The Story of Sergey Brin, Founder of Great Google:-How the Moscow-born entrepreneur co-founder of Google, and changed the way the world is looking.
It takes a little searching to find Sergey Brin's office at the Googleplex. Tucked away in a corner of Building # 43 on this vast campus near the southern tip of San Francisco Bay, past rows of cubicles and colorfully furnished dormitory-style meeting spaces, Office-211 has a discreet exterior and sits far from the public eye. Although it takes some turns and to get there, his office is not protected, as you would expect for the co-founder of a $ 150-billion company by a Russian nesting doll is worth of doors and gatekeepers.
Sergey, 33, shares the space with his co-founder of Google, fellow Stanford Ph.D. failure and billionaire PAL, 34-year-old Larry Page, a scheme that began eight years ago in the first of the company in a modest headquarters from Menlo Park, Calif., garage. Since then, Google has grown from just another Silicon Valley startup to the largest in the world media group, in fact, based on its recent share price of $ 513 per share, Google, which is searching the Web easy and even fun, is bigger than Disney, General Motors and McDonald's combined. It had this lofty heights achieved by revolutionary way people surf the Internet: Before Sergey and Larry analyzed the links between Web pages to provide fast search results according to relevance, the search for information on the web was a shot in the dark.
Strengthening of the sliding glass door to their office is like walking into a playroom for the tech-savvy adults. A row of sleek flat-screen monitors lining one wall displays critical information: e-mail, calendars, documents, and, of course, the Google search engine. Various green plants and an air purifier to keep the oxygen flow, and medicine balls to give the correct kinetic seats. Furthermore, a private mezzanine with Astroturf carpeting and an electric massage chair afford Sergey and Larry a comfortable perch from which to entertain visitors and the survey of the carnival of innovation going on below. And there is ample space for walking, which is essential for Sergey, who just can not seem to sit still.
Trim and boyishly handsome, with a low sloping shoulders, which he continued a relaxed atmosphere, Sergey bounces around the Googleplex with seemingly endless energy. He has dark hair, piercing eyes and a mischievous sense of humor that often catches people off guard. A typical day finds him in jeans, sneakers and a fitted black T-shirt, though his casual manner belies a serious, even aggressive meaning. This strategy reflects the intensity at the weekly meetings, where Sergey and Larry share, the title of president command the final word on approving new products, new hires and review of funding long term research. Sergey also has power over the unscientific, but all major areas of people, policy and politics. Google's employees enjoy this family-friendly extras such as three free meals per day, free home delivery of food for new parents, designated private spaces for nursing mothers, and a full on-site medical care, all of which recently led Fortune magazine in the holding rank as the # 1 place to work in the country.
The co-chairs of the share management duties with Eric Schmidt, a seasoned software executive whom Chief Executive Officer recruited in 2001 to the day-to-day aspects of oversight on Google's business-in short, the "adult" in the playgroup are. But they have no intention to cede control. Since day one they have opposing external interference, prefer to do all their own way to choose to work piece computers on the cheap (and building a computer case out of Lego blocks) for flouting Wall Street on an unconventional IPO. Blazing your own trail comes naturally to Sergey. The Moscow born entrepreneur and his parents are doing all their lives. On December 16, 2005, 16 months after the high-flying company closed its initial stock sale Google deal biggest yet: a $ 1 billion advertising partnership with America Online, the popular Internet service provider. That night, by chance, I meeting with Sergey's parents at their home in the suburbs of Washington, DC. Michael Brin, wearing a black fleece vest emblazoned with the colorful Google logo greets me in the driveway. I ask whether he has heard the big news. "We spoke with Sergey earlier today and he said nothing," he told me. "He said that he on his way home from yoga." Michael, 59, a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, and his wife, Eugenia, 58, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, gracious and down-to-earth, and still somewhat surprised by the success of their son. "It's amazing," marvels Genia, such as family and friends call her. She speaks slowly, with a viscous, Russian-English accent, which accelerates when they compete with her husband. "It is difficult to understand, really. He