biography larry page

Larry Page is an internet entrepreneur and computer scientist who teamed up with grad school buddy Sergey Brin to launch the search engine Google in 1998.

Who Is Larry Page?

Born in Michigan in 1973, Larry Page's parents were both computer experts. Following in their footsteps, he studied computer engineering at Stanford University, where he met Sergey Brin . The duo developed a search engine that listed results according to the popularity of the pages and, with Page as CEO, Google became the world's most popular search engine after launching in 1998. Page and Brin later took charge of Google's new parent company, Alphabet, until stepping down from their everyday roles in late 2019.

Early Life and Education

Lawrence Page was born on March 26, 1973, in East Lansing, Michigan. His father, Carl Page, was a pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence, and his mother taught computer programming. After earning a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering from the University of Michigan, Page decided to concentrate on computer engineering for graduate school at Stanford University, where he met Brin.

Creating Google With Sergey Brin

As a research project at Stanford University, Page and Brin created a search engine that listed results according to the popularity of the pages, after concluding that the most popular result would often be the most useful. They called the search engine "Google" after the mathematical term "googol," which refers to the No. 1 followed by 100 zeros, to reflect their mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the web.

After raising $1 million from family, friends and other investors, the pair launched the company in 1998. Google has since become the world's most popular search engine, receiving an average of 5.9 billion searches per day in 2013. Headquartered in the heart of California's Silicon Valley, Google held its initial public offering in August 2004, making Page and Brin billionaires.

Evolving Conglomerate

In 2006, Google purchased the most popular website for user-submitted streaming videos, YouTube, for $1.65 billion in stock.

In September 2013, Page was ranked No. 13 on the Forbes 400 list of the richest people in America. That October, he was ranked No. 17 on Forbes ' 2013 "Most Powerful People" list. As Google's CEO, Page shared responsibility for the company's operations with Brin, who served as director of special projects for Google, and Eric Schmidt, the company's executive chairman.

In 2015, Page and Brin announced the creation of a new parent company called Alphabet to oversee Google and other subsidiaries. Page and Brin became Alphabet's CEO and president, respectively, with Sundar Pichai stepping in as Google's top executive.

Diminishing Presence and Company Exit

The restructuring gave Page and Brin the opportunity to step away from day-to-day operations of the company they founded, and the CEO was noticeably absent from Alphabet's meetings and quarterly earnings calls. In 2018, Page declined to appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee as part of hearings into the use of Big Tech to meddle in foreign elections, and he came under scrutiny for giving a $90 million exit package to a former senior executive accused of sexual misconduct.

On December 3, 2019, Page and Brin announced that they were stepping down from their roles as CEO and president of Alphabet, handing the reins to Pichai. However, the duo were expected to retain their influence over the company's direction as Alphabet's largest individual shareholders.

Autonomous Air Taxi

In March 2018, it was announced that a company personally funded by Page, called Kitty Hawk, had reached an agreement with officials in New Zealand to begin the certification process on a fully electric, self-piloting flying taxi.

Kitty Hawk had been testing its aircraft, nicknamed Cora, over New Zealand since the previous October. With Boeing, Airbus and Uber among the companies looking to break ground in the burgeoning air taxi industry, Kitty Hawk is aiming to have a commercial network of vehicles up and running by 2021.

Personal Life

Page has been married to research scientist Lucinda Southworth since 2007. The couple has two children.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Larry Page
• Birth Year: 1973
• Birth date: March 26, 1973
• Birth State: Michigan
• Birth City: East Lansing
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Larry Page is an internet entrepreneur and computer scientist who teamed up with grad school buddy Sergey Brin to launch the search engine Google in 1998.
• Internet/Computing
• Business and Industry
• Astrological Sign: Aries
• Stanford University
• University of Michigan

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Larry Page Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
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• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: March 26, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014

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Larry Page (born March 26, 1973, East Lansing , Michigan , U.S.) is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur who, with Sergey Brin , created the online search engine Google , one of the most popular websites on the Internet .

Page, whose father was a professor of computer science at Michigan State University , received a computer engineering degree from the University of Michigan in 1995 and entered into the doctorate program at Stanford University , where he met Brin. Both Page and Brin were interested in improving how users parsed the massive amounts of data offered by the Internet. Working from Page’s dormitory room, they devised a new type of search engine algorithm called PageRank that leveraged Web users’ ranking abilities by tracking each site’s “backing links”—that is, the number of other pages linked to them. Such a system enabled the search engine to determine the authority of Web pages based on how often they were backlinked.

In order to further their search engine, Page and Brin raised about $1 million in outside financing from investors, family, and friends. They called their expanded search engine Google, a name derived from a misspelling of the word googol (a mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros). By September 1998 the two had founded Google Inc., with Page as chief executive officer (CEO), and had established a patent for their PageRank system. The next year Google received $25 million of venture capital funding and was processing 500,000 queries per day.

“We liked the name Alphabet because it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity’s most important innovations, and is the core of how we index with Google search.”

—Larry Page

Page stepped down as CEO in 2001 to become president of products. He was replaced as CEO by technology executive Eric Schmidt . However, both Page and Brin remained closely involved in running Google operations. By 2004 the search engine was being used 200 million times a day. In August 2004 Google issued its initial public offering (IPO) , which netted Page more than $3.8 billion. In an acquisition reflecting the company’s efforts to expand its services beyond Internet searches, in 2006 Google purchased the video streaming service YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. In 2011 Page resumed his duties as Google’s CEO, and Schmidt became executive chair. Google was restructured in August 2015 as a subsidiary of the newly created holding company Alphabet, and Page became CEO of Alphabet. He left the post in December 2019 but continued to serve on Alphabet’s board of directors.

Larry Page Biography

Birthday: March 26 , 1973 ( Aries )

Born In: Lansing, Michigan, United States

Larry Page , born as Lawrence Page, is an American entrepreneur and computer scientist who, along with Sergey Brin, co-founded Google Inc., the search engine giant that offers a wide range of internet products and services. Google began as an online search firm and gradually expanded its operations to other internet related areas. As the son of computer professionals, Page’s fascination with computers began at an early age. As a child, he showed keen interest in technology, business and innovation. While studying Computer Science at Stanford University, he met Sergey Brin with whose assistance he created a search engine that returned results based on relevancy. Page and Brin launched the company under the name ‘Google Inc’ in 1998. They both served as the co-presidents until 2001 when Eric Schmidt was appointed as Chairman and CEO of Google. In 2011, Page officially became the CEO of Google while Schmidt continues to serve as executive chairman. Page is also a member of the Board of Directors of the company. He has an interest in renewable energy technology and philanthropy. Google.org, the philanthropic branch of the company, was set up in 2004. It basically deals with issues of climate change and renewable energy.

Recommended For You

Also Known As: Lawrence Edward Page

Age: 51 Years , 51 Year Old Males

Spouse/Ex-: Lucinda Southworth (m. 2007)

father: Carl Page

mother: Gloria Page

siblings: Carl Victor Page Jr.

Born Country: United States

Billionaires CEOs

Height: 5'11" (180 cm ), 5'11" Males

City: Lansing, Michigan

U.S. State: Michigan

Founder/Co-Founder: Google Company Name

discoveries/inventions: Google Search Engine

education: East Lansing High School, Montessori Radmoor, Stanford University, University of Michigan

awards: 2004 - Marconi Foundation Prize 1999 - Technical Excellence Award 2000 - Webby Award & a People's Voice Award

2001 - Outstanding Search Service Best Image Search Engine Best Design Most Webmaster Friendly Search Engine and Best Search Feature 2004 - Marconi Foundation Prize

You wanted to know

What is larry page known for.

Larry Page is best known as one of the co-founders of Google, the popular internet search engine.

What is Larry Page's educational background?

Larry Page holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan and a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from Stanford University.

What are some notable contributions of Larry Page to the technology industry?

Larry Page has been instrumental in the development of Google's search technology, the creation of innovative products such as Google Maps and Android, and the advancement of artificial intelligence research through projects like DeepMind.

How has Larry Page influenced the business world?

Larry Page's leadership at Google has revolutionized the way people access information online, transformed the digital advertising landscape, and inspired a culture of innovation and experimentation within the tech industry.

What is Larry Page's vision for the future of technology?

Larry Page has expressed a vision of creating technology that is seamlessly integrated into people's lives, improves efficiency, and enhances human well-being through advancements in areas such as artificial intelligence, healthcare, and sustainability.

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Larry Page is an avid kiteboarder and has been spotted catching waves on a kiteboard in various exotic locations around the world.

He is known for his unique approach to problem-solving, often incorporating principles from computer science and mathematics into his decision-making processes.

Larry Page has a keen interest in alternative energy sources and has invested in several projects aimed at promoting sustainable practices in the tech industry.

He is a strong advocate for education and has donated significant amounts of his wealth towards improving educational opportunities for underprivileged students.

Larry Page is a talented musician and has been known to play the saxophone in his free time, showcasing his creative side beyond the realm of technology.

See the events in life of Larry Page in Chronological Order

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• World Biography

Larry Page and Sergey Brin Biography

c. 1973 • East Lansing, Michigan

Entrepreneur

Sergey Brin

August 21, 1973 • Moscow, Russia

Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google, the Internet search engine, while they were graduate students at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Since its founding in 1998, Google has become one of the most successful dot-com businesses in history. Both Page and Brin were reluctant entrepreneurs who were committed to developing their company on their own terms, not those dictated by the prevailing business culture.

Not instant best friends

An innovative thinker with a sense of humor as well, Page once built a working ink-jet printer out of Lego blocks. He was eager to advance in his career, and decided to study for a Ph.D degree. He was admitted to the prestigious doctoral program in computer science at Stanford University. On an introductory weekend at the Palo Alto campus that had been arranged for new students, he met Sergey Brin. A native of Moscow, Russia, Brin was also the son of a professor, and came to the United States with his family when he was six. His father taught math at the University of Maryland, and it was from that school's College Park campus that Brin earned an undergraduate degree in computer science and math.

Brin was already enrolled in Stanford's PhD program when Page arrived in 1995. As Brin explained to Robert McGarvey of Technology Review, "I was working on data mining, the idea of taking large amounts of data, analyzing it for patterns and trying to extract relationships that are useful." One weekend Brin was assigned to a team that showed the new doctoral students around campus, and Page was in his group. Industry lore claims they argued the whole time, but soon found themselves working together on a research project. That 1996 paper, "Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," became the basis for the Google search engine.

A hit with fellow students

Page and Brin created an algorithm, or set of step-by-step instructions for solving a specific computer task. Their algorithm searched all the hypertext documents in cyberspace, which are the basis for Web pages on the Internet. A typical search engine such as Hot Bot, which was popular at one time in the mid-1990s, worked by looking for a term the user entered—"New York Yankees," for example—in all of those documents. If the phrase "New York Yankees" was written into one Web site's hypertext code several dozen or even a hundred times, that document would come up first in the search results. But it might just turn out to be an Internet store that sold sports memorabilia.

Page and Brin wanted to create a search tool that would find the most relevant Web page first. If someone typed in "New York Yankees," for example, the official Yankees site would be the first result returned. Their algorithm analyzed the "back links" in a hypertext document, or how many times other sites linked to it—the more links, the higher the relevancy of the page. As an article in Time explained, their search technology was the first to "treat the Internet as a democracy. Google interprets connections between websites as votes. The most linked-to sites win on the Google usefulness ballot and rise to the top of the search results."

"I hope they will be able to return answers, not just documents.... In the future, Google will be your interface to all the world's knowledge—not just web pages."

Sergey Brin, Guardian (London, England), November 23, 2000.

