Sergey Brin Biography

Sergey Brin is an American computer scientist and businessman, who, with Larry Page, co-founded Google (GOOGL), which is among the most profitable internet companies in the world.

Brin, who now possesses a fortune of roughly $30 billion, rose from humble circumstances. Born in the Soviet Union in 1973, his family came to the United States to escape Jewish persecution when he was six. Like his father and grandfather, he was an avid student of mathematics, and earned his bachelor's degree in the subject at the University of Maryland.

He followed that up by pursuing a computer-science Ph. D. at Stanford University, where he first met Larry Page. Together, Brin and Page built their first internet search engine from Brin’s data-mining program in a dorm room full of parts cobbled together from cheap computers. When the their search engine became popular among Stanford students in 1996, they upgraded to a rented garage, where they started Google,  named after the term "googol," which is a mathematical figure for an astronomical sum wherein a one is followed by 100 zeros.

They registered the domain google.com in 1997 and incorporated in 1998 at a friend’s garage in Menlo Park, California. By 1999, Google had eight employees and moved from Menlo park to Palo Alto. (See also, Why Is Silicon Valley A Startup Heaven?)

Since then, Google has grown to become the biggest search engine on the internet. Furthermore, the company’s email, mapping, cloud storage and other features have become some of the most popular and relied-upon consumer-grade utilities on the web. And with those successes came money, lots of it. The company brought in $66 billion in revenue in 2014.

With the windfall, Brin has been an active figure in pushing Google to play the part of pioneer, investing to develop new technology in fields including biotechnology, alternative energy and self-driving cars, among others. 

Brin and his ex-wife have two children. As an active investor and philanthropist, he supports new technology in fields ranging from space exploration to lab-grown meat to electric cars. He has also made waves as an occasional, though vocal, opponent to government censorship of the internet.