Sergey Brin is one of the most inspiring people of our time. He is an American business magnate, computer scientist, and internet entrepreneur.
Brin immigrated to the United States with his family from the Soviet Union at the age of six. He earned his bachelor's degree at the University of Maryland, College Park, following in his father's and grandfather's footsteps by studying mathematics, as well as computer science. After graduation, he enrolled in Stanford University to acquire a PhD in computer science. There he met Page, with whom he built a web search engine. The program became popular at Stanford, and they suspended their PhD studies to start up Google in Susan Wojcicki's garage in Menlo Park.
In mid-1998 Brin and Page began receiving outside financing, and they ultimately raised about $1 million from investors and from family and friends. They called their updated search engine Google—a name derived from a misspelling of the originally planned name, googol (a mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros)—and created the corporation Google Inc. Brin became the company’s president of technology, and by mid-1999, when Google received $25 million of venture capital-funding, the search engine was processing 500,000 queries per day.
Google went public in 2004. Users were accessing the website 200 million times a day (roughly 138,000 queries per minute). On August 19, 2004, Google Inc. issued its initial public offering (IPO), which netted more than $3.8 billion dollars for Brin.
In 2004 Brin and Page described Google as follows:
“Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one. Throughout Google’s evolution as a privately held company, we have managed Google differently. We have also emphasized an atmosphere of creativity and challenge, which has helped us provide unbiased, accurate and free access to information for those who rely on us around the world.”
However, since they wrote this statement, the company has evolved and matured. Within Google, there are all the popular consumer services that followed Search, such as Maps, Photos, and YouTube; a global ecosystem of devices powered by our Android and Chrome platforms, including our own Made by Google devices; Google Cloud, including GCP and G Suite; and of course a base of fundamental technologies around machine learning, cloud computing, and software engineering.
In 2006 Google was criticized for agreeing to comply with the Chinese government’s censorshiprequirements—blocking Web sites extolling democracy, for example, or those covering the 1989 demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. Brin defended the decision, saying that Google’s ability to supply some, albeit restricted, information was better than supplying none. In April 2011 Brin relinquished his duties as president of technology to become director of special projects.
Google was reorganized in August 2015 to become a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., a newly created holding company,
the world's largest search-engine operator. The Mountain View, California-based company was set-up in 1998 and reported revenue of $258 billion in 2021. The group's divisions include Gmail, Android and YouTube. Brin was its president until in December 2019 he stepped down, though he continued to serve on Alphabet’s board of directors.
Brin is reportedly funding a high-tech airship project.
Sources:
Comments