The search engine with Page and Brin's unique algorithm was initially named "Backrub," but they later settled on "PageRank," named after Page. It soon caught on with other Stanford users when Page and Brin let them try it out. The two set up a simple search page for users, because they did not have a web page developer to create anything very impressive. They also began stringing together the necessary computing power to handle searches by multiple users, by using any computer part they could find. As their search engine grew in popularity among Stanford users, it needed more and more servers to process the queries. "At Stanford we'd stand on the loading dock and try to snag computers as they came in," Page recalled to McGarvey. "We would see who got 20 computers and ask them if they could spare one."

Maxed out credit cards

During this time Page and Brin were running the project out of their dorm rooms at Stanford. Page's room served as the data hub, while Brin's was the business office. But they were reluctant entrepreneurs, not wanting to shelve their Ph.D. studies and join the dot-com rush of the era. In mid-1998 they finally relented. "Pretty soon, we had 10,000 searches a day," Page told Newsweek 's Steven Levy. "And we figured, maybe this is really real." They initially set out just to defray their costs. "We spent about $15,000 on a terabyte [one million megabytes] of disks," Brin explained to McGarvey. "We spread that across three credit cards. Once we did that, we wrote up a business plan."

Google Pranks

The freewheeling corporate culture at Google has produced the occasional prank since its founding. The company had been known to post fake press releases around April 1, or April Fools' Day. In 2000, for example, it launched "MentalPlex," which offered Google site visitors the ability to "search smarter and faster" by peering into a circle with shifting colors.

In 2003 Google explained its novel search technology "PigeonRank" in an April Fools' Day insertion on their Web site that offered a behind-the-scenes glimpse into "the technology behind Google's great results." It was pigeons, the page explained, that helped deliver such quick and accurate search results. In a FAQ, or Frequently Asked Questions, section of the page, it addressed the question, "Aren't pigeons really stupid? How do they do this?" Google responded, "While no pigeon has actually been confirmed for a seat on the Supreme Court, pigeons are surprisingly adept at making instant judgments when confronted with difficult choices."

Page and Brin had the idea to license their PageRank technology to other companies to pay off their credit card debt, but none were interested. David Filo (1966–), another Stanford graduate who had started Yahoo.com, suggested they form a search-engine company. They named their company "Google," after the mathematical term Googol, which specified the number one followed by a hundred zeros. They took it to Andy Bechtolsheim (1956–), a Stanford graduate and co-founder of Sun Microsystems. One of their professors set up an in an early morning meeting with Bechtolsheim. They showed him their Google demo, but Bechtolsheim had another meeting on his schedule that morning, and needed to leave. He liked their idea, however, and offered to write them a check on the spot for seed money. It was for $100,000, and was made out to "Google." In order to deposit it, Page and Brin first needed to open a bank account with their company name on it.

Page and Brin went on to raise more money from friends, family, and then from venture capital firms that funded new businesses. By the end of 1999 they had set up headquarters in an office park in Mountain View, and had officially launched the site. In June of 2000, Google reached an important hallmark: it had indexed one billion Internet URLs, or Uniform Resource Locators. A URL is the World Wide Web address of a site on the Internet. Reaching the one-billion mark made Google the most comprehensive search engine on the Web.

Hired industry pro

In their first years in business, Brin served as president, while Page was the chief executive officer. The company continued to grow exponentially during 2001. Google even became a verb—to "Google" someone or something meant to search for it via the engine, but it was most commonly used in reference to checking out the Web presence of potential dates. Page and Brin's company was the subject of articles in mainstream publications, but they continually rejected offers to go public—make their company a publicly traded one on Wall Street. They did, however, hire Eric Schmidt (1955–) as chief executive officer and board chair in 2001. Schmidt was a veteran of Sun, where he had served as chief technology officer. As Brin explained to Betsy Cummings in Sales & Marketing Management, "Larry and I have done a good job," but conceded that "the probability of doing something dumb" was still likely. "It's clear we need some international strategy, and Eric brings that."

Google kept expanding in cyberspace. It added search capabilities in dozens of languages, and began partnering with overseas sites as well. It also attracted legions of devoted new employees. Its headquarters were informally known as the "Googleplex," and workers were relatively free to make their own hours, with the idea that employees should be able to work when they felt they were most productive. Google staff were also encouraged to use 80 percent of their work hours on regular work, and the other 20 percent on projects of their own design. One of those side projects emerged as Orkut.com, a harder-to-join version of the social-networking phenomenon Friendster.com. Orkut was named after the Google engineer who created it, Orkut Buyukkokten.

Page and Brin strove to keep Google's corporate culture relaxed in other ways, which they felt benefited the company in the long run. Its perks were legendary. There was free Ben and Jerry's ice cream, an on-site masseuse, a ping-pong table, yoga classes, and even a staff physician. Employees could bring their dogs to work, and the company cafeteria was run by a professional chef who used to work for the rock band the Grateful Dead. Brin discussed his management philosophy with Cummings. "Since we started the company, we've grown twenty percent per month. Our employees can do whatever they want."

Long-awaited IPO

By early 2004 Google was one of the most-visited Web sites in the world. Its servers handled some 138,000 search queries per minute, or about two hundred million daily. Analysts believed it was taking in approximately $1 billion in revenues annually, and the company finally announced plans to become a publicly traded company with an initial public offering (IPO) of stock. Theirs, however, would utilize a unique online auction process to sell its first shares to the public. This meant that the large Wall Street firms that handled the IPO underwriting—which investigated the company's books and then placed a monetary value on it—would not be able to give the first shares out to their top clients as a perk. It was estimated that Google was going to be valued at least at $15 billion, and possibly even as high as $30 billion.

Page and Brin each own thirty-eight million shares of Google stock. They would become overnight millionaires when Google began trading on the NASDAQ, or National Association of Securities Dealers Automatic Quotation system, sometime in 2004. Business journalists were calling it the most hotly anticipated IPO of the post-dot-com era. Many other Internet companies had quickly become publicly traded ones in the late 1990s, but began to crash when the economy slowed over the next few years. Just prior to launching their IPO, Google entered a legally required "quiet period," in which they were not allowed to discuss their plans or strategies with the press. Brin told Levy in Newsweek just before that period that he and Page were content to keep tinkering with their research-paper idea. "I think we're pretty far along compared to 10 years ago," he said. "At the same time, where can you go? Certainly if you had all the world's information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you'd be better off. Between that and today, there's plenty of space to cover."

For More Information

Periodicals.

Cummings, Betsy. "Beating the Odds: Now That Frivolity Has Killed Many a Start-Up, Relaxed Management, On-Site Restaurants, and In-House Massages Seem Like Dot-Com Death Wishes. Google.com Proves Otherwise—Thanks to Top-Rate Technology, a Rare Sales Model, and an Aggressive Vision for What's Ahead." Sales & Marketing Management (March 2002): p. 24.

Flynn, Laurie J. "2 Wild and Crazy Guys (Soon to Be Billionaires), and Hoping to Keep It That Way." New York Times (April 30, 2004): p. C6.

Helmore, Edward. "Float Revolution: Google Takes the High Road: The Founders of the Internet Phenomenon Have Announced Flotation Plans — But They Are Determined to Go Public in Their Own Inimitable Fashion." Observer (London, England) (May 2, 2004): p. 3.

"In Search of Google: Watch out, Yahoo. There's a Search Engine Out There with Uncanny Speed and Accuracy. And It's Way Cool." Time (August 21, 2000): p. 66.

Keegan, Victor. "Online: Working It Out: Searching Questions: Sergey Brin Is the President and Co-Founder of the Search Engine Google, Which Was Set Up in 1998." Guardian (London, England) (November 23, 2000): p. 4.

Levy, Steven. "All Eyes on Google; In Six Short Years, Two Stanford Grad Students Turned a Simple Idea into a Multibillion-Dollar Phenomenon and Changed Our Lives. Now Competitors Are Searching for a Way to Dethrone the Latest Princes of the Net." Newsweek (March 29, 2004): p. 48.

Levy, Steven. "The World According to Google: What If You Had a Magic Tool That Let You Find Out Almost Anything in Less than a Second? Millions of People Already Have It—and It's Changing the Way We Live." Newsweek (December 16, 2002): p. 46.

McGarvey, Robert. "Search Us, Says Google." Technology Review (November 2000): p. 108.

Poliski, Iris. "Page Revs up Google's Engine: The Google Search Engine is Virtually a Household Name among Computer Users, and Larry Page, Its Developer, Was Voted R&D's Innovator of the Year for Bringing It to Fruition. Not Only Is Google a Powerful Finder, Its Spinoffs May Change Computing History." R & D (November 2002): p. 40.

Sappenfield, Mark. "A Culture of Idealists Creates Startup Success Google Founders Hold Firm to Their Geeky Roots." Seattle Times (April 30, 2004): p. E4.

Waters, Richard. "Idealists Bound for Reality: Men in the News Sergey Brin and Larry Page: As Google Prepares For Its Stock Market Debut, Richard Waters Asks How the Men Who Founded the World's Most Popular Search Engine Will Cope with the Transition from Internet Visionaries to Corporate Billionaires." Financial Times (October 25, 2003): p. 15.

"The Google Timeline." Google.com. http://www.google.com/corporate/timeline.html (accessed on July 13, 2004).

"Our Search: Google Technology." Google.com. http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html (accessed on July 13, 2004).

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We didn't start out to build a search engine at all.

Lawrence Edward Page was born in Lansing, Michigan. His father, Dr. Carl Victor Page, was a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at Michigan State University, where Lawrence’s mother, Gloria, also taught computer programming. The Page family home was full of first-generation personal computers and scientific magazines, and young Larry, as he was called, immersed himself in them. Significantly, his older brother, Carl Page, Jr., also became a successful Internet entrepreneur.

Larry Page attended a Montessori school in the primary grades and later graduated from East Lansing High School. He was an honors student at the University of Michigan, where he also participated in the university’s solar car team, reflecting another lifelong interest: sustainable transportation technology. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering, he began graduate studies in computer science at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. It was there that he first undertook the project of analyzing patterns of linkage among different sites on the World Wide Web. It was also at Stanford that he first met fellow computer science graduate student Sergey Brin and recruited him to join his research project.

The Internet and the World Wide Web were just taking shape as major forces in telecommunication when Larry Page entered Stanford. Larry Page wanted to devise a method for determining how many other Web pages linked to any one given page. Existing facilities for exploring the Web could only rank search results by the frequency of appearance of a given word on any page of the Web. Searches often produced endless lists of websites of very little pertinence to the user’s query. Page soon found that ranking websites by the number of links leading to it from other sites was a far more useful measure of a Web document’s relevance to a user’s search criteria. To explore the possibilities of his new “PageRank” mechanism more fully, he called on the data mining expertise of his classmate, Sergey Brin.

Together, Page and Brin wrote the paper “Dynamic Data Mining: A New Architecture for Data with High Dimensionality,” and followed it with “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.” The latter paper quickly became one of the most downloaded scientific documents in the history of the Internet. For a time, Page and Brin ran the prototype of their search engine, which they named “BackRub,” on an assortment of inexpensive personal computers stored in Larry Page’s dorm room. Word quickly spread beyond the walls of Stanford that the two graduate students had created something far more useful than existing search technology.

They registered the domain name google.com in 1997. The domain name was derived from the term “googol,” the very large number written as a one followed by 100 zeros, an expression of the vast universe of data the Google search engine was designed to explore. Page and Brin incorporated Google as a privately held company in 1998 and relocated their servers from Larry Page’s dorm room to a friend’s garage in Menlo Park, California. Having completed their master’s degrees, they took a leave of absence from the Ph.D. program to concentrate on building their business. At first, Larry Page served as the company’s CEO, Sergey Brin as its president. Their stated mission was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

After quickly outgrowing a series of office locations, the company leased a complex of buildings in Mountain View, California in 1999. Google has since purchased the entire property, known as the GooglePlex, one of the most unusual and innovative workplaces in the world , replete with exercise and recreational facilities.

In 2000, Google began selling text-based advertisements associated with search keywords. The text-only ads on their graphics-free homepage kept their download time to the bare minimum, and their ability to deliver ads directly related to the interests of the user made the ad space highly valuable.

