Larry Page is one of the co-founders of Google, alongside Sergey Brin. He is widely recognized as one of the most influential figures in the history of the internet and modern technology.

Larry Page was born on March 26, 1973, in East Lansing, Michigan, United States. His full name is Lawrence Page. His father, Carl Victor Page, was pursuing doctoral research in artificial intelligence at Michigan State University at the time of his birth, while his mother, Gloria Page, was teaching computer programming at the same university. Growing up in an academic and technology-oriented environment played a crucial role in shaping his future interests.

He completed his primary, secondary, and high school education in Michigan, graduating from East Lansing High School. He later earned a degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan. Afterward, he continued his academic journey at Stanford University in California, located approximately 40 kilometers southeast of San Francisco, where he pursued a PhD in Computer Science.

While working on his doctorate at Stanford University, Larry Page teamed up with his friend Sergey Brin to develop what would become the Google search engine. The two first met in the summer of 1995, when Page was assigned to show Brin around the university. Shortly after this meeting, Brin joined Page’s doctoral research.

In January 1996, the duo launched an early search engine called BackRub, based on the PageRank algorithm they developed. BackRub analyzed backlinks between websites to determine relevance, a revolutionary concept at the time. The project quickly gained popularity within the university, spreading by word of mouth as its effectiveness became widely recognized.

Despite growing interest, Page and Brin faced financial difficulties common among students. They needed servers to run BackRub, but the cost was prohibitively high. To overcome this, Larry Page managed to achieve strong results using low-capacity computers. In the first half of 1998, they purchased inexpensive terabyte-scale disks and set up the first Google.com data center in Page’s dorm room. Meanwhile, Brin secured an office at the university and began searching for potential investors.

Initially, investors showed little interest. As a result, Page and Brin left their academic positions to focus entirely on finding funding and repaying loans taken out for server equipment. Eventually, their friend Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, agreed to write a check for $100,000. However, the check could not be cashed because Google Inc. had not yet been legally established.

To resolve this, they borrowed money from friends and relatives and officially founded Google with $1,000,000 in capital, setting up operations in a friend’s garage. On September 7, 1998, Google Inc. officially launched in Menlo Park, California, and soon began expanding worldwide.

Today, Google reaches millions of users daily through its wide range of internet services. For many years, Larry Page served as Google’s President of Products, while Sergey Brin held the position of President of Technology. Despite their immense wealth, both founders have been known for maintaining modest lifestyles.

According to Forbes, in October 2014, Larry Page ranked 19th on the world’s richest list with a personal fortune of $30.4 billion. Bloomberg Billionaires Index reported that as of December 27, 2016, his net worth had risen to $40.7 billion, placing him 10th globally.

Larry Page, together with Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg, is considered one of the four individuals who became billionaires entirely through their own entrepreneurial efforts.

In 2007, Larry Page married Lucinda Southworth. The couple has two children, born in 2009 and 2011.

On December 4, 2019, the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, announced that they would step down from their roles as President and CEO of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Both remained on the board of directors, while Google CEO Sundar Pichai assumed the role of CEO of Alphabet.

Source: Biyografiler.com