Sergey Brin (born August 21, 1973) is a
Russian-born American
computer
scientist best known as the co-founder of
Google, Inc., the world’s largest
Internet company, based on its
search engine and online advertising
technology. As of 2009,
Forbes ranks
Brin as the 26th richest person in the world.
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" and "
Don't be evil."
Early life and education
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
.
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, 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. Jews were excluded from the
physics departments, in particular..." Michael Brin
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."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. 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...".
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.
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." 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.'"
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.
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. He is on leave from his
Ph.D. studies at Stanford.
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." Together,
the pair authored what is widely considered their seminal
contribution, a paper entitled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale
Hypertextual Web Search Engine."
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.
As Larry
Malseed wrote, "Soliciting funds from faculty members, family and
friends, Sergey and Larry scraped together enough to buy some
server 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."
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.
Personal life
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.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). 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.
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. 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%. 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?"
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. 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."
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...". And
in 2004, they received the
Marconi
Foundation Prize, the "Highest Award in Engineering," and were
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..."
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."
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."
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. He is an investor in
Tesla
Motors, which is developing the
Tesla
Roadster, a 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 seven tourists into space.
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.
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.
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."
- "We came up with the notion that not all web pages are created
equal. People are – but not web pages."
- "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."
- "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."
References
External links
Interviews
Articles
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