was a very capable child in mathematics and computers, but we could never have imagined this." Michael, milder in his accent, adding with typical pragmatism, "Google has saved more time for more people than anything else in the world. " They sit me down at the dining table, clearing off papers to make room for a spread of cheese and fruit. The room itself is simply decorated, even scarce, the only signs of wealth are everywhere I see a big-screen TV in the living room and a Lexus in the driveway. The Brin has a compact, young-looking couple, Michael skeptical attitude is an accurate way of speaking and Genia gentle and caring. Both have a sincere, easy laughs. We talk a couple of hours, occasionally interrupted by Michael cigarette breaks, which he heads out with the dog, Toby. Smoking is a habit he brought with him from the Soviet Union in 1979, when he emigrated to the United States with his mother, Maya, Genia, and Sergey, then six. (A second son, Sam, was born in 1987.) One of the stories of Michael seems to me. In the summer of 1990, a few weeks before 17th birthday Sergey, Michael led a group of gifted high school students in mathematics on a two-week exchange program of the Soviet Union. He decided to bring the family, despite concerns about the welcome they could expect from Communist authorities. It would give them a chance to relatives still living in Moscow, including Sergey paternal grandfather, like Michael a Ph.D. Visit mathematician. It did not take long for Sergey, a precocious teenager about to enter university, tailored to his former surroundings. The Soviet empire was crumbling and in the drab, cinder-block landscape and the people stony mien of resignation, he saw first hand the dismal future that would have been. On the second day of the trip, while the group toured a sanatorium in the countryside near Moscow, Sergei took his father aside, looked him in the eye and said, "Thank you for taking us all from Russia. " "There were only two times when my children were grateful to me," Michael said dryly, and I get the sense that he is very serious. The other occasion, he said, the younger brother Sergey, Sam, and repairing a broken toilet. Genia, seated beside him, protests. "Misha, what are you talking about?!" She cries as she rarely, if their recollections differ, or when they feel Michael's sketches. As Sergey recalls the trip awakened his childhood fear of authority. His clear tenor voice, tinted with a faint accent that is no longer recognizable Russian, came to me via satellite phone as he flew to Asia last November. Teens have their own way of transforming fear in Defiance, Sergey reflects, recalling that his impulse to fight against Soviet oppression had been throwing stones at a police car. The two officers sitting inside the car stepped out of "excited", he says, but, fortunately, his parents were able to ward off the case.
"My rebelliousness, I think, came from his born in Moscow," Sergey said, adding, "I would say this is something that followed me into adulthood." On a bagel shop to the other side of campus, Maryland, where he has taught statistics and dynamical systems for 25 years, Michael speaks of the discrimination that drove him to take his family from Russia. It's a bitter cold day in College Park, reminiscent of the winter in Moscow. Over a lunch of soup and sandwiches, Michael explains how he was forced to his dream of becoming an astronomer, even before he reached college left. Officially, anti-Semitism did not exist in the USSR, but in reality, Communist Party chiefs barred Jews from the top professional ranks by denying them access to universities. Jews were excluded from the Physics Department, especially at the prestigious Moscow State University, because Soviet leaders can not be trusted with nuclear rocket research. Unfortunately for Michael, astronomy fell under the umbrella of physics. Michael chose to study mathematics instead. But acceptance of the mathematics department of Moscow State University, home to perhaps the brightest mathematicians in the world, also proved extremely difficult. Discrimination has been administered through an entrance examination for the Jews tested in different rooms of other applicants-morbid nickname of "gas chambers", and stricter evaluation. Nevertheless, with the help of a good friend of the family connected, Michael was accepted and graduated cum laude in 1970 with a diploma. "I did all A's except for the three classes where I B's: history of the Communist Party, military training and statistics," he says. "But no one would even consider me for graduate school because I was Jewish. That was normal." So Michael was an economist for Gosplan, the Central Planning Agency. "I tried to prove that in a few years, living standards in Russia would be higher than in the United States," he says. "And I proved. I know enough about math to prove what you want."
