Sergey Brin

Sergey Mikhailovich Brin was born on August 21, 1973, in Moscow, to a Russian-Jewish family. His father, Mikhail, was a mathematics professor, and his mother, Eugenia, worked as a researcher. Both parents were graduates of Moscow State University. The family lived in a three-room apartment in central Moscow with Sergey’s paternal grandmother. After his father attended a mathematics conference in Warsaw in 1977, he decided the family should leave the Soviet Union due to antisemitism. They applied for an exit visa in September 1978, which led to his father being fired and his mother losing her job. For eight months, they took temporary work while waiting, fearing their request would be denied like many refuseniks. In May 1979, they received their visas and left. They spent time in Vienna and Paris before his father secured a teaching position at the University of Maryland with help from Anatole Katok. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society supported them, and they arrived in the United States on October 25, 1979.

Brin attended Eleanor Roosevelt High School. In September 1990, he enrolled at the University of Maryland, earning a Bachelor of Science in computer science in 1993 with honors in computer science and high honors in mathematics, at age 19. That year, he interned at Wolfram Research, the company behind Mathematica. He then began graduate studies in computer science at Stanford University on a National Science Foundation fellowship, receiving a master’s degree in 1995. As of 2008, he was on leave from his PhD program.

At a Stanford orientation, Brin met Larry Page. They initially disagreed on many topics but became close intellectual partners. Brin focused on data mining systems, while Page worked on using citations to infer the importance of research papers. Together, they wrote a paper titled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine." They developed the PageRank algorithm, which used backlink data to measure a web page’s importance, creating a search engine superior to existing ones. They set up equipment in Page’s dorm room, then converted Brin’s dorm into an office and programming center. Their project grew quickly, straining Stanford’s computing resources. Using Page’s basic HTML skills, they built a simple search page and assembled spare computer parts to handle multiple users. In August 1996, the first version of Google was released on Stanford’s website. By early 1997, the Backrub page noted that the search engine had indexed over 75 million URLs and downloaded 207 gigabytes of content, running on Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums with Linux. Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg provided key implementation help.

Brin and Page later started Google in Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park, California, after Brin left his PhD studies. He served as president of Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, until stepping down in 2019. He and Page remain co-founders, controlling shareholders, and board members at Alphabet. Brin is a centibillionaire, with an estimated net worth of $264.9 billion as of August 2026. In 2023, he came out of retirement to contribute to AI research at Alphabet.