Sergey Brin - Biography, Achievements and Quotes

Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin is a Russian-born American computer scientist and Internet entrepreneur who, with Larry Page, co-founded Google, one of the most profitable Internet companies. As of 2012, his personal wealth is estimated to be $20.3 billion. Together, Brin and Page own about 16 percent of the company.

Brin immigrated to the United States with his family from the Soviet Union at the age of six. He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland, following in his father's and grandfather's footsteps by studying mathematics, as well as computer science. After graduation, he moved to Stanford University to acquire a Ph.D. in computer science. 

There he met Larry Page, with whom he later became friends. 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 PhD 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 that is summed up by Google’s motto "Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful" and "Don't be evil".

Achievement and Superb Facts about Sergey Brin

• Brin was born in Moscow in 1973 and emigrated to the U.S. in 1979 at the age of 6 with his mathematician parents. His father gained work as a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland and his mother went on to work at NASA.
• He attended grade school at a Montessori School in Maryland, received further education at home, attended Eleanor Roosevelt High School, and enrolled in the University of Maryland to study computer science and mathematics, where he received his B.S. degree in 1993 with high honors.
• Brin began his graduate study in computer science at Stanford University on a graduate fellowship from the National Science Foundation. He earned his Master’s degree in August 1995 ahead of schedule in the process of his Ph.D. studies.
• Brin has also received an honorary MBA from the IE Business School.
• Brin expressed interest in the Internet very early on in his studies at Stanford. He authored and co-authored various papers on data-mining and pattern extraction. He also wrote software to ease the process of putting scientific papers often written in TeX, a text-processing language, into HTML form, as well as a website for film ratings.
• Google was named by mistake. YES! Founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page made a spelling mistake while they thought they were going for ‘Googol’.
• The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page didn’t know HTML and they just wanted a quick interface. During initial tests, this simple design resulted in users calmly sitting waiting for the “rest of the page to load”. To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was added as a line as an end of page marker.
• The first ever Google Doodle was made by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were out of the office to spend the weekend in the Burning Man Festival 2008. They posted the first doodle on Google’s homepage to let users know that they won’t be in the office to fix issues such as server’s crash.
• Google’s headquarters is known as Googleplex and its employees are referred to as ‘Googlers’. The new joined folks are known as ‘Nooglers‘ and a former Googler is known as ‘Xoogler‘.
• Sergey continued in his father’s footsteps, studying math, as well as taking on computer science at the University of Maryland. He later moved to Stanford University for his doctorate. Here he made a new friend, Larry Page and the two started working in a cramped dorm room on a new search engine ((c) William Mercer McLeod).
• Google is yet another invention that began in the basement of a simple neighborhood. Two computer geniuses spent nights at work in Susan Wojcicki’s basement and came up with an internet sensation. Susan Wojcicki is now serving as Senior Vice President, Advertising and her sister Anne Wojcicki is married to Sergey Brin (in picture).
• The first search engine Brin and Page launched was called BackRub. This operated on Stanford servers throughout 1996 until it began to take up too much bandwidth for the university servers to handle. In 1997, Sergey and Larry decided to rename their search engine after a play on the word googol. This was a number represented as 1 followed by 100 zeroes (one googol = 1.0 × 10100). Thus, Google came to be, a name representing the endless possibility of information.
• The Economist magazine has called Sergey Brin an ‘Enlightenment Man’ because of his belief in the importance of knowledge and its superiority to ignorance. This goes perfectly in hand with Google’s mission to ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’.
• In the mid-1990’s, two doctorate students at Stanford University met and shared an uncommon love—the love for search engine development. Eventually, these two ‘nice boys,’ Sergey Brin and Larry Page, created Google in a friend’s garage. Find out some interesting facts about Sergey Brin, an almost timid young man with a kind heart and great vision.
• As a youngster, Sergey found his niche in puzzles, maps and mathematics. Math is, after all, the same in every language.
• Sergey Brin’s education credits include a Bachelor of Science degree with honours in mathematics and computer science from the University of Maryland at College Park.
• Sergey Brin and Larry Page met during the doctoral program at Stanford in the late 1990’s, eventually developing a search engine the world has come to know and love as Google.
• Google lore has it that Sergey and his partner Larry Page were not instant best friends. It was hard work and a love for retrieving relevant information for large data sets that developed the friendship-and company-that would last a lifetime.
• Sergey Brin and Larry Page co-authored the 10th most downloaded scientific paper at Stanford, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.” Sergey also has dozens of other academic and scientific research publications under his belt.
• It is no secret that Google began as a search engine created by two quiet computer geeks. Interestingly enough, it began in Susan Wojcicki’s basement. She now serves as an executive at Google, which shows that even with their fame and fortune, the Google co-founders have not forgotten their roots.
• Sergey Brin may not have a Ph.D., but he is recognized by the Instituto de Empresa with an honorary MBA, and is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship. Sergey Brin was nominated to be one of the 2005 World Economic Forum’s “Young Global Leaders.”
• Sergey Brin is currently reported as ‘on leave’ from the Ph.D. program at Stanford. It would be easy to assume that as a young billionaire, Sergey Brin will not return to graduate with his doctorate.
• Lazy is not the word many would associate with Sergey. Intelligent, kind, sweet, and especially modest are the phrases often used to describe the young man who co-founded Google. Even so, ABC New’s Peter Jennings quotes Sergey as stating “I am sometimes something of a lazy person, so when I end up spending a lot of time using something myself — as I did with Google in the earliest of days, I knew it was a big deal.”
• Since co-founding Google with Larry Page, Sergey has become one the 14th richest person in the United States, with an estimated value exceeding $14 billion dollars in 2006, according to Forbes.
• The Google mantra-‘Don’t Be Evil’ has some clarification through Sergey. Eric Schmidt has famously said, “Evil is whatever Sergey says is evil.” And as long as Sergey stays away from the dark side of the force, Internet searchers can rest easy.
• Sergey Brin is so well loved by the Internet community that some unknown person purchased all possible domain names under “Sergey Brin”.
• Sergey believes in simplicity of business and lifestyle. In an interview with CNNMoney.com, Sergey Brin explains why Google is so successful: “ Simplicity is an important trend we are focused on. Technology has this way of becoming overly complex, but simplicity was one of the reasons that people gravitated to Google initially. This complexity is an issue that has to be solved for online technologies, for devices, for computers, and it’s very difficult. Success will come from simplicity.”
• In early 2013, New Yorkers were in for a treat when Sergey Brin was spotted on the NYC Subway wearing Google Glass. These ‘augmented reality glasses’ consist of a small screen sitting on the right lens along with a microphone and speakers attached to a camera. In essence, when connected to the internet, one could readily receive information about individuals passing down the street.
• In 2011 The Brin Wojcicki Foundation was number twenty five in The Chronicles Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest charitable donors. The year 2013 includes a $61.9 million to the Michael J. Fox Foundation. In the year 2012 The Brin Wojcicki Foundation was ranked the fifth most charitable organization in the United States in the 2012, putting in $223 million to their causes.
• Google’s success has always been seen in the simplicity it has to offer. Both in its business products and social networking options, Sergey Brin has been recorded as saying that technology has complicated products for many people and Google aims to provide an easy, user friendly option that people have chosen over the chaotic multiple options of its competitors. 
• To put it in his own words: “We are focused on features, not products. We eliminated future products that would have made the complexity problem worse. We don’t want to have 20 different products that work in 20 different ways. I was getting lost at our site keeping track of everything. 
• I would rather have a smaller set of products that have a shared set of features” (Business 2.0, How to Succeed). This is also in line with Google’s philosophy ‘Ten things we know to be true‘.
• In 2008, Sergey Brin invested $4. 5 million in a company named Space Adventures. This is a US company for space tourism that sends tourists into orbit. His investment is seen as part of a future ticket for his flight into outer space (Photo courtesy: etoday).
• In 2007, Brin was cited by PC World as #1 on a list of the “50 most important people on the Web,” along with Larry Page and Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
• In May 2007, Brin married Anne Wojcicki in the Bahamas. Wojcicki is a biotech analyst and a 1996 graduate of Yale University with a degree in biology. She co-founded 23andMe, a personal DNA genotyping service.