That same year, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, still enrolled as Ph.D. candidates at Stanford, attended the Academy of Achievement’s International Achievement Summit in London, England as graduate student delegates. The interview recorded at that time can be read on this website.   They returned to the annual event in 2004 as recipients of the Academy’s Golden Plate Award.

By 2001, a vast number of once-promising Internet startups had folded, but Google was growing explosively and turning a profit. Page and Brin recruited Novell executive Eric Schmidt to serve as CEO, with Larry Page taking the role of President for Products, and Sergey Brin as President for Technology. The three have run the enterprise as a triumvirate ever since.

Google’s initial public offering in 2004 raised $1.67 billion, giving the company a market capitalization of $23 billion. A number of Google employees with shares in the company became millionaires overnight, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin found themselves multibillionaires at age 27. Google was an immediate favorite with individual investors, and the stock price has soared. All three top executives — Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt — reduced their annual salaries to a dollar a year and refused bonuses, tying their personal wealth directly to the company’s performance in the stock market.

By the end of 2006, Google had over 10,000 employees and annual revenues well over $10 billion. Various estimates place Larry Page and Sergey Brin among the two dozen richest people on Earth, and the dozen richest Americans. Despite its enormous growth, Google has largely succeeded in preserving a uniquely informal and creative atmosphere at its Mountain View campus.  Google employs a Chief Culture Officer to maintain and develop a creative and collaborative environment. Employees are encouraged to spend 20 percent of their work time on independent projects. As many as half of Google’s new products originated in this Innovation Time Off program.  In 2007 and 2008, Fortune magazine, in its annual Top 100, ranked Google as the best company in the world to work for.

In addition to its in-house product development, Google has also grown through strategic acquisitions of hardware and software companies with innovative video, teleconferencing and social networking products. One of the most dramatic of these was the 2006 purchase of the online video site YouTube for $1.65 billion. Prior to the sale, YouTube’s earnings were negligible, but Google quickly turned it into a profit center.

The following year, Google acquired the software company DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. DoubleClick technology directs display advertising to users based on their search behavior. DoubleClick complements the formidable arsenal of technologies that Google has deployed to revolutionize online advertising. AdWords places advertising in third-party websites, on a cost-per-click or cost-per-view basis. Google Analytics enables the owners of websites to study the traffic to their sites. AdSense allows these owners to display advertising on their sites; they are then paid by the advertisers on a per-click basis. Today 99 percent of Google’s revenue is derived from advertising. Users also have the option of purchasing Google Site Search, a service that provides access to the Google index without advertising.

In recent years, Google has introduced a number of popular new services and applications, including a toolbar that allows users to perform searches from their desktops, without visiting the Google website. The website itself enables searches for video and still imagery as well as text. Google Maps is a popular navigation tool, while Google Earth allows users to access satellite imagery to zoom in on locations all over the world. The most ambitious project of all, Google Book Search, aims to make the contents of vast libraries of books available and searchable online. Google Books offers free access to books that are already in the public domain, while selling digital versions of new books online.

Google also provides a free Web-based email service, Gmail, which offers its users far more storage space than most other services. The company now offers a suite of business tools, including word processing and spreadsheet applications, at a fraction of the cost of competing office software packages. Google has created its own Web browser, Google Chrome, as well as the popular Picasa photo organization and editing software. Other Google applications include: Google Calendar; Google Docs, an online tool for collaborative writing and editing; Google Translate, which can translate documents back and forth between dozens of different languages, and allows users to compare and rate alternative translations. One of the company’s most ubiquitous products is the Android smartphone operating system.

A philanthropic arm, Google.org, focuses on climate change and global issues of poverty and public health. The company has run an online poll to select nonprofit initiatives to receive $10 million in Google.org donations. One of Google.org’s principal projects is the development of a 100-mile-a-gallon hybrid automobile. As a company, Google maintains a commitment to environmentally sustainable technology. It has the largest solar power capacity of any corporate campus in the United States, and even the grounds of its green campus are grazed by a flock of goats. Google has negotiated 20-year power contracts with wind farms in Iowa, and in 2010 acquired a 20 percent stake in two wind farms built by NextEra Energy Resources in North Dakota.

Google has consistently supported the principle of “net neutrality” that requires broadband carriers to treat all websites equally, but Google spokesmen caution Internet users against unrealistic expectations of online privacy. The future of the Internet, they maintain, will embody a principle of “true transparency, no anonymity.” Meanwhile, Google seeks the expansion of broadband access. It provides free wireless broadband service throughout the city of Mountain View, and a subsidiary, Google Fiber, is testing wireless broadband in cities across the United States.

In 2011, Eric Schmidt stepped aside as CEO of Google, and Larry Page, then 38 years old, took the helm of the company he founded 13 years before. Schmidt remained with the company as executive chairman. As Google’s new CEO, Larry Page pledged to make Google “a big company that has the nimbleness and soul and passion of a startup.”

Later that year, Google initiated its largest acquisition yet, buying Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion.  Motorola had been a principal manufacturer of phones running Google’s Android operating system, and the merger gave Google ownership of significant patents in the mobile phone sector.  Within two years of closing the deal, Google later sold the company to Lenovo of Japan, while keeping control of the all-important patents.  Google continues to make strategic acquisitions of startups in the fields of gaming, virtual reality, online music, image recognition and artificial intelligence.

The Google Brain Project, initiated in 2011, has used Google’s massive reserves of data and its distributed computer infrastructure to develop a large-scale artificial neural network, capable of interpreting visual, written or auditory data and learning from its own mistakes. Elements of this technology are now used in the speech recognition feature of the Android Operating System.

In 2013, the company introduced Google Glass, a hands-free voice-activated computer built into a pair of eyeglasses, with a display projected into the eye and an audio speaker audible only to the wearer.  Google Glass enables the wearer to take pictures, record video, dictate messages, navigate, and access other information without significantly obstructing the natural field of vision. Google made prototypes available on a limited basis through 2015, before withdrawing the product for further experimentation.

Google reorganized its multifarious interests as a holding company, Alphabet Inc., in 2015, with Google as its principal subsidiary.  Larry Page and Eric Schmidt retained their roles as CEO and executive chairman, respectively, at the new parent company and named a new CEO, Sundar Pichai, to head Google. Sergey Brin served as first president of Alphabet.

Today, Google remains the Internet’s most visited website, employing well over a million servers around the world to process over 3.5 billion search requests every day. In 2016, the company opened a new 11-story office complex on St. Pancras Square in London. As of that year, Google had 70 offices in more than 40 countries, and data centers across the U.S., in Chile, Finland, Ireland, Belgium, Singapore and Taiwan.

Former Stanford University president John L. Hennessy succeeded Schmidt as executive Chairman of Alphabet in 2018.  At the end of 2019, Sergey Brin and Larry Page announced that they would step down from their executive positions with Alphabet.  Sundar Pichai was named CEO of Alphabet as well as Google.  Brin and Page continue to serve on Alphabet’s board; as the two largest stockholders they retain controlling interest in Alphabet and all its subsidiaries, including Google.

Since 1999, Larry Page has experienced difficulties with his voice.  By 2013, both of his vocal cords had become paralyzed, possibly due to an autoimmune disorder.  He has donated a reported $20 million to a vocal-cord nerve-function research program at Massachusetts General Hospital. His family foundation, named for his father, has donated $15 million to combat the epidemic of Ebola virus in West Africa. Larry Page and his wife, Lucinda Southworth, have their principal residence in Palo Alto, California.  As of 2021, Larry Page had amassed a personal fortune of over $100 billion. He is among the six wealthiest individuals in the world.

In January 2022, Wisk Aero, the California-based eVTOL company from Google co-founder Larry Page, announced a $450 million funding boost from The Boeing Company to further develop its Cora, an electric VTOL aircraft that the company plans to get type-certified with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) as an autonomous, all-electric, air taxi. Wisk’s 6th generation eVTOL aircraft will be the first candidate for the certification of “an autonomous, all-electric, passenger-carrying aircraft in the US.”

In May 2024, Larry Page joined the $100 Billion Club with a net worth of $114 billion, thanks to his shares in Google. Although he stepped away from day-to-day operations four years ago, he remains one of the company’s largest individual shareholders.

If you use the Internet, chances are you use Google every day. The search engine and the enormously successful company that shares its name were the creation of a pair of Stanford University graduate students still in their mid-20s, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

It was Larry Page who first hit on the idea of analyzing Internet links to rate their relevance to a given information search. At first Page was only interested in writing a fun and interesting dissertation, but he soon realized his idea had far greater potential. With his classmate Sergey Brin, he presented his work to acclaim at the World Wide Web conference in 1998. Within a year they had raised over $30 million to start a company, Google Inc., providing a free Web search service that can return an ordered list of results in a fraction of a second. The simple white page with the multi-colored logo was an immediate hit with Web surfers around the world. The website generates enormous revenue by providing advertising space, linked by content to the results of a given search.

When Page took the company public in 2004, he and Sergey Brin became multibillionaires overnight. That same year, they joined the select company of Academy of Achievement student delegates who have returned to the International Achievement Summit as honorees of the Academy. Today, Google is the most-used Web search service in the world, conducting more than a billion searches a day, in over 100 languages, and has given the English language a new verb: “to Google.” Larry Page and Sergey Brin have transformed the way the world accesses and uses information.

We’re talking to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Google. Sergey Brin, how do you see Google as a company, and what do you hope to accomplish with it?

Sergey Brin:   At Google, our mission is to make the world’s information accessible and useful. And that means all of the world’s information, which now, in our index, numbers over a billion documents, and it’s an incredible resource. In history, you have never had access to just pretty much all of the world’s information in seconds, and we have that now, and to make it really useful, you have to have a good way of finding whatever it is that you want.   That’s precisely what we work on at Google. My hope is to provide instant access to any information anybody ever wants in the future.

Certainly, you weren’t the only ones with that objective at the time, but you two did something about it. How do you account for that?

Sergey Brin: That’s true. Certainly anyone can say, “Oh, I want to build a car that is going to cost $5 and go 500 miles an hour,” and that would be great.

I was fortunate to be at Stanford, and I was really interested in data mining, which means analyzing large amounts of data, discovering patterns and trends. And at the same time, Larry joined Stanford in ’95, and he started downloading the Web, which it turns out to be the most interesting data you can possibly mine. Our joint effort, just looking at the data out of curiosity, we found that we had technology to do a better job of search, and from that initial technology, we got really interested in the problem, and we realized how impactful having great search can be. So we built technology upon technology after that, to bring Google to where it is today, and we continue to develop lots of technology for tomorrow.

Why is it that you perceived the need for Google before anyone else did?

Larry Page: Well, it’s actually a great argument for pure research because…

We didn’t start out to do a search engine at all. In late 1995, I started collecting the links on the Web, because my advisor and I decided that would be a good thing to do. We didn’t know exactly what I was going to do with it, but it seemed like no one was really looking at the links on the Web — which pages link to which pages. In computer science, there’s a lot of big graphs. Right now, (the Web) has like five billion edges and two billion nodes. So it is a huge graph. I figured I could get a dissertation and do something fun and perhaps practical at the same time, which is really what motivates me.

I started off by reversing the links, and then I wanted to find basically, say, who links to the Stanford home page, and there’s 10,000 people who link to Stanford. Then the question is, which ones do you show? So you can only show 10, and we ended up with this way of ranking links, based on the links. Then we were like, “Wow, this is really good. It ranks things in the order you would expect to see them.” Stanford would be first. You can take universities and just rank them, and they come out in the order you’d expect. So we thought, “This is really interesting. This thing really works. We should use it for search.” So I started building a search engine. Sergey also came on very early, probably in late ’95 or early ’96, and was really interested in the data mining part. Basically, we thought, “Oh, we should be able to make a better search engine.”

Search engines didn’t really understand the notion of which pages were more important. If you typed “Stanford,” you got random pages that mentioned Stanford. This obviously wasn’t going to work.

