21 August 1973 year
Born in Moscow Sergey Brin — entrepreneur, billionaire, co-founder of Google. He turns 52.
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His father was a former researcher at the Research Institute of Economics under the USSR State Planning Committee. His mother worked at the Institute of Oil and Gas. Both faced discrimination in academic circles due to anti-Semitism.
After his first application to emigrate, his father was fired from his job, and his mother was forced to leave. In 1979, a year later, the family was able to emigrate to the United States when Sergei was five.
I may have only had five years in Russia, but those were important years in my life.
I am deeply grateful to my parents for taking me to the States.
In 1990, at 17, he visited the Soviet Union with his father during a scientific exchange trip. He admitted that his childhood fears of the Soviet authorities prompted him to throw a pebble at a police car.
At the same time, he began studying mathematics and computer systems at the University of Maryland. He received a fellowship from the US National Science Foundation.
At 20, he entered Stanford University and graduated with a master's degree. He studied big data and wrote a program for processing scientific texts.
In the 1990s, search engines already existed, but they couldn't sort search results by keyword frequency—it took a long time to find information. At 23, while pursuing a doctorate, together with a fellow student Larry Page figured out how to solve this problem by creating a prototype of Google.
Coming up with something is the least important part of creating something great.
We worked in a garage. The first server consisted of four hard drives housed in a case made of colorful Lego bricks.
The idea was tested on a university search engine: it became so popular that the friends put their doctoral studies on hold.
Having once misspelled the word “googol” – a mathematical term, a one followed by 100 zeros – they came up with the name of the company.
In 1998, they registered Google Inc. and received their first check for $100 from an investor. Seven years later, Forbes included the friends on its list of billionaires.
They all [other startups] were trying to become portals, create 25 other services and didn't pay attention to search.
Today, it is a subsidiary of the Alphabet holding company, owning Gmail, Google Maps, Google Play, Chrome, YouTube, and the Android operating system. Google itself processes nearly 100 search queries every second—over 8,5 billion per day.
The more problems you solve, the more opportunities you have.
The company employs more than 170 people in 50 countries. For many, a Google office is a dream job: more than 2 million people apply for jobs at the company every year, but less than 1% are hired. Moreover, about 15% of Google employees are self-taught and never even graduated from college.
In 2019, Brin and Page stepped down from their leadership positions at Google, but remained among the company's major shareholders and board members.
According to Forbes, Brin is the eighth-richest person in the world. He invests in philanthropy and anti-aging research.
If we did everything for money, we would have sold the company a long time ago and would be relaxing on the beach.
Brin is also one of the co-founders of the Breakthrough Prize, a major scientific award with an annual fund of $3 million. Since the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine, these funds have been used, among other things, to support local scientists forced to flee the country.
Russia is Nigeria in the snow. Do you really like the idea of a gang of bandits controlling the world's energy supplies?
(Interview with the Californian magazine Red Herring, 2002)
In 2022, the company suspended paid services and Google Play in Russia. However, it retained free services—search, email, documents, and maps. Authorities imposed significant fines on Google, which left the company in debt, which has already exceeded 27 billion rubles.
YouTube has also been slowed down in Russia since August 2024.
There are very powerful forces against the open internet from all sides and all over the world. And I'm more worried than ever. It's terrifying.
(Guardian interview, April 15, 2012)