He continued to study mathematics on his own, steals the evening courses at the university and research papers writing. After a few were published, Brin started a thesis. The moment a student in the Soviet Union would earn a doctorate without going to graduate school, where he passed certain examinations and an institution agreed to consider his thesis. Michael took two advisers, one official advisor, an ethnic Russian, Jewish and an informal mentor. ("Jews could not Jewish advisers," he says.) With their help, he successfully defended his thesis at a university in Kharkov, Ukraine, but life did not change much even after he received his Ph.D. He remained in his daily work of Gosplan and received a 100-ruble increase. "I thought I was rich. Life was beautiful, "he says with a wry smile. For Genia, life in Moscow was comfortable enough. She had also managed to overcome obstacles from Moscow State, graduated from the School of Mechanics and Mathematics. In a research laboratory of the Soviet Oil and Gas Institute, a prestigious industrial school, she collaborated with a number of other Jews. "I was happy in my work and had many friends," she says. Brin The "institutional encounters with anti-Semitism does not extend to days-to-day interactions with colleagues and neighbors. Highly assimilated into Russian culture, they were part of the intelligentsia and had a circle of university-educated friends. Located in a small three-room apartment in downtown Moscow, 350 square feet in all shared with the mother of Michael, they were better off than many Muscovites who still lived in the shared apartments. After Sergey was born on August 21, 1973, in the courtyard of their colossal five-story building became his playground. In accordance with Russian tradition, Sergey spent two hours in the morning and evening each day outdoors, whatever the season. As we talk to the bagel shop, Michael keeps a close eye on the time. Every so often he jumps from his chair and dashes outside. This is not just for a smoke, though he highlighted. He is also closely monitor the parking meters, his and mine, and care as the time passed to drop in more quarters. The history of Russian Jewish emigration in the mid-1970s can be neatly summarized in a joke from the era: two Jews in the street, one third goes through and says to them: "I do not know what you speak about, but yes, it's time to get out of here! " "I have some time that my father was unable to the career he wanted to pursue," says Sergei me. As a young boy, though, Sergey had only a vague sense of why his family wanted to leave their native Russia. He picked up the ugly details of the anti-Semitism they faced years later, little by little, he says. Nevertheless, he felt early on, all the things he was not: He was not Russian. He was not welcome in his own country. He was not going to get a fair chance to promote through its schools. Further complicating his understanding of his Jewish identity was the fact that, under the ardent atheist Soviet regime, there were few religious or cultural models of what was Jewish. The negatives were all he had. Sergey, too young to remember the days in the summer of 1977, when his father came home and announced that it was time for the family to emigrate. "We can not stay here anymore," he told his wife and mother. He came to his decision, while attending a conference in Warsaw mathematics. For the first time he had been able to freely mix with colleagues from the United States, France, England and Germany. Discovering that his intellectual brethren in the West "were not monsters," said he listened as she described the opportunities and conveniences of life beyond the Iron Curtain. "He said he does not would continue, he had seen what life could be, "says Genia. The couple knew, of course, the dangers of applying for an exit visa. They could easily end up refuse nothing, unable to find employment, shunned, in eternal oblivion. Nobody promised Michael a position abroad, but he was sure he could find work in the West intellectually stimulating and would support the family. Genia, was not convinced. They had lived their entire lives in Moscow. They had decent jobs and a young son. Was it worth it to try to leave? "I would not go," she says. "This took a while for me and his mother to agree. I had a lot more attachments." It was up to Michael to do the convincing. "I was only in the family who decided that it was really important to leave, not a distant future", he says. The Brine 'story gives me a clue to the origin of entrepreneurial instincts Sergey's. His parents, academics and on, denying any role in shaping their son great business sense "He did not teach us, not our area," says Michael. Yet Sergey's willingness to take risks, his sense of who trust and ask for help, his vision to see something better and the conviction to go after, these properties are reflected in many of what Michael Brin has in circumventing the system and work twice as hard as others for the doctorate to earn, let the Soviet Union. For Genia, the decision ultimately came down to Sergey. While her husband admits that he thought much about his own future as his son, for her, "it was about 80/20 Sergey. They formally requested an exit visa in September 1978. Michael was immediately fired. Genia, who had obtained her job through a relative, she had to stop its isolation from all accusations. "When he got a whiff of our intentions," she says, "he said," Take it away as soon as possible. " It was a secret from everyone at work, my real reason to leave. So I lied to all my colleagues was that I just my job to leave because I got another job where I would only be at work three days per week and the salary would be higher. I was completely up-up-the name of a place where I planned to work. "There was no other job, of course, and suddenly they came with no income. To Michael translated technical books into English, but it was drudgery. He also began to teach himself programming, without expectation of getting an academic position as they ever got out. If Genia found temporary work, again lying about her situation, she shared responsibility for care of Sergey, who stayed at home instead of living a miserable Soviet pre-school. And then they waited. To many Soviet Jews, never came for exit visas. However, in May 1979, the paper Brin were awarded to the Soviet Union "We hoped it would happen to leave," Genia says, "but we were completely surprised by how fast did it." The timing was coincidental: They were among the last Jews allowed to leave until the Gorbachev era. Sergey, who six years that summer, remembers what followed was just as "worrying" literally true. "We were in different places from day to day," he says. The