Larry Page, where do you go from here? What do you see yourself doing in ten or 20 years?

Larry Page: Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. So we have the ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the Web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing. That’s obviously artificial intelligence, to be able to answer any question, basically, because almost everything is on the Web, right? We’re nowhere near doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we work on. And that’s tremendously interesting from an intellectual standpoint.

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The rise, disappearance, and retirement of Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin

The duo gave up control of parent company alphabet on tuesday.

By Nick Statt , is a Senior Producer on Decoder. Previously, he wrote about technology and gaming for Naavik, Protocol, and The Verge.

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No two tech executives are quite as enigmatic and private as Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The two men, who started Google more than 20 years ago while computer science graduate students at Stanford University, have hardly been seen or heard from in the last half-decade or so, since restructuring the company to create Google parent Alphabet and leaving Sundar Pichai in charge of a newly streamlined Google.

Yet on Tuesday afternoon, Page and Brin dropped a bombshell announcement : they’re relinquishing control of Alphabet to current Google CEO Sundar Pichai as well, and effectively stepping away from management for good. The news, while it sounded like a big development, felt inevitable. Page and Brin haven’t been deeply involved in the day-to-day operations of the company for some time it seems, and the announcement was making it official. It’s the Sundar Pichai show now, from top to bottom. (Page and Brin will retain their controlling shares and seats on the board, and both plan to keep in regular communication with Pichai.)

Larry Page and Sergey Brin are stepping back for good

It’s a fitting end for two of the most mysterious tech leaders of a generation, who are both exiting their company as it hovers near $1 trillion in market cap. But it’s also a troubling time for Google. The search giant has faced increasing scrutiny from employees, media organizations, activists, regulators, and lawmakers since Page and Brin first stepped back in the summer of 2015. And many of those controversies are problems of Page and Brin’s creation, either because the duo didn’t foresee the ways in which Google could do harm or because they explicitly steered the company in a direction that flouted standard corporate ethics.

In that context, it’s important to look back at the big moments in both men’s careers and how the actions they took have had an outsized impact not just on the tech industry, but on the internet and society itself. What Page and Brin have built will likely last for decades to come, and knowing how Google got to where it is today will be an important piece in the puzzle of figuring out where it goes in the future.

AUGUST 1996: Larry Page and Sergey Brin meet at Stanford University, develop PageRank, and launch Google

Page and Brin met at Stanford University in 1995, as both were in the school’s computer science graduate program. The origin of Google is a story about the origin of an idea, and that idea was Page’s vision that a World Wide Web search engine could rank links based on how often they were being linked by other pages. With Brin’s help, the idea turned into PageRank, the foundational algorithm of Google Search. The search product went live on Stanford’s network in 1996.

1996: Brin’s resume contains hidden “objective” detailing his future lifestyle

Brin’s 1996 resume remains accessible on as part of Stanford’s online archives, and you can still go read it right now . Among the projects he was working on at the time, prior to forming Google, include a movie rating platform and a code conversion tool for turning academic papers into HTML files.

But if you inspected the source code on the webpage, you’d find Brin’s hidden “objective” laid out bare: “A large office, good pay, and very little work. Frequent expense-account trips to exotic lands would be a plus.” Lucky for Brin, he would very much get to enjoy that lifestyle in his later years at Google after he moved on from being co-president with Page to heading up the company’s experimental divisions.

1998: Page and Brin rail against ad-supported search engines in Stanford paper

Although Google is now one of the most powerful forces in online advertising on the planet, Page and Brin weren’t too keen on turning their prototype search engine into an ad-selling machine, at first. In a Stanford paper titled, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” the duo laid out the case for a search engine that would not be biased toward entities that paid top dollar for higher placement:

In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

1999: Page and Brin try to sell Google for $1 million, then $750,000

While Page and Brin had officially incorporated Google, and smartly changed its name from Backrub , in 1998, the two men shortly after thought they might sell the company, apparently not quite aware of the potential of the product.

In fact, Page and Brin tried to sell Google for $1 million to internet portal company Excite in 1999, as recalled by Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla . The prominent venture capitalist was able to negotiate Page and Brin down to as low as $750,000, but Excite CEO George Bell still wouldn’t take the deal. Google is now worth nearly $913 billion.

2000: Google adopts “Don’t be evil” slogan as its primary corporate value

Accounts on the genesis “don’t be evil” differ. Gmail inventor Paul Buchheit wrote in his personal blog back in 2007 that he coined the phrase during a meeting on corporate values, as a way to “jab at a lot of the other companies, especially our competitors, who at the time, in our opinion, were kind of exploiting the users to some extent.”

But early engineer and future Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer was once quoted as saying early engineer Amit Patel wrote it on a whiteboard in 1999. Buchheit also corroborates a portion of that account, saying after the corporate values meeting, in which he says both he and Patel lobbied for “don’t be evil,” that Patel went around the company scribbling the phrase on whiteboards to help spread it around the company.

Either way, Page and Brin agreed to make the slogan an official corporate value some time around the year 2000, convinced by Buchheit and Patel that the motto helped enshrine the company’s engineering-first approach and would stave off money-hungry tactics from the increasing number of business and sales employees Google was hiring to help sell more ads. The phrase would later become an official company motto when it was included and explained on the company’s prospectus , as part of its S-1 filing to go public. “We will live up to our “don’t be evil” principle by keeping user trust and not accepting payment for search results,” Page would write in the S-1.

August 2001: Page gives up CEO role to Eric Schmidt

After officially incorporating and launching Google to the public in 1998, Page and Brin were overseeing one of the fastest-growing companies in corporate history. For the graduate school dropouts, it was a bit much. Especially after Page’s high-profile attempt earlier that year to fire all of Google’s project managers, a move the company eventually reversed in an embarrassing public refutation of his leadership.

Eventually, Page and Brin, at the behest of investors, brought on Novell CEO Eric Schmidt to provide, as Brin famously painted it in a 2001 television interview , “parental supervision.” For Google stakeholders and the company’s more experienced executive leadership, it was a way to sideline the stubborn but socially awkward Page from doing too much damage to the company while it was still growing exponentially.

Ultimately, however, Page’s ability to let others step in and take the reins, a learning he would draw throughout his career, was a recognition that power and forward-facing leadership don’t always go hand in hand, and that he and Brin could both be effective at the company and retain their influence without overseeing every aspect of the business. Although at the time, Page was notoriously unhappy about having to relinquish control to non-engineers.

2002: Yahoo wants to buy Google for $3 billion, but Page and Brin don’t bite

If you someone from the year 2019 traveled back in time and told you about the eventual fate of Yahoo, it would have been hard to believe. In 2002, Yahoo was an internet giant of unprecedented size, and it wanted in on Google’s fast-growing search business . So much so that Yahoo was willing to pay up to $3 billion for it, a then-unconscionable amount of money for a startup with what Yahoo CEO Terry Semel considered lackluster revenue.

Props to Yahoo for seeing the value in Google — Yahoo leadership was right after all, about Google becoming a big thing — but Page and Brin weren’t in the mood to sell. Just three years after they were willing to take $750,000 for Google, it had grown into an entity they felt was worth more than 4,000 times that price.

Flash forward a decade and a half or so and Yahoo has been sold off to Verizon and folded into Oath, a media conglomerate ultimately rebranded as Verizon Media. Rumor has it people still use its email service.

August 2004: Google goes public at a valuation of $27 billion; Page and Brin create super-voting Class B shares

Just a few years after hiring Schmidt, Google was on a fast-moving rocket to the upper echelon of not just the tech industry, but the broader American business landscape. It filed for an initial public offering, which took place in August of 2004 and raised $1.7 billion, giving Google a valuation of $27 billion.

One particularly notable aspect of Google’s IPO was Page and Brin’s decision to create a so-called super-voting Class B stock that only they, Schmidt, and a handful of other executives were granted. That Class B stock came with 10 times the voting power of a Class A share, meaning Page and Brin would hoard just over 50 percent of it as a way to maintain control of the company in perpetuity, and that remains the case even today following their official departure.

At the time, Page described the move, which would later be copied by a number of high-profile Silicon Valley companies including Facebook, as a way to “maximize value in the long term.” That was a goal the co-founders believed shareholder concerns, which focus on near-term profit, might jeopardize. “We are creating a corporate structure that is designed for stability over long time horizons. By investing in Google, you are placing an unusual long term bet on the team, especially Sergey and me, and on our innovative approach,” Page wrote.

August 2005: Page buys Android for $50 million, without telling Schmidt

One of Page’s most prescient business calculations was the rise of mobile computing, and he moved quick to snap up a small startup by the name of Android in the summer of 2005 to the tune of $50 million. He did so without telling Schmidt , who was then still CEO, because Page believed so strongly that Android co-founder Andy Rubin could help the company make inroads in the mobile software market.

Of course, Android would go on to become the most popular mobile OS in the world. The project underwent a last-minute course correction after Rubin watched Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveil the iPhone in 2007 , famously viewing the presentation on a laptop while riding a cab in Las Vegas. But with the 2008 announcement of the T-Mobile G1 / HTC Dream, the first Android phone was out in the wild and would form the foundation for the world’s first open source mobile operating system.

October 2006: Susan Wojcicki convinces Page and Brin to approve YouTube acquisition

Susan Wojcicki was the 16th employee at Google and the person whose garage the company was literally started out of. That meant she often had the confidence of Page and Brin, but it did take some convincing on her part to get Google leadership to approve the the landmark $1.65 billion acquisition of an online video site called YouTube .

Wojcicki, who oversaw Google’s own fledging video platform, quickly and early on identified YouTube as the clear winner in what would become a contested online video race. So she moved fast to buy it while Google still had an upper hand at the negotiation table. “I saw an opportunity to combine the two services,” Wojcicki recalled in venture capitalist John Doerr’s book Measure What Matters . ”I worked up some spreadsheets to justify the $1.65 billion purchase price... and convinced Larry and Sergey.” Sounds like listening to Wojcicki was a smart decision, discounting of course the never-ending YouTube controversies of late.

September 2008: Google launches Chrome browser, thanks to Sundar Pichai

After Page and Brin hired a number of developers from Mozilla Firefox, and at the suggestion of superstar product manager Sundar Pichai, Google embarked on its quest to build a better web browser. This was despite then-CEO Schmidt’s insistence that Google stay out of what he later categorized as the “bruising browser wars.” The eventual product was Chrome. The browser’s eventual domination of the market is one of Pichai’s most stunning business successes, and it helped push the product chief toward the CEO role years later.

At the time, however, Schmidt had to be convinced it was worth the time and effort, and it was Page’s job to do so. “It was so good that it essentially forced me to change my mind,” Schmidt said at a press conference in 2009 of the original Chrome demo, developed by the former Mozilla engineers. Page responded during that interview that he thinks they “just wore [him] down.”

January 2011: Page takes over as CEO again and Schmidt shifts to executive chairman

After 10 years at the helm, Schmidt ended his tenure at Google with the cheeky tweet, “Day-to-day adult supervision is no longer needed.” In what was then the biggest executive shakeup in Google’s history , Page took the reins back as CEO and Schmidt took on an advisory gig as executive chairman of the board.

All three men retained their super-voting class stock that gave them complete control of the company’s direction, but the move signaled a big shift for Google. “One of the primary goals I have is to get Google to be a big company that has the nimbleness and soul and passion and speed of a start-up,” Page told The New York Times of the shift .

It was the beginning of a new era for the company as Page and Brin would employ their newfound control of the company to launch its Google X skunkworks, and delve further into experimental hardware and long-term projects far outside the bounds of its core product offerings.

June 2012: Brin shows off Google Glass prototype with live skydiving demo

Brin, who at this point held the official title of “Co-Founder” and who was responsible mostly for exploring new products, will forever be remembered for being the person to debut Google Glass, the first mass-produced face computer. Developed as one of the first products out of Google X (now simply just X), the internal skunkworks lab known as “ the moonshot factory, ” Google Glass was an early attempt at a heads-up display that would go on to fail rather publicly over privacy concerns, design criticism, and an overall messy and chaotic launch.

