the co-founder of
Google, Inc., the world’s largest
Internet company, based on its
search engine and online advertising technology.
[6] As of 2009,
Forbes ranks Brin as the 26th richest person in the world.
[3]Brin immigrated to the United States at the age of six. Earning his undergraduate degree at the
University of Maryland, he followed in his father's and grandfather's footsteps by studying mathematics, double-majoring in
computer science. After graduation, he moved to
Stanford to acquire a Ph.D in computer science. There he met
Larry Page, whom he quickly befriended. They crammed their dormitory room with inexpensive computers and applied Brin’s
data mining system to build a superior
search engine. The program became popular at Stanford and they suspended their Ph.D studies to start up Google in a rented garage.
The Economist magazine referred to Brin as an “
Enlightenment Man," and someone who believes that “knowledge is always good, and certainly always better than ignorance," a philosophy which is summed up by Google’s motto of making all the world’s information "universally accessible and useful"
[7] and "
Don't be evil."
//
[[
edit] Early life and education
Sergey Brin was born in
Moscow, in the
Soviet Union, to
Russian Jewish parents, the son of Michael Brin and Eugenia Brin, both graduates of
Moscow State University. His father is a mathematics professor at the
University of Maryland, and his mother is a research scientist at
NASA's
Goddard Space Flight Center.
[8][9]Childhood in the Soviet Union
In 1979, when Brin was six, his family felt compelled to immigrate to the United States. In an interview with
Mark Malseed, author of The Google Story,
[10] Sergey's father explains how he was "forced to abandon his dream of becoming an
astronomer even before he reached college. Officially,
anti-Semitism didn't exist in the
U.S.S.R. but, in reality,
Communist Party heads barred Jews from upper professional ranks by denying them entry to universities (both parents are graduates of Moscow State University). Jews were excluded from the
physics departments, in particular..." He therefore changed his major to
mathematics where he received nearly straight A's. However, he said, "Nobody would even consider me for
graduate school because I was Jewish."
[11] The Brin family lived in a small, three-room, 350 square foot apartment in central Moscow, which they also shared with Sergey's paternal grandmother.
[11] Sergey told Malseed, "I've known for a long time that my father wasn't able to pursue the career he wanted," but Sergey only picked up the details years later after they had settled in America. He learned how, in 1977, after his father returned from a mathematics conference in
Warsaw,
Poland, he announced that it was time for the family to emigrate. "We cannot stay here any more," he told his wife and mother. At the conference, he was able to "mingle freely with colleagues from the
United States,
France,
England and
Germany, and discovered that his intellectual brethren in the West were 'not monsters.'" He added, "I was the only one in the family who decided it was really important to leave...".
[11]Sergey's mother was less willing to leave their home in Moscow, where they had spent their entire lives. Malseed writes, "For Genia, the decision ultimately came down to Sergey. While her husband admits he was thinking as much about his own future as his son's, for her, 'it was 80/20' about Sergey." They formally applied for their exit
visa in September 1978, and as a result his father "was promptly fired." For related reasons, his mother also had to leave her job. For the next eight months, without any steady income, they were forced to take on temporary jobs as they waited, not knowing whether their application would be granted. During this time his parents shared responsibility for looking after him and his father taught himself
computer programming. In May 1979, they were granted their official exit visas and were allowed to leave the country.
[11]At an interview in October, 2000, Brin said, "I know the hard times that my parents went through there, and am very thankful that I was brought to the States."
[12] A decade earlier, in the summer of 1990, a few weeks before his 17th birthday, his father led a group of gifted high school math students, including Sergey, on a two-week
exchange program to the Soviet Union. "As Sergey recalls, the trip awakened his childhood fear of authority" and he remembers that his first "impulse on confronting Soviet
oppression had been to throw pebbles at a police car." Malseed adds, "On the second day of the trip, while the group toured a
sanitarium in the countryside near Moscow, Sergey took his father aside, looked him in the eye and said, 'Thank you for taking us all out of Russia.'"
[11]Education in America
Brin attended
grade school at
Paint Branch Montessori School in
Adelphi, Maryland, but he received further education at home; his father, a professor in the department of mathematics at the
University of Maryland, nurtured his interest in mathematics and his family helped him retain his Russian-language skills. In September 1990, after having attended
Eleanor Roosevelt High School, Brin enrolled in the University of Maryland, College Park to study
computer science and
mathematics, where he received his
Bachelor of Science degree in May 1993 with honors.
[13]Brin began his graduate study in
Computer Science at
Stanford University on a
graduate fellowship from the
National Science Foundation. In 1993 he interned at
Wolfram Research, makers of
Mathematica.
[14] He is on leave from his
Ph.D. studies at Stanford.
[15][
edit] Search engine development
During an orientation for new students at
Stanford, he met
Larry Page. In a recent interview for The Economist, Brin jokingly said "We're both kind of obnoxious." They seemed to disagree on most subjects. But after spending time together, they "became intellectual soul-mates and close friends." Brin's focus was on developing data mining systems while Page's was in extending "the concept of inferring the importance of a research paper from its
citations in other papers."
[7] Together, the pair authored what is widely considered their seminal contribution, a paper entitled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale
Hypertextual Web Search Engine."
[16]Combining their ideas, they "crammed their dormitory room with cheap computers" and tested their new search engine designs on the web. Their project grew quickly enough "to cause problems for Stanford's computing infrastructure." But they realized they had succeeded in creating a superior engine for searching the web and suspended their PhD studies to work more on their system.
