Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin-Google

Google, one of the most profitable internet companies, was co-founded by the American Scientist and Internet entrepreneur of Russian Origin, Sergey Brin along with Larry Page. He was referred to as an “Enlightenment Man” by the Economist newspaper. Let us know more about the life of this Enlightenment Man and his collaboration with Larry Page which produced the most successful search engine on the internet.

CHILDHOOD:

Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin popularly known as Sergey Brin was born to Michael Brin and Eugenia Brin on 21 August, 1973 in Moscow, Russia. His father was a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland and his mother was a researcher at NASA’s Goddard space flight centre. In Moscow, Brin’s family used to live with his grandmother in a flat. When Brin was 6 years old, his family shifted to the USA due to Soviet Union issue.

EDUCATION AND GRADUATION:

Brin as a child attended Paint Branch Montessori School though he had received most of the education from Michael Brin at home. He had graduated from Eleanor Roosevelt High School. In 1990 he entered the University of Maryland and within three years he graduated with the degree of Bachelor of Science. He then entered Stanford University, where he studied computer science with a scholarship from National Science Foundation.

ASSOCIATION WITH LARRY PAGE:

Brin again went to Stanford University to do PhD in Computer Science and there he met his fellow student Larry Page and joined his research work “BackRub” which is all about exploring the mathematical properties of World Wide Web and Backlinks.That was when the thought for Page Rank was originated. The simple thought of this PageRank algorithm which was developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, created a new idea that would later revolutionize the internet age. That is nothing but the idea of a search engine that would be a far more superior version than the existing ones.

CAREER – JOURNEY WITH GOOGLE:

While studying at Stanford University he did an internship at Wolfram Research. In 1998, after raising 1$ million from family, friends and investors, Page and Brin incorporated Google as a privately held company. The mission of their group was “to organize the worlds informative and make it universally accessible and useful” and “Don’t be evil”. In the beginning, Page served as the CEO of the company and Brin as president. In 2000, Larry Page and Sergey Brin enrolled their names as Ph. D students at Stanford, attended the Academy of Achievement’s in London as graduate student delegates. In 2001, they hired Eric Schmidt as Chairman and CEO of Google and Larry page took the role of President of Products and Brin as President of Technology.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin found as multi-billionaires at age 27. The three top executives of Google are Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt has reduced their annual salaries to a single dollar a year, tying their personal wealth to Google performance in Stock market. By the end of 2006, it is estimated that Page and Brin are among the top 12 richest people on earth and top 6 richest Americans.Together Brin and Page own 16 percent of the company shares.

Other than Google, Brin work on the other projects, he along with Page invested in the alternative energy industry which help to solve the worlds energy and climate problems to find wider sources of renewable energy. He is also an investor in Tesla Motors. He involved in Project Glass program which is a research and development program by Google and in Google driverless project.

PERSONAL LIFE:

In 2007, Brin was married to a biotech analyst and entrepreneur, Anne Wojcicki. Brin and Anne have a son, born in 2008 and a daughter, born in 2011. Anne Wojcicki has a keen interest in health information so, the couple brainstormed with the leading researchers about human genome project. Genetics is regarded as a database and computing problem by Brin and Anne instinctively so, Anne co-founded a firm “23andMe” which enables people on their genetic structure. In august 2013, it was announced that Brin and his wife have been living separately but officially they did not get divorced.

PAPERS:

Brin’s  focus was always on developing data mining system and he wrote many papers on data mining and pattern extraction which includes "Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web," "Scalable Techniques for Mining Casual Structures”, "Dynamic Item-set Counting and Implication Rules for Market Basket Data," and "Beyond Market Baskets”.

Brin and Larry both wrote the paper “Dynamic Data Mining” and the second paper was “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.” The second paper became more popular and one of the most downloaded scientific papers in the history of internet.

Brin created a website for film ratings and even designed a software application which can translate the text processing language to HTML.

AWARDS:

In 2002, Brin along with Page was named to MIT Technology Review TR100. 

In 2003, Page along with Brin, received an Honorary MBA from IE Business School.

In 2004, the pair was elected Fellows of the Marconi foundation at Columbia University and received Marconi Foundation Price. In the same year, they were named as “Persons of the Week” by ABC World News Tonight. Brin received the “Academy of Achievement’s Golden Plate Award” with Larry at Chicago.

In 2005, Page and Brin were elected Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Science.

PRESENT:

Brin is now serving as the Co-founder and Director of special projects at Google and he is considered as the one of the most influential business magnates in this era with completely exceptional entrepreneurial skills.