But when Brin debuted the device onstage at Google I/O in 2012, it seemed like the future had come falling out of the sky — literally. Google had hired a team of skydivers to jump out of an airplane above San Francisco while live streaming the jump from a Glass prototype. It was far and away the most impressive tech demo since the unveiling of the iPhone, and it was very much Page and Brin telling the world that Google was about much more than boring web products. They were signaling to everyone in attendance and watching online that Google would deliver the future faster than any of its competitors.

2012: Page suffers from vocal chord paralysis

Page was largely silent for most of 2012, a product of vocal chord paralysis that the newly re-minted CEO revealed the following year in a Google+ post . The condition has affected Page at various points in his life, but it hit him particularly hard the year after he took the reins back at Google. It caused him to miss the company’s 2012 I/O conference as a result.

Although Page would go on to give a speech at the 2013 I/O conference just a few days after disclosing his condition, this admission would mark the moment Page began drastically cutting down on his speaking engagements. In subsequent years, Page began skipping earnings calls and would rarely speak to the press, as his voice became increasingly quiet and hoarse due to the condition’s impact on his breathing.

May 2013: Page discusses his vision for Google Island

One of Page’s most high-profile talks and one of his last public speaking engagements took place in May of 2013 at the company’s I/O conference, one year after Brin used the same stage to announce Google Glass. There, wearing a bright red shirt under a jet black jacket, Page detailed his vision for a so-called Google Island , where technological progress could march on unabated by silly concerns like regulatory requirements and ethics.

It was mostly just Page riffing on his desire for a different kind of tech industry that didn’t have to be so beholden to corporate interests, shareholders, and advertising. He wanted a slice of the world that could just develop new tech for the sake of it and to better humanity.

But it was a weird speech, and it definitely felt like the beginning, or at leas the first public sign, of Page’s evolution into the ultra-rich, detached founder who just can’t be bothered with the day-to-day struggles of normal human beings. (As my colleague Casey Newton just wrote, Page began taking on a kind of Doctor Manhattan status over the years, and this certainly felt like a turning point in that shift.) Of course, you can’t recall this moment without mentioning tech journalist Mat Honan’s iconic and imaginative speculation about life on Google Island he wrote for Wired , now an infamous piece of tech industry fan fiction.

September 2013: Google creates Calico to focus on life extension

Following the launch of Google X, the debut of Google Glass, and the unveiling of the company’s self-driving car project, the search giant turned its sights on the sciences. In particular, Page was interested in life extension. So the company, through its Google Ventures investment arm, created Calico , a company effectively aimed at curing death. It’s headed up by Bill Maris, the founding partner of Google Ventures, who recruited former Genentech CEO Art Levinson to be its chief executive.

It was yet another signal that Page’s Google was willing to put down huge sums of money toward problems far outside the realm of online search and mobile operating systems. Calico, however, has so far seemingly failed to yield any meaningful advancements in the life sciences, medicine, or biotechnology industries. It is unclear what, if anything, the company is focused on right now.

2014: Brin has extramarital affair with employee Amanda Rosenberg

You can trace the end of Brin’s time as the exuberant, Tony Stark-like futurist face of Google to a disastrous series of headlines in early 2014 detailing his extramarital affair with an employee on the Google Glass team. The most prominent of the stories was a Vanity Fair article detailing the intricacies of the affair from start to finish as it played out the previous summer.

Amanda Rosenberg, who became a marketing manager for the device as it was moving from the experimental Google X lab to a full-fledged product, began a relationship with Brin while Brin was married to fellow Google employee Susan Wojcicki’s sister Anne Wojcicki, who was the founder and CEO of genomics company 23andMe. Rosenberg herself was publicly dating Android vice president Hugo Barra, who later moved to China to take a job with Xiaomi.

The fallout was a rare but highly visible blot on Brin’s career, although his holdings in the company would have prevented any attempt to oust him. (He retained his role as overseer of Google X.) Brin and Wojcicki divorced, and Page reportedly stopped talking to his co-founder for some time over the situation. More recently, Rosenberg has begun publicly discussing the effects the affair had on her career and personal life , and she’s also penned a book about living with bipolar disorder.

In an oral history of Google’s early days , Brin was playfully accused of being “the Google playboy” due to getting sexually involved with employees, and early HR manager Heather Cairns called him “a sexual harassment claim waiting to happen.”

October 2014: Andy Rubin leaves Google, but Page chooses not to disclose sexual misconduct claim

Amid Brin’s relationship with Rosenberg, Google was also dealing with another instance of sexual misconduct, although this one much more serious. In late 2013, Android co-founder Andy Rubin, who at that point in the company’s history was overseeing Google’s ominous-sounding Replicant robotics division, left the company. As reported to the press, it was on good terms. “I want to wish Andy all the best with what’s next,” Page said in a statement at the time. “With Android he created something truly remarkable — with a billion-plus happy users.”

But behind the scenes, Rubin was pushed out after an employee accused of him of coercing her into performing oral sex in a hotel room. Google investigated the claim, deemed it credible, and decided Rubin had to go, but Page, Brin, and other members of the executive team allegedly decided not to reveal that information to the press.

Rubin was sent on his way with a $90 million exit package an addition $150 million stock grant. None of this would be made public until The New York Times published a story in October of 2018 detailing the allegations against Rubin and how it was handled at upper levels of Google leadership. Rubin went on to found smartphone company Essential, while Google decided to disband its robotics division and sell off its most valuable asset , robot maker Boston Dynamics, to SoftBank.

Google parent company Alphabet is now conducting an internal investigation into how its executives handled claims of sexual misconduct, after numerous other incidents similar to Rubin’s were brought to light, and following a massive employee protest in 2018 known as the Google Walkout which formed in response to the Rubin revelations.

August 2015: Google restructures as Alphabet

By the summer of 2015, Google was a remarkably different company than when Page had reassumed his CEO role four years prior. The company was involved in self-driving cars, wearable technology, the Nexus smartphone line, and numerous other product and experimental research efforts spanning artificial intelligence, cloud and quantum computing, and even fiber internet.

Given that complexity, it was time, in Page and Brin’s eyes, to shake things up. “Our company is operating well today, but we think we can make it cleaner and more accountable. So we are creating a new company,” Page wrote in a blog post .

The new company would be called Alphabet , and it would remove Page and Brin from any day-to-day operations at Google proper and elevate them to CEO and president, respectively, of what is effectively a holding company. The process made Google’s financials a bit easier to parse as the various experimental divisions got broken out from Google proper. More importantly it raised Sundar Pichai to the position of Google CEO.

In the broader scope of Page and Brin’s careers, this is the moment both men decided to let go of the steering wheel and the beginning of their more serious retreat from the public eye. Of course, both still retained their super-voting class shares, and Pichai reported directly to Page. In the process of the restructuring, Google ditched “Don’t be evil” as an official motto, replaced as “do the right thing” in the Alphabet code of conduct . (Page and Brin retained the phrase in the separate Google code of conduct .)

2016: Page begins investing in “flying cars”

Page more or less disappeared off the face of the Earth after relinquishing control of Google proper to Pichai and taking on his new role as Alphabet CEO. He still made regular appearances at the company’s all-hands meetings and could be found wandering various parts of the Googleplex campus alongside Brin. But he never again would speak on an investor call, to the press, or at a product event .

What he did end up getting involved in was flying cars . More accurately, they’re eVTOLs, short for electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles. Page now has his hands in numerous startups, as an investor and advisor, dedicated to bringing aerial electric vehicles to market. It’s not quite clear why he’s so interested in this technology or why he has spent his years post-Alphabet restructuring putting his money toward this particular market — he has not given an interview about his interest. But it does have the air of an older, rich celebrity developing a fondness for luxury cars, with an appropriate tech twist.

January 2017: Brin makes rare public appearance to protest Trump’s immigration order

Just as Page pulled off a disappearing act in 2015, Brin too became a hermit of sorts. It’s hard to find any information on what he’s been up to in the years since becoming president of Alphabet and leaving his role at Google proper. He is reportedly working on a giant “sky yacht,” an aircraft that will ferry supplies for humanitarian missions , and joined a chorus of fellow tech leaders last year in voicing concern for the rapid development of AI . But that’s kind of it.

He did, however, show up in a personal capacity to a protest of President Donald Trump’s immigration-related executive order at San Francisco International Airport in January 2017; Brin is a Russian immigrant. That naturally made headlines , as did speeches Brin and Pichai gave to employees shortly after on the company’s commitment to supporting immigrants and opposing Trump’s executive order. Brin has not made any public appearances in support of political causes since.

September 2018: Breitbart leaks video of Page and Brin all-hands meeting after Trump’s election

While Page and Brin receded from public view starting around 2015, they were reportedly quite active in Google’s famous weekly TGIY all-hands sessions, in which executives would answer questions from employees and address big-picture topics at the company and in the news. One such session, occurring just after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, was two years later leaked to conservative news outlet Breitbart .

“Most people here are pretty upset and pretty sad,” Brin is seen saying as the meeting kicks off. “I find this election deeply offensive, and I know many of you do too. It’s a stressful time, and it conflicts with many of our values. I think it’s a good time to reflect on that. ... So many people apparently don’t share the values that we have.”

This is perhaps the last time the public will ever see Google’s co-founders speaking in front of a crowd, and that feels more certain to be the case after Tuesday’s announcement. Earlier this month, Pichai announced to employees that Google will be scaling back its weekly all-hands meetings due to leaks, as pressure mounts internally and externally on Google leadership and how it has been handling the tumultuous few years since the Alphabet restructuring . But Page and Brin, although they are no longer involved in the company’s operations, do remain in control of the company given their super-voting class shares.

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A two-time CEO of Google and its parent company Alphabet Inc, Page is one of the two original creators of the world’s most powerful search engine, having previously written a website called BackRub during his early years at Stanford University in the mid-1990s that brought about Google’s inception. Born in 1973 in Lansing, Michigan, his father was a brilliant computer scientist himself, holding a PhD in the subject and being generally regarded as a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence . His father was a professor at Michigan State University and his mother a computer programming instructor at the same school. Page was immersed in computers and obsessed with reading as a child, and he also played multiple instruments and enjoyed musical composition. He claims to have been the first kid at his school to turn in an assignment written on a word processor. Page graduated from the University of Michigan in 1995 with a honors degree in computer engineering, where he built an inkjet printer out of Lego bricks. He went on to enroll in Stanford University to pursue a doctorate in computer science, where he met future Google co-creator Sergey Brin at new student orientation. Seeking a subject for a paper early on at Stanford, Page started exploring the math behind the World Wide Web and how web pages were linked together. He realized it was comparable to how academic papers were referenced in other academic papers. He and Brin combined to start a research project called BackRub in 1996, along with Scott Hassan, who wrote much of the code for the search engine. BackRub began crawling the web in March 1996 from Page’s own personal page on Stanford’s website. The first version of Google , released onto Stanford’s site in August 1996 had indexed 75.2 million HTML URLs and downloaded 207 gigabytes of content. Needless to say, Stanford wasn’t particularly pleased with how much of its server space was being consumed by a single program. The two students registered the domain name google.com in September 1997 and incorporated the company a year later. By the end of 1998, Google had indexed 60 million pages. In 1999, Page and Brin tried to sell Google to Excite, a leading search engine of the day, for $1 million. Even after they lowered the price to $750,000, Excite CEO George Bell rejected the price. As of the time of this writing, Google was worth approximately $1.36 trillion. By June 2000, Google had indexed its 1 billionth URL. As president of the company, Page made a lot of big changes, including refusing to let engineers be managed by non-engineers and that ‘ideas are more important than age.’ Page stepped down as CEO in 2001 and the company went public in 2004 with its IP, making Page a billionaire at age 30. Page led the company’s acquisition of Android for $50 million in 2005 that led to the company’s dive into the smartphone industry. Page returned as CEO in 2011. He shut down a lot of the company’s underperforming products and features over the next two years. He stepped down again in 2019.