[7]As Larry Malseed wrote, "Soliciting funds from faculty members, family and friends, Sergey and Larry scraped together enough to buy some
servers and rent that famous garage in
Menlo Park. ... [soon after],
Sun Microsystems co-founder
Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a $100,000 check to “Google, Inc.” The only problem was, “Google, Inc.” did not yet exist—the company hadn’t yet been incorporated. For two weeks, as they handled the paperwork, the young men had nowhere to deposit the money."
[11]The Economist magazine describes Brin's approach to life, like Page's, as based on a vision summed up by Google's motto, "of making all the world's information 'universally accessible and useful.'" Not long after the two "cooked up their new engine for web searches, they began thinking about information that is today beyond the web," such as digitizing books, and expanding health information.
[7]Health Information
In May 2007, Brin married
Anne Wojcicki in
The Bahamas. Wojcicki is a
biotech analyst and a 1996 graduate of
Yale University with a
B.S. in
biology.
[4][17] She has an active interest in
health information, and together she and Brin are developing new ways to improve access to it. As part of their efforts, they have brainstormed with leading researchers about the
human genome project. “Brin instinctively regards
genetics as a
database and computing problem. So does his wife, who co-founded the firm,
23andMe,” which lets people analyze and compare their own genetic makeup (consisting of 23 pairs of
chromosomes).
[7] In a recent announcement at Google’s Zeitgeist conference, he said he hoped that some day everyone would learn their genetic code in order to help doctors, patients, and researchers analyze the data and try to repair bugs.
[7]Brin's mother, Eugenia, has been diagnosed with
Parkinson's Disease. In 2008, he decided to donate a large sum to the
University of Maryland School of Medicine, where his mother is being treated.
[18] Brin used the services of 23AndMe and discovered that although Parkinson's is generally not
hereditary, both he and his mother possess a
mutation of the
LRRK2 gene that puts the likelihood of his developing Parkinson's in later years between 20 and 80%.
[7] When asked whether ignorance was not bliss in such matters, he stated that his knowledge means that he can now take measures to ward off the disease. An editorial in The Economist magazine states that "Mr Brin regards his mutation of LRRK2 as a bug in his personal code, and thus as no different from the bugs in computer code that Google’s engineers fix every day. By helping himself, he can therefore help others as well. He considers himself lucky. ... But Mr Brin was making a much bigger point. Isn’t knowledge always good, and certainly always better than ignorance?"
[7]Views Chinese Censorship of Google
Remembering his youth and his family's reasons for leaving the Soviet Union, he "agonized over Google’s decision to appease the communist government of
China by allowing it to censor search engine results," but decided that the Chinese would still be better off than without having Google available.
[7] He explained his reasoning to Fortune magazine:
"We felt that by participating there, and making our services more available, even if not to the 100 percent that we ideally would like, that it will be better for Chinese web users, because ultimately they would get more information, though not quite all of it."
[19][
edit] Awards and recognition
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...".
[20] And in 2004, they received the
Marconi Foundation Prize, the "Highest Award in Engineering," and 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." They joined a "select cadre of 32 of the world's most influential communications technology pioneers..."
[21]In February, 2009, Brin was inducted into the
National Academy of Engineering, which is "among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer ... [and] honors those who have made outstanding contributions to engineering research, practice...". He was selected specifically, "for leadership in development of rapid indexing and retrieval of relevant information from the World Wide Web."
[22]In their "Profiles" of Fellows, the
National Science Foundation included a number of earlier awards:
"he has been a featured speaker at the
World Economic Forum and the Technology, Entertainment and Design Conference. ...
PC Magazine has praised Google [of] the Top 100 Web Sites and Search Engines (1998) and awarded Google the Technical Excellence Award, for Innovation in Web Application Development in 1999. In 2000, Google earned a
Webby Award, a People's Voice Award for technical achievement, and in 2001, was awarded Outstanding Search Service, Best Image Search Engine, Best Design, Most Webmaster Friendly Search Engine, and Best Search Feature at the Search Engine Watch Awards."
[23][
edit] Other interests
Brin is working on other, more personal projects that reach beyond Google. For example, he and Page are trying to help solve the world’s energy and climate problems at Google’s
philanthropic arm
google.org. He had Google invest in the
alternative energy industry to find wider sources of
renewable energy. They are trying to get companies to create innovative solutions to increasing the world's supply.
[24] He is an investor in
Tesla Motors, which is developing the
Tesla Roadster, a 221-mile (356 km) range
battery electric vehicle.
Brin has appeared on television shows and many documentaries, including
Charlie Rose,
CNBC, and
CNN. In 2004, he and Larry Page were named "Persons of the Week" by
ABC World News Tonight. In January 2005 he was nominated to be one of the
World Economic Forum's "Young Global Leaders." He and Page are also the executive producers of the 2009 film
Broken Arrows.
In June 2008, Brin invested $5 million in
Space Adventures, the
Virginia-based
space tourism company. His investment will serve as a deposit for a reservation on one of Space Adventures' proposed flights in 2011. So far, Space Adventures has sent five tourists into space.
[25]He and Page co-own a customized
Boeing 767-200 and a
Dornier Alpha Jet, and pay $1.3 million a year to house them and two
Gulfstream V jets owned by Google executives at
Moffett Federal Airfield. The aircraft have had scientific equipment installed by
NASA to allow experimental data to be collected in flight.
[26][27]Brin is a member of
AmBAR, a networking organization for Russian-speaking business professionals (both
expatriates and immigrants) in the
United States. He has made many speaking appearances.
[28][
edit] Quotes
"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."
[24]"We came up with the notion that not all web pages are created equal. People are – but not web pages."
[29]"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."
[29]"I think, if anything, I feel like I have gotten a gift by being in the States rather than growing up in Russia. . . . It just make me appreciate my life that much more."
[12]