Superb Quotes by Sergey Brin

• Some say Google is God. Others say Google is Satan. But if they think Google is too powerful, remember that with search engines unlike other companies, all it takes is a single click to go to another search engine.
• Obviously everyone wants to be successful, but I want to be looked back on as being very innovative, very trusted and ethical and ultimately making a big difference in the world.
• As we go forward, I hope we're going to continue to use technology to make really big differences in how people live and work.
• Before Google, I don't think people put much effort into the ordering of results. You might get a couple thouand results for a query. We saw that a thousand results weren't necessarily as useful as 10 good ones.
• 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.
• If I were seriously interested in something important to me, I wouldn't just click on the first search result, read it and take it as God's word.
• We came up with the notion that not all web pages are created equal. People are -- but not web pages.
• Ultimately you want to have the entire world's knowledge connected directly to your mind.
• I don't know what would have happened if we hadn't won that AOL deal.
• We believed we could build a better search. We had a simple idea, that not all pages are created equal. Some are more important,
• Too few people in computer science are aware of some of the informational challenges in biology and their implications for the world. We can store an incredible amount of data very cheaply.
• To me, this is about preserving history and making it available to everyone
• These two chefs will play an important role in managing the company's growing appetites.
• It's clear there's a lot of room for improvement, there's no inherent ceiling we're hitting up on.