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• Larry Page stepped down as CEO of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, in 2019 but remains a board member and a controlling shareholder.
• He cofounded Google in 1998 with fellow Stanford Ph.D. student Sergey Brin.
• With Brin, Page invented Google's PageRank algorithm, which powers the search engine.
• Page was CEO until 2001, when Eric Schmidt took over, and then from 2011 until 2015, when he became CEO of Google's new parent firm Alphabet.

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You never lose a dream; it just incubates as a hobby. Larry Page

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Biography of Larry Page

Co-founding google, achievements and recognition.

Larry Page, one of the co-founders and current President of Product at Google, developed a passion for computers from a young age. His father, Dr. Carl Victor Page, was a computer science professor at the University of Michigan. Following in his father's footsteps, Larry became an honorary graduate of the University of Michigan, earning a Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering. During his time as a student, Larry built a model of an inkjet printer using Lego™.

While pursuing his postgraduate studies at Stanford University, Larry met Sergey Brin. Together, they founded and led the company Google in 1998. Larry took a leave of absence from Stanford after completing his Master's degree to focus on Google. As the CEO of Google, Larry expanded the company's workforce to over 200 employees and increased its profitability. In April 2001, he transitioned to the role of President of Product, sharing responsibility for the day-to-day operations of Google with Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin.

In 2002, Larry was honored with the title of "Global Leader for Tomorrow" at the World Economic Forum in Davos. He is also a member of the National Advisory Committee for the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan. Alongside co-founder Sergey Brin, Larry received the Marconi Prize in 2004. He serves as the CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation and was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2004.

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A biographical snapshot of Google co-founder Larry Page

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NAME: Larry Page

EDUCATION: Bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan, master’s degree from Stanford University, on leave from Ph.D. program at Stanford.

PERSONAL: Married to Lucy Southworth.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Took over as Google Inc.'s CEO in April 2011, having left the post in 2001 to become Google’s president of products. Co-founded Google in 1998 with Sergey Brin and served as founding CEO.

NET WORTH: $52.4 billion, according to Forbes magazine.

Lawrence Page

The son of Michigan State University computer science professor Dr. Carl Victor Page, Larry's love of computers began at age six. While following in his father's footsteps in academics, he became an honors graduate from the University of Michigan, where he earned a bachelor of science degree in engineering, with a concentration on computer engineering. During his time in Ann Arbor, Larry built an inkjet printer out of Lego™ bricks.

While in the Ph.D. program in computer science at Stanford University, Larry met Sergey Brin and together they developed and ran Google, which began operating in 1998. Larry went on leave from Stanford after earning his master's degree.

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How Larry Page’s Obsessions Became Google’s Business

By Conor Dougherty

• Jan. 22, 2016

Three years ago, Charles Chase, an engineer who manages Lockheed Martin’s nuclear fusion program, was sitting on a white leather couch at Google’s Solve for X conference when a man he had never met knelt down to talk to him.

They spent 20 minutes discussing how much time, money and technology separated humanity from a sustainable fusion reaction — that is, how to produce clean energy by mimicking the sun’s power — before Mr. Chase thought to ask the man his name.

“I’m Larry Page,” the man said. He realized he had been talking to Google’s billionaire co-founder and chief executive .

“He didn’t have any sort of pretension like he shouldn’t be talking to me or ‘Don’t you know who you’re talking to?’” Mr. Chase said. “We just talked.”

Larry Page is not a typical chief executive, and in many of the most visible ways, he is not a C.E.O. at all. Corporate leaders tend to spend a good deal of time talking at investor conferences or introducing new products on auditorium stages. Mr. Page, who is 42, has not been on an earnings call since 2013, and the best way to find him at Google I/O — an annual gathering where the company unveils new products — is to ignore the main stage and follow the scrum of fans and autograph seekers who mob him in the moments he steps outside closed doors.

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Larry Page Bio: The Story Behind Google’s Co-Founder

Larry page bio facts, larry page key facts summary, larry page birthplace and early life, larry page early business success, larry page videos, larry page business failures, larry page family, larry page career earnings, larry page real estate holdings, larry page quotes, question: what is larry page’s net worth, question: how much of google does larry page own, question: is larry page richer than bill gates, question: did larry page fail as the ceo of google.

I use Google every day, whether it is searching for something, using Google Maps, or one of their countless other products. However, I realized that I didn’t know a lot about the history of this company and its co-founder, Larry Page.

In this Larry Page bio, I’m going to take you through the history of his life and show you that, even from a young age, he seemed destined to create something big.

Before I get into how he got the idea for Google, here are some quick bio facts about Larry Page.

• He co-founded Google with Sergey Brin in 1998.
• His research project at Stanford University, nicknamed BackRub, created the basis for the Google search engine.
• He has a net worth of $94 billion.
• Known for his innovation, he created an inkjet printer using Lego while at Stanford University.
• Page stepped down as CEO of Google in 2002 due to poor management decisions but returned as head of Google in 2011.
• He grew up alongside technology as his father had a Ph.D. in computer science, and his mother was a computer programming instructor at college.
• Married and has two children with his wife, Lucinda Southworth.
• The family foundation, the Carl Victor Page Memorial Fund, donates money to many educational, societal, and medical causes.

When I started looking into the childhood of Larry Page, I thought there were many indications that he would be significant in the tech world.

Page was born in Lansing, Michigan, in 1973 to Carl Victor Page Sr and Gloria Page. His father had a PhD in computer science, and his mother was a computer programming instructor at college. So, you can already see where Page got his tech background from, and he grew up in a household obsessed with computers and technology.

His early years shaped his future business life, and his parents played a major role in this. I found it interesting that he was the first child in his school to turn in an assignment that was created on a word processor.

Page attended the Okemos Montessori School, East Lansing High School, and eventually went to the University of Michigan, where he earned a Bachelor of Science in computer engineering. He was awarded a Master’s in computer science from Stanford University in 1998.

One of the early indications of Page’s innovation was during his time at Stanford. He made an inkjet printer from Lego, which I thought was a pretty cool invention!

During his time at Stanford, Page started his interest in search engines and the mathematics behind the internet. His dissertation focused specifically on how web pages linked to each other and essentially created the basis for backlinks, as the premises explored the similarity between citations in academic research and potential backlink algorithms for a search engine.

This was when Larry Page met Sergey Brin, who joined his research project and would become two of the most important business operators in history.

They nicknamed the project ‘BackRub,’ and the earliest search algorithm used as the foundation of Google can be traced back to 1996. BackRub used a web crawler to analyze webpages across the internet and gathered valuable backlink data. This data and the relevance between links to different web pages created the PageRank algorithm, which is Google’s formula for ranking pages on its search engine.

By early 1998, the basic BackRub webpage and search query tool was getting 10,000 searches per day.

Page and Brin co-founded Google in 1998, and the search engine giant has become one of the biggest success stories in business history .

They got enough money together to buy some servers and worked out of a garage in Menlo Park, California. One of the early investors in Google was Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, who gave them $100,000. However, the pair hadn’t yet officially founded Google (as it wasn’t incorporated), but I think the fact that Bechtolsheim gave them $100,000 before they had properly registered the company showed the potential the concept of Google had.

By the end of the year, the Google search engine had indexed 60 million URLs, growing to 1 billion by June 2000. I found it interesting that Larry Page and Sergey Brin were initially against any form of ad’s on their search engine. However, they backtracked and allowed basic text advertisements in 2000.

I think one of the most significant business decisions Page and Brin made in the early years of Google was deciding not to sell the company to Excite. They initially decided to sell up for $1 million, and Vinod Khosla talked them down to $750,000 – but the Excite CEO rejected the deal at the time. Could you imagine if Google – with a market capitalization of 1.45 trillion in 2022 – had sold for less than a million dollars?

Page faced pressure in the early 2000s to step down as CEO as Google really began to grow in stature. Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital invested $50 million in the company and wanted to replace Page with a more experienced team, which he decided to do after meeting Steve Jobs and other tech CEOs, including Andrew Grove of Intel.

Page stepped down and became the President of Products, with Eric Schmidt assuming the CEO role. I think even though Page symbolically took a bit of a back seat, he was still very much involved in the decision-making at Google, and he pioneered the acquisition of Android for $50 million in 2005.

I think you can look at the period up until 2011 as somewhat lost years for Larry Page. Even though he was still a part of Google, he wasn’t as prominent (although he still wielded a significant degree of influence) and didn’t lead their IPO in 2004. However, it made him $3.6 billion, which took him into the exclusive billionaire category.

Eric Schmidt stepped down as Google’s CEO in 2011, and this brought Page back to the forefront of the company.

Page’s tenure as CEO from 2011 to 2019 led to a substantial restructuring of the company as he granted more autonomy to some of Google’s products, such as YouTube and AdWord. He also led the acquisition of other products with mixed success, some of which I will touch on below.

Page stepped down as CEO in 2019 to be replaced by Sundar Pichai.

Google dominates the search engine market, and by creating and acquiring other services, we all use some form of Google products daily. I think it is undeniable the success Page (alongside Sergey Brin) achieved. From turning Google as a concept while at Stanford University into creating a company that has so much influence over our lives.

I think one of the most significant failures in Larry Page’s career was during his first stint as CEO of Google in the early 2000s.

He was obsessed with being part of every project at the company, even as Google grew enormously in this period. One of his mantras was “Don’t delegate: Do everything you can yourself to make things go faster,” which I think caused a lot of issues at Google at the time.

In 2001, he decided to fire all the project managers at Google, which, understandably, caused an uproar and subsequently led to him stepping down as CEO in favor of Eric Schmidt. I think this highlights that he wasn’t ready for this level of leadership. Instead, the company fared better with a more experienced leader.

However, to show how much he learned from this experience, Page was voted number one on the Forbes “America’s Most Popular Chief Executives” list by Google employees in 2015.

There are other failures during Page’s career that I think it is useful to highlight. He admitted that he should have paid more attention to developing a social media platform. Google tried to buy Friendster in 2003 and then parked the social media concept for a number of years until Google Buzz and Google+ came along. Both failed, and by this point, Facebook had taken off.

Another failure is his decision to purchase Motorola for $12.5 billion in 2011. Three years later, he sold Motorola to Lenovo for $2.9 billion, representing a substantial financial loss.

Larry Page’s parents played a significant role in shaping this internet entrepreneur into the head of a company worth over a trillion dollars. His father, Carl Victor Page, Sr, had a Ph.D. in computer science, while his mother, Gloria, worked as a computer instructor. He has Jewish roots from his mother’s side of the family.

Larry Page’s brother, Carl Victor Page Jr, also had a big impact on his life and has become a successful internet entrepreneur in his own right. Carl owned eGroups, which was sold to Yahoo! in 2000 for $432 million.

Larry Page is married to Lucinda Southworth.

The couple married in 2005, and the ceremony was held on Necker Island, owned by a certain Richard Branson. The couple has two children.

Larry Page has an impressive net worth of $94 billion, which he earned by co-founding Google (now under the parent company, Alphabet).

His net worth has risen significantly over the last decade. In 2013, his net worth was estimated to be $23 billion, and it grew to almost $100 billion in 2022.

Page is a prominent investor in Tesla Motors. I found out that he has also contributed funds to various renewable energy technology.

The Page family runs the Carl Victor Page Memorial Foundation, which has assets of around a billion dollars. The fund has donated money to numerous charitable causes, including education and societal programs, helping to fight Ebola in Africa, and also the Voice Health Institute. Page suffers from Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, which paralyzes his vocal cords, and has prevented him from holding meetings and speaking at Google business events.

