Sergey Brin is one of the co-founders of Google and serves as the company’s Chief Technology Officer and a member of its board of directors. While pursuing his PhD at Stanford University, he developed the Google search engine together with his close friend Larry Page.

Sergey Brin was born on August 21, 1973, in Moscow, Russia, into a Russian Jewish family. His mother, Eugenia Brin, and his father, Michael Brin, were both mathematicians who graduated from Moscow State University. When Brin was six years old, in May 1979, his family emigrated from Russia to the United States and settled in Maryland. He graduated from Eleanor Roosevelt High School. His father later became a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland. Brin completed his undergraduate education in mathematics and computer science at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, Catonsville. After graduating, he moved to California.

Between 1993 and 1995, Brin pursued his doctoral studies at Stanford University, a private university located approximately 40 kilometers southeast of San Francisco in California. During his PhD studies, he worked together with his friend Larry Page to develop the Google search engine, and on September 4, 1998, they officially founded the Google company.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin first met in the summer of 1995. Larry was assigned to show Sergey around the university campus. Following this meeting, Sergey joined Larry’s doctoral research. The duo launched a search engine called BackRub in January 1996, based on their PageRank algorithm. The name “BackRub” was derived from the idea of analyzing backlinks between websites. Within a year, their backlink analysis approach gained widespread recognition, and their reputation grew rapidly within the university community.

Like many students, they faced financial difficulties while trying to further develop their ideas. They needed a server to run BackRub, but servers were expensive. Larry managed to achieve impressive results using low-capacity computers. In the first half of 1998, they purchased inexpensive terabyte-sized disks and established Google.com’s first data center in Larry’s dormitory room. Meanwhile, Sergey obtained an office at the university and began searching for potential investors for Google. Initially, their project attracted little interest from investors.

As a result, they left their university positions to focus on seeking investment and repaying the loans they had taken out for servers. Eventually, their friend Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, agreed to write a check for 100,000 dollars. However, cashing this check was not possible because Google Inc. had not yet been legally established. Consequently, they borrowed money from friends and relatives and founded what would become the world’s largest internet giant in a friend’s garage with a total capital of 1,000,000 dollars.

On September 7, 1998, Google Inc. officially launched in Menlo Park, California, and began expanding globally. Today, Google reaches millions of users every day through its wide range of internet-based services.

Currently, Larry Page serves as Google’s President of Products, while Sergey Brin continues his work as Chief Technology Officer. Despite possessing multibillion-dollar fortunes, the pair are known for leading modest lifestyles. For example, Brin has lived in a modest two-room rented house and driven a non-luxury Toyota vehicle. The duo also purchased a Boeing 767 for business travel and had it redesigned according to their personal needs.

According to Forbes in 2012, Brin ranked 13th on the list of the world’s richest people with a personal fortune of 20.3 billion dollars. In 2014, his wealth increased to 30 billion dollars, placing him 20th among the world’s richest individuals. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, as of December 27, 2016, he ranked 11th globally with a net worth of 39.9 billion dollars.

Sergey Brin, together with his partner Larry Page, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, is one of the four individuals who became billionaires solely through their own efforts.

Sergey Brin resides in Los Altos, California, USA. In May 2007, he married biotechnology analyst Anne Wojcicki. The couple has a son born in December 2008 and a daughter born in 2011. Since August 2013, they have been living separately.

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

Source: Biyografiler.com