Sergey Brin

Sergey Brin is the co-founder and President of Alphabet Inc. Brin is a computer scientist and entrepreneur who created, along with Larry Page, the online search engine Google, one of the most successful sites on the Internet.

Brin’s family moved from Moscow to the United States in 1979. After receiving degrees in computer science and mathematics at the University of Maryland in 1993, he entered Stanford University’s graduate program, where he met Page, a fellow graduate student.

The two were both intrigued by the idea of enhancing the ability to extract meaning from the mass of data accumulating on the Internet. They began working from Page’s dorm room to devise a new type of search technology that leveraged Web users’ own ranking abilities by tracking each site’s “backing links” — that is, the number of other pages linked to them. Brin received a master’s degree in 1995, but he went on leave from Stanford’s doctorate program to continue working on the search engine.

In mid-1998, Brin and Page began receiving outside financing, and they ultimately raised about $1 million from investors and family and friends. They called their updated search engine Google. The name was derived from a misspelling of the originally planned name, googol (a mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros). The duo created the corporation Google Inc.

Brin became the company’s president of technology, and by mid-1999, when Google received $25 million of venture capital funding, the search engine was processing 500,000 queries per day. By 2004 users were accessing the Web site 200 million times a day. On August 19, 2004, Google Inc. issued its initial public offering (IPO).

In 2006 Google acquired YouTube, the Web’s most popular site for user-uploaded streaming videos. The move reflected the company’s efforts to expand its services beyond Internet searches.

In April 2011 Brin relinquished his duties as president of technology to become director of special projects. Google was reorganized in August 2015 to become a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., a newly created holding company with Brin as its president.

Sergey has been a featured speaker at several international academic, business and technology forums, including the World Economic Forum and the Technology, Entertainment and Design Conference. He has shared his views on the technology industry and the future of search on the Charlie Rose Show, CNBC, and CNNfn.