trip was a blur. First Vienna, where the family was met by representatives of HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which helped thousands of Eastern European Jews to establish a new life in the free world. Then, in the suburbs of Paris, where Michael's "unofficial" Jewish Ph.D. advisor, Anatole Katok, had arranged a temporary research position for him at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques. Katok, emigrated with his family last year, looked after Brin and paved the way for Michael to teach at Maryland. When the family finally landed in America on October 25, they were in New York's Kennedy Airport by friends from Moscow. Sergey first memory of the U.S. was sitting in the backseat of the car, amazed at all the huge cars on the highway as their hosts, she was driving home to Long Island. De Brin found a home in Maryland, a simple, cinder-block structure into a lower-rent district near the middle of the university campus. With a loan of $ 2,000 from the Jewish community, they bought a 1973 Ford Maverick. And, on a proposal by Katok programs, she enrolled at Paint Branch Montessori School in Adelphi Sergey, Maryland. He struggled to adapt. Bright-eyed and shy, with only a rudimentary knowledge of English, Sergey spoke with a heavy accent, when he went to school. "It was a difficult year for him, the first year," says Genia. "We were constantly discussing the fact that we had told the children as a sponge, they immediately understand the language and have no problem, and that was not the case." Patty Barshay, the school director, was a mentor and friend Sergey and his parents. She invited them for a party at her home by December 1 ("a bunch of Jewish people with nothing to do on Christmas Day") and wound up teaching Genia how to drive. Everywhere she turned, there was so much to take in. "I remember her inviting me to dinner one day," says Barshay, 'and I asked Genia,' What is this kind of meat? She had no idea. They had never seen so much meat "as American supermarkets offer. When I ask about her former pupil, Barshay lights, obviously proud of Sergey's achievements. "Sergei was not particularly outgoing child," she says, "but he always had the confidence to pursue what he had put on his heart." He was attracted toward puzzles, maps and math games that taught multiplication. "I really enjoyed the Montessori method," he tells me. "I could grow my own pace." He adds that the Montessori environment, which gives students the freedom to choose activities that suit their interests-helped foster his creativity. "He was interested in everything," says Barshay, but adds, "I never thought it any clearer than anyone else." One thing that Brin shared with thousands of other families emigrating to the West of the Soviet Union was the discovery that, suddenly, they were free to be Jews. "Russian Jews lacked the vocabulary to even articulate what they feel," says Lenny Gusel, the founder of a San Francisco-based network of Russian-Jewish immigrants, he encounters many newcomers struggle with this fundamental change. "They were considered Jews back home. Here they were regarded as Russians. Many just wanted to assimilate as Americans." Gusel the group, which he calls the "79ers," after the peak year of immigration in the 1970s , and the New York cousin, RJeneration, attracted hundreds of 20 - and 30-something immigrants who struggle with their Jewish identity. "Sergei was the absolute symbol of our group, the number one Russian Jewish immigrant success story," he says. The Brin was no different from their fellow immigrants who was Jewish in an ethnic, not a religious experience. "We felt our Judeo-different ways, by keeping kosher or synagogue. It's genetic," explains Michael. "We were not very religious. My wife does not eat on Yom Kippur, I do." Genia interrupts: "We always have a Passover dinner. We have a seder. I have the recipe for Gefilte fish from my grandmother." Religious or not, on arrival in the suburbs of Washington, Brin were determined by a synagogue, Mishkan Torah of Green Belt, Maryland, which helped them to acquire furnishings for their home. "We did not need much, but we saw how the community helped many other families," Genia says. Sergey attended Hebrew school Mishkan Torah for the better part of three years, but hated the language classes and everything else. "He was teased by other children and he begged us not to send him anymore," said his mother withholds. "Eventually it worked." Conservative congregation was too religious for Brin and they drove. In a three-week trip to Israel 11 years old Sergey's interest in everything Jewish awakened, informed the family of another synagogue about restarting studies to prepare for a bar mitzvah. But the rabbi said it would be more than one year to catch up and Sergey who do not want to wait past his 13th birthday, leaving the chase to take. If a Jewish family, the value of the Brin accepted without reservation, Michael says, is the scholarship. Sergey programs in his brother-younger years was more fond of basketball than homework, even the idea that advanced degrees were required for all professions have. "Sam never asked us, 'Is it true that before you play in the NBA you have to get a doctorate?" ", Recalls his father. Which the professor could not resist replying: "Yes Sam that is!" Sergey attended Eleanor Roosevelt High School, a public high school in Greenbelt. He drove round in three years, gathering one year's worth of college credits that would enable him to university to finish in three years well. At the University of Maryland, he majored in mathematics and computer science and graduated near the top of his class. When he was a prestigious National Science Foundation scholarship for graduate school won, pushed for Stanford. (MIT had rejected him. Apart) from the physical beauty of the campus of Stanford, Sergey knew that the school's reputation for supporting high-tech entrepreneurs. At the moment however, his focus was on obtaining his doctorate square. Handsome, with a relaxed smile, Sergey sparkles with a healthy self-consciousness which at times spills over into arrogance. At Stanford, he became known for his habit of bursting in the professors without knocking. One of his advisers, Rajeev Motwani, recalls: "He was a brutal young man. But he was so smart, it just radiated from him. "His abiding interest was science, particularly in the areas of data mining, or how meaningful patterns extract from the mountains of information. But he also took time out from Stanford social life and various sports: skiing, skating, gymnastics, enjoy even trapeze. His father once remarked, "I asked him if he had any advanced courses, and he said, 'Yes, advanced swimming."
