In this success story, we are going to share Sergey Brin biography, an American computer scientist and internet entrepreneur who co-founded Google with Larry Page, which is considered one of the most profitable companies of nowadays. The distinctive personality traits of Sergey Brin are perseverance, creativity, vision and emotional intelligence. Many people know that Brin immigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union yet when he was six, but not everyone is familiar with his full biography in details. We invite you to read it on Astrum People.

Early Life

Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin was born on August 21, 1973, in Russian Jewish family in Russia, Moscow. His father, Michael Brin, is a mathematician, now retired from Department of Mathematics, University of Maryland. His mother, Eugenia Brin, was a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Recently, she took the role of the Director of Historical Records Task Force Chair at HIAS, an organization aimed to connect Russian-Jewish and other American immigrants to share their life stories.

While living in the Soviet Union Michael Brin regularlypursue faced hidden anti-Semitism. Michael’s dream was to become an astronomer. Thus, he wanted to study physics at university but was rejected to enter any of them. At that time, the Communist Party forbade Jews to pursue higher studies in particular subjects, including physics, in order to block them access to the country’s nuclear secrets.

Thus, Sergey Brin’s father decided to study mathematics and became a student at Moscow State University, despite the fact that the entrance exams for the Jews were held in the separate rooms, notoriously called “gas chambers”. In 1970, he graduated with honors and became an economist at GOSPLAN, the State Planning Committee of USSR. Later, he continued to study mathematics on his own and with the help of his advisers defended his thesis to obtain a Doctorate degree at The University of Kharkiv.

Sergey’s mother, Eugenia, also attended Moscow State University. She majored in mathematics and mechanics and worked in a research laboratory at the Soviet Oil and Gas Institute. They were living in a 350 square feet three-room apartment in central Moscow

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In the late 1970s, Jewish families started to migrate from the Soviet Union. Although the Brin family enjoyed their life in Moscow, Michael knew that eventually Sergey Brin would be restricted from many activities and opportunities because of his Jewish nationality. In 1977, Michael Brin went to a mathematics conference in Warsaw, Poland. Upon his return, he announced that it was time for the family to emigrate. Thus, in September 1978, Michael Brin applied for their exit visa. As soon it came to Soviet Government’s notice, they fired him from his job, and, for the related reasons, his wife also had to leave her job. Next eight months until they got an exit visa, the family had to go through the very hard times. To sustain his family, Michael taught himself computer programming; he also worked as a translator of technical texts.

They finally left the USSR and first arrived in Vienna, where representatives of HIAS met them. Later they moved to Paris. Anatole Katok, Michael’s unofficial Jewish Ph.D. advisor, met them in Paris and helped him to occupy an interim research position at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques. Anatole Katok had migrated the year before with his family to Paris and looked after the Brins while they stayed there. On October 25, 1979, the family, which consisted of Michael, Eugenia, Sergey and Michael’s mother, finally landed at New York’s Kennedy Airport. Sergey Brin was six years old at that time.

The Brin family rented a simple, concrete blockhouse in Maryland in a lower-middle-class neighborhood. Later they bought a 1973 Ford Maverick by taking a loan of $2,000 from the Jewish community. The graduates of Soviet mathematics schools were highly valued worldwide. Therefore, it did not take much of time for the head of the family to find a teaching position at the University of Maryland in College Park, a city in Prince George’s County, Maryland. His wife became a specialist scientist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The one who suffered the most was the grandmother – she was shocked when she had to take an exam for the driver’s license to bring her grandson to school.

School Years

First, Sergey attended the Mishkan Torah Hebrew School with the other Jewish kids. He did not like to study there as he was bullied for his thick Russian accent. After some time, Sergey begged his parents to transfer him to a different school. They encouraged him to study the elementary school at Paint Branch Montessori School in Adelphi, Maryland. Sergey’s parents became friends with the school’s director, Patty Barshay, who later became a mentor of Sergey. Now, Sergey Brin considers that studying at that school was one of the key factors of his success. Barshay described Sergey Brin as outgoing, self-confident, and fascinated by numbers and mathematics.

He sometimes was getting bored, as the classes of mathematics seemed too simple for him. This fact is not surprising, as the young genius was getting an additional education at home. Parents not only helped Sergey to retain the knowledge of Russian language but also encouraged his interest in mathematics and computer science. In the early 1980s, the availability of personal computers was still rare. Sergey Brin’s first computer Commodore 64 he received from his father as a present for his birthday when he turned nine years old. Soon, Sergey surprised his schoolteachers by submitting an unusual project prepared on the computer and printed out on the printer.

After graduating from Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt, Maryland, where he had studied for three years, Sergey Brin enrolled at the University of Maryland in 1990, at the age of 15. In 1993, at the age of 19, Brin received his doubled bachelor’s degree in computer systems and mathematics with honors and earned a prestigious scholarship of National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, which covered his following education.

Stanford University

Sergey Brin continued his education at Stanford University, which is the most prestigious high-tech university of the United States, located in California’s Silicon Valley. Some American universities allow Bachelor students to apply directly to the doctoral program and receive a Master’s degree while studying. Thus, such universities can encourage their talented students into long-term projects so that the students may concentrate on their research.

