Sergey Brin Biography

Sergey Brin and his fellow Stanford student Larry Page invented the Internet search engine Google.

Sergey Brin’s parents were Russian immigrants; he was six when the family moved to the United States. His father became a professor of math at the University of Maryland, and Sergey Brin graduated from the same university in 1993 with honors in computer science. He moved on to graduate school at Stanford University, where he studied data mining and then joined forces with Page. Together they wrote the paper “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine” and created their own search engine, at first known as BackRub and then in 1998 incorporated as Google. The company was an immediate success, growing so quickly that in a few years “Google” had become a verb for Internet search. The company’s 2004 public stock offering made both men billionaires and leading high-tech figures of the new century.

From 2001-2011, Brin and Page ran Google along with their hand-picked CEO, Eric Schmidt; Brin had the title of “Co-Founder and President of Technology.” In 2011, Larry Page was named CEO, with Schmidt moving to the job of executive chairman and Sergey Brin returning to the simple title of “Co-Founder.” The company said Brin would oversee new and strategic products.

In 2015, a corporate reorganization renamed the parent company Alphabet, Inc., with Page as its CEO and Brin as president. Then in 2019, the pair announced that they would step down from their positions, making Sundar Pichai the CEO of Alphabet. At that point, Brin’s net worth was estimated at over $50 billion. He remains active on the company’s board of directors.