What is Google, the following legend. In the spring of 1995, during a prospective student weekend, Sergey met a stubborn computer science student at the University of Michigan Larry Page. They talked and argued during the two days, each finding the other cocky and annoying. They were also a direct connection, enjoyed the intellectual combat. Like Sergey, Larry is the son of high-powered intellect steeped in computer science. His father, Carl Victor Page, a computer science professor at Michigan State University until his death in 1996, received one of the first doctors awarded in the field. His mother, Gloria, has a master's degree in computer programming and has taught college classes. The two young graduate students also shared a Jewish background. Larry's maternal grandfather made aliyah and lived in the desert town of Arad near the Dead Sea, working as a tool and die maker, and his mother was raised Jewish. Larry, however, brought up in the form of his father, whose religion was technology, not easily identifiable as a Jew. He also never had a bar mitzvah.
Larry and Sergey soon began working on ways to utilize information on the World Wide Web, spending so much time together, they have a common identity, "LarryandSergey." By 1996, Larry had had the idea of using the links between web pages rank their relative importance. Borrowing from the academic world the concept of citations in scientific publications as a measure of the timeliness and value, he and Brin applied that thinking to the web: as a page linked to another, it was actually "quote" or casting a vote for that page. The more votes a page had the more valuable it was. The concept seems rather obvious afterwards, and today most search engines operate on this principle. But at the moment, it was groundbreaking. To call their new invention a Google spelling of a very large number in mathematics, Larry and Sergey shopped it around to various companies for the price of 1 million U.S. dollars.
Nobody was interested. In the technology boom of the late 1990s, conventional thinking was that the so-called portals like Yahoo and AOL, that e-mail, news, weather and much more offered, it is the most money. Nobody cared to look. But Sergey and Larry knew that they're on to something, so they decided to leaves of absence from Stanford to take a firm and self build. Sergey's parents were skeptical. "We were definitely angry," says Genia. "We thought that everybody had in mind to get a PhD" Ask for funds from teachers, family and friends, Sergey and Larry scraped together enough to buy and rent some servers that famous garage in Menlo Park. Their venture quickly bore fruit: After viewing a quick demo, Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim (himself a Jewish immigrant from Germany) wrote a $ 100,000 check "Google Inc." The only problem was, "Google Inc. 'yet There, the firm had not been included. For two weeks, when they handled the paperwork, the young men had nowhere to deposit the money.
It is difficult to pinpoint the moment when Google became a true American phenomenon. Traditional measures such as gracing the cover of Time magazine or be profiled on 60 Minutes, seem irrelevant when it comes to the rapidly evolving world of the Internet. But there is no doubt about the date that Wall Street started the quirky California company seriously. It was April 29, 2004, when Google formally filed paperwork for its initial public offering of shares. Two things shocked the investment world that day. First, the company's astounding sales and profit figures, which until then closely monitored secrets. Nobody had dreamed that the subtle text ads placed alongside Google search results, which many web users do not even recognize them as ads can be, so profitable. Second, the ruthlessly serious "founders" letter "that Sergey and Larry had included with the submission, which began by saying that Google was not" a conventional company "and does not intend to become one. They followed up that show of chutzpah.
