Sergey Brin

Sergey Mikhailovich Brin (Russian: Сергей Михайлович Брин; born August 21, 1973) is a Soviet Union-born American entrepreneur who co-founded Google with Larry Page.

Brin currently holds the position of President of Technology at Google and has a net worth estimated at $18.5 billion as of March 9, 2007, making him the 26th richest person in the world and the 5th richest person in the United States, together with Larry Page.

He is also the fourth-youngest billionaire in the world.

Biography

Early life and education

Brin was born in Moscow, in the Soviet Union to a Jewish family, the son of Michael Brin and Evgenia Brin (nee: Krasnokutskaya), both mathematicians who graduated from the Moscow State University. In 1979, when Brin was six, his family emigrated to the United States. Brin attended grade school at Paint Branch Montessori School in Adelphi, Maryland, but he received further education at home; his father, a professor in the department of mathematics at the University of Maryland, nurtured his interest in mathematics and his family helped him retain his Russian-language skills. In September 1990, after having attended Eleanor Roosevelt High School, Brin enrolled in the University of Maryland, College Park to study computer science and mathematics, where he received his Bachelor of Science degree in May 1993 with honors.

Brin began his graduate study in Computer Science at Stanford University on a graduate fellowship from the National Science Foundation. He earned his master's degree in August 1995 ahead of schedule in the process of his Ph.D. studies. He is on leave from his Ph.D. studies at Stanford.

Brin has also received an honorary MBA from the IE Business School.

Interest in search engines

Brin expressed interest in the Internet very early on in his studies at Stanford. He authored and co-authored various papers on data-mining and pattern extraction. He also wrote software to ease the process of putting scientific papers often written in TeX, a text-processing language, into HTML form, as well as a website for film ratings.

The defining moment for Brin, however, was when he met future co-president of Google, Larry Page. According to Google lore, Page and Brin "were not terribly fond of each other when they first met as Stanford University graduate students in computer science in 1995." They soon found a common interest: retrieving relevant information from large data sets. Together, the pair authored what is widely considered their seminal contribution, a paper entitled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine."

Personal life

In May 2007, Brin married Anne Wojcicki in The Bahamas. Wojcicki is a biotech analyst, and a 1996 graduate of Yale University with a degree in biology.She co-founded 23andMe, a personal DNA genotyping service.

Miscellaneous

Brin has appeared on television shows and many documentaries, including Charlie Rose, CNBC, and CNN. In 2004, he and Larry Page were named "Persons of the Week" by ABC World News Tonight. In January 2005 Sergey Brin was nominated to be one of the World Economic Forum's "Young Global Leaders".

Brin and Larry Page purchased a Boeing 767 airliner for their business and personal needs. The plane's interior was supposed to be redesigned by aviation designer Leslie Jennings, but a legal battle between the designer and the holding company that owns the plane stalled the renovation. The plane would hold about 50 passengers when refurbished, and would include a California King-sized bed.

Brin and Page were executive producers of the 2007 film Broken Arrows.

In 2007, Brin was cited by PC World as #1 on a list of the "50 most important people on the Web," along with Larry Page and Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

He is also an investor in Tesla Motors, which is developing the Tesla Roadster, a 221-mile range battery electric vehicle. He has also placed an order for the Roadster. It is reported by Conde Nast Portfolio that Brin drives a Toyota Prius.

In June 2008, it was announced that Brin had made a $5 million investment in Space Adventures, the Virginia-based space tourism company. His investment will serve as a deposit for a reservation on one of Space Adventures' proposed flights in 2011. So far, Space Adventures has sent five tourists into space.