Sergey Brin liked mathematics, but he had no clue how would this passion turn out. His list of the selected disciplines was surprising: dancing, yachting, swimming, gymnastics, etc. His father recalls that when he asked his son whether he was going to sign up for some advanced courses, Sergey replied that he had already enrolled in advanced swimming.

From the beginning of studying at Stanford University, Sergey Brin demonstrated an interest in Internet technologies and search engines. He authored and co-authored a number of papers relating to the methods of information extraction from unstructured sources, and information retrieval in large collections of texts and scientific data. Also, he developed software, which converted experimental work created using a word processor TeX, into HTML format.

In 1993, Sergey Brin created a software application that would crawl Playboy’s Web site, download the latest images, and set them as a screensaver. However, Brin was forced to remove the screensaver, after a female student complained.

The crucial moment in the biography of Sergey Brin happened in March 1995 when he met Lawrence “Larry” Page at the spring meeting of the prospective Ph.D.s in Computer Science, who later became the CEO of Google. In the summer of 1995, Sergey Brin was assigned to accompany Larry Page on campus. Initially, they were not happy with each other, and they were arguing and furiously discussing any topic.

However, soon they discovered that both of them were extremely interested in the problem of extracting information from large data sets. Sergey and Larry became friends, and in January 1996, in preparation for writing doctoral theses, they began to work together on a research project designed to improve the methods of finding information on the Internet fundamentally. They presumed that the most popular data was the most useful. Therefore, young scientists hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the liaison between websites and ranked them according to their popularity must have been more efficient than the existing ranking methods of other search engines. The modern search engines’ ranking principles of websites depended on the frequency of the word appearance on the page.

Page and Brin were convinced that the most important ranking factor of web pages was backlinks, but not keyword stuffing. Brin and Page decided to test this idea as a part of their research project. They launched the search engine BackRub with the PageRank algorithm – it checked number and relevance of backlinks to estimate a website’s content credibility and usefulness. It was available for Stanford students only. Young researchers required many computers to store and process big data on the Internet. It took more time than anticipated, and it cost a computer science department $20,000 to launch a crawler.

Establishment of Google

In the fall of 1997, Larry and Sergey brainstormed a catchier name of BackRub. They turned to their mate Sean Anderson for help. Anderson suggested the name Googolplex, a huge number, the digit 1 followed by 10 to a 100 degrees. Sergey and Larry liked the name and proposed to shorten it to Googol. The word googol indicates the digit 1 followed by 100 zeros.

Sergey Brin Biography

Googol number. A nine-year-old Milton Sirotta, a nephew of the famous mathematician Edward Kasner, invented googolplex and googol numbers yet in 1920.

Anderson commented: “I typed in G-o-o-g-l-e and misspelled it on my workstation, and that was available. Larry found that acceptable, and he registered it later that evening and wrote it on the whiteboard: Google.com”.

Soon, one of their office colleagues noticed that they had misspelled googol number and pointed out on it. However, the Google.com had been already registered.

Initially, it has been hosted on the root domain of Stanford University at google.stanford.edu. The domain name google.com was registered on September 15, 1997.

During the first half of 1998, the Sergey and Larry were involved in the development of a new and promising search engine technology. Larry Page’s dorm room at Stanford University served as the data center while the Sergey Brin’s dorm room – the business office. Initially, Brin and Page did not want to create Google as business and considered the search engine as the basis for a scholarly research project to obtain their Ph.D. degrees.

Sergey Brin Biography

The first Google logo and search page in 1997.

They noticed that Google became too popular among Stanford students, and they started thinking how to expand Google beyond the Stanford walls. First, they attempted to sell their idea to AltaVista for $1 million but Paul Flaherty, the inventor of AltaVista, rejected their proposal. Sergey and Larry also tried to sell it to Yahoo!, Excite, but things turned out a different way.

After several unlucky attempts of selling it, they created a business plan and started looking for angel investors who would provide funds for an exchange of ownership portion of their company. David Cheriton, their computer science professor, introduced them Andy Bechtolsheim, who was a Vice President of Cisco Systems (later co-founder of Sun Microsystems). He was very interested in the idea and wrote out a check for $100,000.

Humble Beginnings in a Garage

In the middle of 1998, Brin and Page paused their studies at Stanford University. Their parents were not pleased with this decision.

On September 7, 1998, Google was incorporated as a limited liability company, Google Inc. Larry Page became CEO, and Sergey Brin became President. Their first office was a rented garage from Susan Wojcicki, a sister of Sergey Brin’s girlfriend Anne Wojcicki, which was located in Menlo Park, California. Despite, Google processed around 10,000 requests per day PC Magazine featured it on the list of Top 100 best Websites and Search Engines of 1998. Soon Craig Silverstein joined their team as the first Google’s employee. In the following year, the company moved into the new office in Palo Alto.

Sergey Brin Biography

Page (left) and Brin (right) in their garage-office rented from Susan Wojcicki.

The number of satisfied users has been growing rapidly, and the word “Google” was popping from all over the place. The company needed investments for the business expansion, but at the same time, Brin and Page did not want to lose control. The partners wanted Google to adhere its mission – “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” That was a starting point where they proved that they were able to find original solutions not only in the area of new technologies but also in running the business.