I wasn’t surprised to find out that Larry Page has a pretty impressive home. If you are worth nearly $100 billion, I would expect you to have a large real-estate portfolio.

I never thought of Larry Page as particularly extravagant, although he does have a sizeable collection of real estate, a super yacht, and a fleet of airplanes.

Page bought a home in Palo Alto, California, for $7.2 million, in 2005. This was his first real estate purchase. He subsequently purchased other properties in the area to create a 9,000-square feet estate with a significant eco house.

I also wasn’t surprised to learn that Larry Page owns a yacht. Page bought a 193-foot (59m) superyacht called Senses in 2011, and he paid $45 million. Also, Page and Eric Schmidt also own a fleet of eight private jets and a private terminal at San Jose International Airport, which he paid $82 million for in 2013.

“You never lose a dream; it just incubates as a hobby.”

“My job as a leader is to make sure everybody in the company has great opportunities, and that they feel they’re having a meaningful impact and are contributing to the good of society. As a world, we’re doing a better job of that. My goal is for Google to lead, not follow that.”

“Good ideas are always crazy until they’re not”

Frequently Asked Questions – Larry Page Bio

Answer: Larry Page has an estimated net worth of $94 billion. This has risen considerably over the last ten years, has his net worth in 2013 stood at $23 billion. His wealth has come from co-founding Google and the company going public in 2004.

Answer: Larry Page and Sergey Brin co-founded Google in 1998. After restructuring, the company is now owned by a parent organization, Alphabet. Page and Brin own 51% of B shares in the company (giving them overall control of the company), although this amounts to around 12% of total shares.

Answer: No. Larry Page has an estimated net worth of $94 billion, while Bill Gates has an estimated net worth of $107 billion. The two tech giants fall significantly behind Elon Musk , who is the wealthiest person in the world according to Forbes, with a net worth of $270 billion.

Answer: His first stint as CEO of Google wasn’t successful due to his management style. He was eventually ousted in favor of Eric Schmidt. However, Larry Page returned as CEO in 2011 and fared much better due to having more experience.

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The person responsible for providing us with all the information of the world is Larry Page; ranking on number 13 on Forbes richest people list with a net worth of 20.3 billion dollars. He is an American computer scientist, entrepreneur and the co-founder of Google.

Larry Page was born on 26th March 1973 in East Lansing, Michigan. Both his parents were experts in computers and following his parents line of interest, Page graduated from the University of Michigan with Bachelor of Science in computer engineering and Master of Science from Stanford University. He was interested in computers from an early age and he wanted to start his own company from age 12. He was the first child in his school to do an assignment on word processor. It was during his time in Stanford when the first seeds of this brilliant thought were planted.

After he entered the PhD program, he had to decide on a dissertation theme. This was when he came up with the idea that would link together web pages, like a citation links to a reference. He was joined with college friend and fellow PhD student Sergey Brin , who found this topic to be very appealing. The project was initially named ‘Backrub’. Both started working on this huge task of building a crawler that would convert backlink data into a degree of how important a web page was. Consequently, PageRank algorithm was created that made the duo realize that they could make a search engine far greater to the ones that were currently in use. The first version of Google came out in 1996 and it is still available on the Stanford University’s website.

Google Inc. was founded in 1998 with Larry Page and Sergey Brin as co-presidents. Its initial domain name was ‘Googol’ which was derived from a number that is one followed by hundred zeros. This represented the vast amount of data that the search engine was intended to explore. They stated their mission as ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’. With a humble beginning from Page’s garage the company expanded to own few offices in California in 1999 and then an entire complex called ‘Googleplex’, that is of the most extraordinary workplaces of the world comprising of amazing recreational and exercising facilities. By 2001 Google was growing with a fiery speediness and making big profits. The company’s first public offering was $1.67 billion which gave it a market capitalization of $23 billion. Page became a multi billionaire at just 27. As a favorite of shareholders, Google’s stock prices rose immensely. Page received the Academy of Achievement’s ‘Golden Plate Award’ in 2004.

By 2006, Google consisted of more than 10,000 employees with annual incomes of over ten billion dollars. Google bought several hardware and software companies out of which the most profitable was the purchase of YouTube for 1.65 billion dollars. Today, Google is one of the most used website with over a million servers worldwide. It processes more than a billion search requests every day.

Larry Page is one of the most successful entrepreneurs who laid the foundation for a venture that has changed the way in which internet was used.

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The Untold Story Of Larry Page's Incredible Comeback

One day in July 2001, Larry Page decided to fire Google’s project managers. All of them.

It was just five years since Page, then a 22-year-old graduate student at Stanford, was struck in the middle of the night with a vision. In it, he somehow managed to download the entire Web and by examining the links between the pages he saw the world’s information in an entirely new way.

What Page wrote down that night became the basis for an algorithm. He called it PageRank and used it to power a new Web search engine called BackRub. The name didn’t stick.

By July 2001, BackRub had been renamed Google and was doing really well. It had millions of users, an impressive list of investors, and 400 employees, including about a half-dozen project managers.

As at most startups, in Google’s first year there were no management layers between the CEO, Page, and the engineers. But as the company grew, it added a layer of managers, people who could meet with Page and the rest of Google’s senior executives and give the engineers prioritized orders and deadlines.

Page, now 28, hated it. Since Google hired only the most talented engineers, he thought that extra layer of supervision was not just unnecessary but also an impediment. He also suspected that Google’s project managers were steering engineers away from working on projects that were personally important to him. For example, Page had outlined a plan to scan all the world’s books and make them searchable online, but somehow no one was working on it. Page blamed the project managers.

Some dramatic streamlining was called for, he resolved. Instead of the project managers, all of Google’s engineers would report to one person, a newly hired VP of engineering named Wayne Rosing, and Rosing would report directly to him.

Google’s human resources boss, a serious woman with bangs named Stacey Sullivan, thought Page’s plan was nuts, according to “ I'm Feeling Lucky ,” Douglas Edwards' inside view of Google's early years. Sullivan told Page so. “You can’t just self-organize!” she said. “People need someone to go to when they have problems!”

Page ignored her.

Sullivan took her concerns to Eric Schmidt. In March, Schmidt had become the chairman of Google. Everyone assumed he’d be CEO as soon as he could leave his full-time job as CEO of Novell.

Schmidt agreed with Sullivan. So did Page’s executive coach, Bill Campbell. Everyone called Campbell “Coach” because he’d once been Columbia University's football coach. He still walked and talked like he was pacing a sideline.

As Steven Levy detailed in his own rollicking Google history, “ In the Plex ,” one evening, Campbell got into a big argument with Page about his plan. To prove his point, Campbell brought engineer after engineer into Page’s office to offer their perspective. One after another, they told Page that they actually preferred to have a manager — someone who could end disagreements and give their teams direction.

But Page was determined.

Schmidt in particular may have been the worst person for Sullivan to turn to for help back then. Page had never been behind hiring him — or any CEO, for that matter. Google’s investors made him do it.

Before long, Schmidt might have presented an obstacle to Page’s plan. But not yet. It was July 2001 and Schmidt hadn’t officially become CEO. So Page went ahead.

He deputized Rosing to break the news.

That afternoon, all 130 or so engineers and a half-dozen project managers showed up. They stood outside Page’s office amid Google’s mismatched cubicles and couches — which, like the rest of the company’s office furniture, had been bought from failed startups on the cheap.

Finally, Rosing, a bald man in glasses, began to speak. Rosing explained that engineering was getting a reorganization: All engineers would now report to him, all project managers were out of a job.

The news did not go over well. The project managers were stunned. They hadn’t been warned. They’d just been fired in front of all their colleagues.

The engineers demanded an explanation. So Page gave one. With little emotion, speaking in his usual flat, robotic tone, he explained that he didn’t like having non-engineers supervising engineers. Engineers shouldn't have to be supervised by managers with limited tech knowledge. Finally, he said, Google’s project managers just weren’t doing a very good job.

As Page talked, he kept his gaze averted, resisting direct eye contact. Though he was an appealing presence with above-average height and nearly black hair, he was socially awkward.

The news was met with a chorus of grumbling. Finally, one of the engineers in the room, Ron Dolin, started yelling at Page. He said an all-hands meeting was no place to give a performance review. What Page was doing was “completely ridiculous,” he said, and “totally unprofessional.”

“It sucked,” one of the project managers present said later. “I felt humiliated by it. Larry said in front of the company that we didn't need managers, and he talked about what he didn't like about us. He said things that hurt a lot of people.”

In the end, the layoffs didn’t stick. The project managers Page had intended to fire that day were instead brought into Google’s growing operations organization, under the leadership of Urs Hözle.

Page’s reorganization didn’t last long either. While some engineers thrived without supervision, problems arose. Projects that needed resources didn’t get them. Redundancy became an issue. Engineers craved feedback and wondered where their careers were headed.

Eventually, Google started hiring project managers again.

“I did my best to advise that there is true value in management, and you can set a tone by how you manage this,” Stacy Sullivan recalled in “I'm Feeling Lucky.” “Hopefully it was a lesson learned for Larry.”

By August 2001, Schmidt had fully extricated himself from his responsibilities at Novell. He became Google’s CEO — so-called adult supervision for Page and his co-founder, Brin.

And for a long time, Larry Page was very unhappy.

Everyone knows the Steve Jobs story — how he was fired from the company he founded — Apple — only to return from exile decades later to save the business.

What’s less-well understood is that Apple’s board and investors were absolutely right to fire Jobs. Early in his career, he was petulant, mean, and destructive. Only by leaving Apple, humbling himself, and finding a second success (with Pixar) was he able to mature into the leader who would return to Apple and build it into the world’s most-valuable company.

Larry Page is the Steve Jobs of Google.

Like Jobs, Page has a co-founder, Sergey Brin, but Page has always been his company’s true visionary and driving force.

And just as Apple’s investors threw Jobs out of his company, Google’s investors ignored Page’s wishes and forced him to hire a CEO to be adult supervision.

Both then underwent a long period in the wilderness. Steve Jobs’ banishment was more severe, but Page also spent years at a remove from the day-to-day world of Google.

As with Jobs, it was only through this long exile that Page was able to mature into a self-awareness of his strengths and weaknesses.

Then, like Jobs, Page came back with wild ambitions and a new resolve.

Lawrence Edward Page

On the cold, clear night of Jan. 7, 1943, Nikola Tesla quietly slept in his suite at the Hotel New Yorker, 33 floors above the streets of Manhattan. Suddenly, his chest erupted in pain. Then his heart stopped.

A day later, a hotel maid decided to ignore a “do not disturb” sign on Tesla’s door. She found his body. The great inventor was dead.

A Serbian immigrant born in 1856, Tesla invented the way almost all of the world’s electricity is generated today. He also envisioned and created wireless communication. But he died having spent the better part of his last decade collecting a pension and feeding pigeons, unable to persuade new investors to fund his latest wild visions. He died believing he could invent a weapon to end all war, a way for power to travel wirelessly across the oceans, and plan for harnessing energy from space. He died alone and in debt.

Tesla was a brilliant man. He spoke eight languages and had a photographic memory. Inventions would appear in his mind fully formed. But he was lousy at business.

In 1885, he told his boss, Thomas Edison, that he could improve his motors and generators. Edison told him, “There's $50,000 in it for you — if you can do it.” Tesla did as he’d promised, and in return Edison gave him a $10 raise.

Tesla quit. He formed his own company, Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing. But he soon disagreed with his investors over the direction of the business. They fired him, and he was forced to dig ditches for a year.

In 1900 he persuaded JPMorgan to invest $150,000 in another company. The money was gone by 1901. Tesla spent the rest of his life writing JPMorgan asking for more money. He never got it.

The year after Tesla died, in 1944, New York Herald Tribune journalist John Joseph O’Neill wrote a biography about the inventor, who had been a friend.

“During the last three decades of his life, it is probable that not one out of tens of thousands who saw him knew who he was,” the biography, “ Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla ,” concludes.

