Sergey Brin was born in Moscow, Russia, on August 21, 1973. He is an American computer scientist, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Google, one of the most recognizable websites on the Internet with Larry Page.
Brin’s family immigrated to the United States from Moscow in 1979. He graduated from the University of Maryland in 1993 with mathematics and computer science degrees. In Stanford University’s graduate program, he met Page, another graduate student. The idea of improving the ability to extract meaning from the massive amount of data accumulating on the Internet piqued their interest.
They began developing a new form of search technology from Page’s dorm room, leveraging Web users’ own ranking abilities by tracking each site’s “backing links”–that is, the number of other pages connected to them. Brin received his master’s degree from Stanford in 1995. However, he decided to take a break from Stanford’s doctoral program to focus on the search engine.
In mid-1998, Page and Brin began to seek outside funding. They eventually raised $1 million from friends, family members, and investors. Their modified search engine was named Google by Page and Brin, which was a typo of their original title, “googol” (a mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros), and they founded Google Inc. Brin was appointed president of technology at Google, and by mid-1999, when the search engine got $25 million in venture capital funding, it was processing 500,000 inquiries per day.
In 2001, Page was succeeded as CEO of Google by technology executive Eric Schmidt. Google, on the other hand, was effectively led by the three of Brin, Page, and Schmidt. By 2004, people were visiting the site 200 million times per day (roughly 138,000 queries per minute). Brin received more than $3.8 billion in the first public offering (IPO) of Google Inc. on August 19, 2004.
YouTube was the most popular website for user-submitted streaming videos in 2006, and Google bought it in equity for $1.65 billion. This was in line with the company’s desire to expand its offerings beyond Internet search.
That same year, Google was rebuked for complying with the Chinese government’s censorship rules, such as censoring websites advocating democracy or covering the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Brin supported the decision, claiming that Google’s ability to provide some information, even if it was limited, was better than not providing any.
In April 2011, Brin was elected director of special projects and resigned as president of technology. In August 2015, Google was reorganized as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc, a newly created holding company headed by Brin. While he resigned from the position in December 2019, he remained on Alphabet’s board of directors.
Brin’s Married Life
Anne Wojcicki, a biotech analyst and entrepreneur was married to Brin in May 2007 in the Bahamas. They had a son in 2008 and a daughter in 2011. After Brin’s affair with Amanda Rosenberg, Google Glass’s marketing director, Brin and his wife filed for divorce in August 2013. Brin and Wojcicki formalized their divorce in June 2015.
Sergey Brin married Nicole Shanahan, the creator of a legal technology company on November 7, 2018 and the couple recently welcomed a daughter. After their separation on December 15, 2021, Brin and Shanahan got divorced on January 4, 2022. According to reports, Shanahan’s involvement with Elon Musk caused their separation.
