More than 20 years ago, Sergey Brin and Larry Page first launched Google from a common room near Stanford University. Since then, the company has grown into the world's most popular search engine - and has branched out into everything from truck cranes to life extension research.
According to Forbes, Sergei Brin is one of the world's billionaires, but he comes from more humble beginnings. Brin was born in the Soviet Union in the summer of 1973. His father dreamed of becoming an astrophysicist, but his Jewish background and the anti-Semitism of the USSR kept him from those ambitions. Instead, he ended up as an economist for a government planning agency. The family managed to obtain exit visas and flee the USSR when Brin was six. However, his family's stressful and troubling experience co-founded Google with a lasting recognition of democracy and freedom.
The Brin family ended up in Maryland, where Google co-founder was enrolled in a Montessori school that emphasized independence and encouraged creativity. Brin later found out that his Google co-founder, Larry Page, also attended Montessori school. Brin eventually earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Maryland and then flew west to Stanford, where he earned a PhD in computer science. There, his love for adrenaline exercises flourished: he tried skating, skiing, gymnastics and even a horizontal bar.
Brin met Google co-founder Larry Page in Stanford in 1995. The two initially considered each other "uncomfortable," but later became classmates and close friends who made money from computer science.
The first Brin and Page search engine launched was called BackRub. This worked on Stanford servers throughout 1996, until it began to take up too much bandwidth for university servers to handle. In 1997, Sergey and Larry decided to rename their search engine after playing with the word googol. This was a number represented as 1 followed by 100 zeros (one Google = 1.0 × 10100). So Google originated, a name representing an infinite possibility of information.
As Google expanded from a simple search engine to a huge company with dozens of diverse projects, Brin was the architect of the most ambitious as a one-time head of X, Moonshot's factory. His projects included self-propelled cars, smart contact lenses and smart glasses. Without Google Glass computer smart glasses, you wouldn't be able to see Brin for a long time. Brin also worked on the now dismantled Google Google+ social network. In 2014, he admitted on stage that he should never have worked on it because he is "a little weird" and not very sociable.
Although Google has grown into a multibillion-dollar company, Brin has stood up for his fitness obsessions. He is known to wear Vibram workout clothes and bare shoes and has often been seen rollerblading in offices, doing yoga in meetings, or walking at hand for fun.
Those who knew Brin show that they truly believe in using knowledge and power for the greater good. The Economist once called him an "Enlightenment man" for his determination to use reason and science to solve the world's vast problems.
Brin donated hundreds of millions of dollars to charity, of which at least $ 160 million was for Parkinson's disease research. Neurodegenerative disease occurs in Brin's family (both his great-grandfather and mother), and a test by 23andMe - Wojcicki's society - revealed that Brin has a genetic mutation that makes him susceptible. To reduce his chances of getting Parkinson's disease, Brin started exercising even more intensely and drinking green tea twice a day. Due to his health regime and scientific progress, he estimated in 2010 that he now has only less than a 10% chance of getting the disease.
Google's success has always been seen in the simplicity it offers. Sergey Brin, both in his business products and in his social networking capabilities, says that technology has complicated products for many people, and Google aims to provide an easy and user-friendly option that people have chosen because of the chaotic number of capabilities of its competitors. In his words: “We focus on features, not products. We've ruled out future products that would make the complexity problem worse. We don't want to have 20 different products that work in 20 different ways. I got lost on our website and watched everything. I'd rather have a smaller set of products that have a shared feature set ”(Business 2.0, How to Succeed).