“Even when the newspapers, once a year, would break out in headlines about Tesla and his latest predictions concerning scientific wonders to come, no one associated that name with the excessively tall, very lean man, wearing clothes of a bygone era, who almost daily appeared to feed his feathered friends.”

“He was just one of the strange individuals of whom it takes a great many of varying types to make up a complete population of a great metropolis.”

Forty-one years after those words were published, in 1985, a 12-year-old in Michigan finished reading Tesla's biography and cried.

That was Larry Page.

The child of a pair of computer science professors at Michigan State University, Larry grew up in a messy house. There were computers, gadgets, and tech magazines everywhere. The atmosphere — and Page’s attentive parents — fostered creativity and invention.

In that moment, Page realized it wasn’t enough to envision an innovative technological future. Big ideas aren’t enough. They need to be commercialized. If Page wanted to be an inventor, he was going to have to start a successful company, too.

Tesla’s story also taught Page to watch out for the Thomas Edisons of the world — people who will use you and place your dreams in the service of their own cynical ends.

Larry’s Rules For Management

Google incorporated on Sept. 4, 1998 — two years after the idea of ranking Web pages by their inbound links came to Page in a dream. He made himself CEO, and his best friend, Sergey Brin, was named co-founder.

Co-founders are often forgotten by history. Steve Jobs had two at Apple. Mark Zuckerberg had four at Facebook.

Sergey Brin was a different kind of sidekick to Page. They had met at Stanford, where Brin was outgoing and energetic, known among professors for his habit of bursting into their offices without knocking.

To Page’s startup-turned-global-technology company, Brin would bring a much-needed extroversion that Page lacked. Brin excelled at strategy, branding, and developing relationships between Google and other companies. He was a partner to Page, if, ultimately, a junior one.

While Google is often thought of as the invention of two young computer whizzes — Sergey and Larry, Larry and Sergey — the truth is that Google is a creation of Larry Page, helped along by Sergey Brin.

Page and Brin had raised $1 million from friends and family to launch their startup, moving off Stanford’s campus and into a rented garage.

By February 1999, the startup had already outgrown the garage, relocating to an office above a bike shop in Palo Alto, California. Seven months later, Google outgrew that office, moving to a nondescript building in an office park a couple of miles off the highway in nearby Mountain View.

Outside that building, in an asphalt parking lot, yellow police tape marked off an area where Page, Brin, and the rest of Google’s employees — Googlers, they called themselves — played roller hockey. The games were full contact. Employees wore pads and would come back inside from games drenched in sweat and sometimes bloodied and bruised. “No one held back when fighting the founders for the puck,” Douglas Edwards wrote. “The harder you played, the more respect you earned.”

Inside the beige office building, the game was twice as tough. Yes, there was free food for all employees and a massage therapist on site. And, with brightly colored exercise balls and couches everywhere, the place looked like a kindergarten crossed with a freshman dorm.

But for Page’s employees, working at Google felt more like a never-ending thesis defense. Everywhere you looked, there were know-it-alls ready to gleefully tear into you. Page had originally bonded with Brin over a day of fierce argument, and that’s how the relationship grew. Their debates were not shouting matches. They were a series of blunt points made by one side, and then the other, with a little name-calling thrown in. Page would call one of Brin’s ideas stupid. Brin would say Page’s idea was naive. They’d both called each other bastards.

Page never felt any deterioration of his friendship with Brin after these fights, so he styled his interaction with other Googlers in the same unvarnished way. Page once told a room full of Google’s first marketing employees that their profession was built on an ability to lie.

Page had a tendency to communicate through emphatic body language. He’d lift an eyebrow in a way that made you know he thought your idea was stupid. If you said something that made him angry or uncomfortable, he’d respond in a quieter tone, and wouldn’t be able to look at you while he did it.

He became infamous for his lack of social grace. A slow-loading application during a product demonstration would prompt him to start counting out loud.

“One one-thousand.”

“Two one-thousand.”

Page encouraged his senior executives to fight the way he and Brin went at it. In meetings with new hires, one of the two co-founders would often provoke an argument over a business or product decision. Then they would both sit back, watching quietly as their lieutenants verbally cut each other down. As soon as any argument started to go circular, Page would say, “I don't want to talk about this anymore. Just do it.”

It wasn’t that he was a tyrant. It’s just that he connected to people over their ideas, not their feelings.

Early Google HR boss Heather Cairns remembers once spotting Page talking intently with Google’s janitor after work hours.

She later asked Page what they were talking about so seriously.

“I want to know how everyone does their job,” he replied, going on to offer a detailed recitation of the janitor’s method for placing empty trash bags at the bottom of each barrel so he could replace them easily.

“It’s very efficient,” Page said approvingly, “and he saves time doing that, and I learned from that.”

Page hadn’t been a social child. But in college and graduate school, he’d been able to connect with people over external abstractions: visions of the future, cool technologies. At Google, he kept his interaction with employees on this level. He managed without regard to feelings.

Asked about his approach to running the company, Page once told a Googler his method for solving complex problems was by reducing them to binaries, then simply choosing the best option. Whatever the downside he viewed as collateral damage he could live with.

When Page went to Stanford after receiving his bachelor’s in computer science from the University of Michigan, he expected he’d have to make a choice between becoming an academic and building a company. Choosing the former would mean giving up the opportunity to become the inventor of widely used applications. But building a company would force him to deal with people in a way he didn’t enjoy. For Google’s first few years, he got to have the best of both worlds: He was building a product that millions of people used, and he created an interpersonal culture intensely focused on ideas and outcomes rather than emotional niceties.

For many years, Google thrived under this type of management.

For many employees, the combative atmosphere was a reasonable price to pay for working at a company with a real clarity of purpose.

Even in cases where the environment left bruises, solid ideas won. In “In The Plex,” Steven Levy tells the story of how, in 2000, Google hired an associate product manager named Wesley Chan and put him in charge of building something called Google Toolbar, a way for users to search without having to open Microsoft Explorer. Chan figured out that no one was using it because it didn’t do anything special for users. He decided it could double as a pop-up-ad blocker.

He pitched the idea to Page in a meeting.

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard!” Page replied. “Where did we find you?”

Chan was undaunted, however. Shortly thereafter, he secretly installed the improved Toolbar onto Page’s computer. When Page later mentioned to a room full of people that he was seeing fewer pop-ups, Chan told him why. The Toolbar was launched.

Page eventually wrote down his rules for management:

• Don't delegate: Do everything you can yourself to make things go faster.
• Don't get in the way if you're not adding value. Let the people actually doing the work talk to each other while you go do something else.
• Don't be a bureaucrat.
• Ideas are more important than age. Just because someone is junior doesn't mean they don't deserve respect and cooperation.
• The worst thing you can do is stop someone from doing something by saying, “No. Period.” If you say no, you have to help them find a better way to get it done.

The niceties of social interaction weren't the only rules Page was happy to violate.

In 1999, for instance, the method by which large Web companies such as eBay, Yahoo, and Google added server space had become fairly routine. They purchased servers and installed them in cages at giant warehouses owned by third-party vendors. The warehouse companies would pay for the power that kept the servers running and the air conditioning that kept them cool, and the website owners would pay for space by the square foot. Page figured if Google was going to pay per square foot, he was going to stuff as many servers into that space as he could. He took apart servers and began hunting for ways to shrink them. The first thing to go? All the off switches.

“Why would you ever want to turn a server off?” he reportedly asked.

Stripped of useless components and fitted with corkboard to keep wires from crossing, Google developed new super-slim servers. They looked ugly. But before long, Google would end up paying the same price to host 1,500 servers as early rival Inktomi paid to host 50. As a result, Google’s search ran a lot faster, and Inktomi, along with many of Google’s other search rivals, was left in the dust.

Despite all his stunning success running Google during its first two years — or perhaps because of it — Larry Page was about to lose his job.

Into the Wilderness

During the first half of 1999, Google experienced an insane surge in popularity. That ballooning usage necessitated new capital to invest in more servers and a growing staff. But Google wasn’t making any money yet.

As Page and Brin began seeking new investors, Page had one requirement above all: He and Brin would retain a majority of the company’s voting stock and ultimate control over Google.

At first, Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists laughed off the notion.

Google kept growing, and the giggles faded. Before long, the Valley’s two highest-profile venture capital firms — Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital — agreed to invest a combined total of $25 million under Page’s terms.

But the investors had a stipulation of their own. In exchange for allowing Page and Brin to retain a majority ownership of Google, they wanted Page, then 26, to step down as CEO. They wanted him to hire adult supervision.

As Steven Levy reported, John Doerr, the partner from Kleiner Perkins, told Page that a world-class CEO would do a “much better job of building a world-class management team.”

Page took the deal. Google needed the money.

A couple of months after the deal closed, however, when there was no way the investors could back out, Page called Doerr and informed the Venture Capitalist that he and Brin had experienced a change of heart.

“We actually think we can run the company between the two of us,” he said.

It is possible that Page had initially agreed with Doerr that Google needed a world-class CEO, only to change his mind later. But probably not.

Page had always been a control freak. A college friend told Levy that even back at the University of Michigan, Page was “controlling and paranoid” because “he wanted to make sure everything was done well and right.”

In 1998, Page and Brin decided to take all eight of Google’s employees on a company ski trip to Lake Tahoe. When they went to rent a van, they discovered they could save $2.50 per day if they designated a single driver. Page designated himself. He drove the whole way while everyone else played math games in the back.

This was a given, Douglas Edwards wrote. “Larry wasn't about to put his life in anyone else's hands.”

The truth was, Page did not think he needed any help running Google — at least not beyond the help provided by Brin — and that’s what he told his new investor.

Doerr flipped out. It was obvious to him Page wasn’t ready to lead a major corporation, and the way he’d conveyed his views on the issue wasn’t encouraging.

He suggested that Page meet with a bunch of big tech CEOs — Apple’s Steve Jobs, Intel’s Andy Grove, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos — and ask them about their jobs. Doerr thought Page would come away convinced he could use help.

Page readily agreed.

After all the meetings, he called Doerr and delivered some surprising news. Page was convinced that Google could use a CEO after all. But only if that CEO was Steve Jobs.

Obviously, that wasn’t going to happen — but Doerr was glad to hear that Page believed someone in the world could help. Together, they started interviewing other candidates. Doerr introduced Page and Brin to the CEO of Novell, Eric Schmidt.

Page liked Schmidt OK. Unlike most executives, Schmidt had been a programmer. In fact, years ago he had written code for a software tool that Google was still using. Brin liked Schmidt because he was a “Burner,” an attendee of the annual psychedelic Burning Man festival held in a Nevada desert.

Google hired Schmidt. He joined as chairman in March 2001 and became CEO in August.

Page went along with the arrangement but wasn’t happy about it. He fretted about his place in the new hierarchy — his title would be president of products — and even began to wonder if he’d become unnecessary to the company he’d founded.

It was during this uncertain period, in July 2001, that Page dragged Google through his misbegotten engineering reorganization, immediately proving to most observers that Doerr had been right all along.

Page may also have had another motive for the move: Getting rid of managers who might have ended up reporting to Schmidt may have seemed like a way for Page to maintain his control.

“I can't think of anything that people at Google were ever so upset about — at least in engineering,” former Google engineer and Gmail inventor Paul Buchheit told Edwards. “People had some sense of ownership of the company, that it was this big happy family. And all of a sudden, some of your friends were kicked off the island. You're, like, ‘This isn't what I thought it was. I thought we were all in it together.’”

Google had come a long way with Page running the place like a hockey game crossed with a thesis defense. But quietly, Google employees were thrilled to have someone with a more deft, empathetic touch now running the show.

That’s What Schmidt’s For

Over the next several years, Google grew into a massive global business.

Always in consultation with Page and Brin, Schmidt kept things on an even keel. He hired a team of executives, built a sales force, and took Google public.

Everyone inside Google still regarded Larry Page as their ultimate boss. He approved every hire, and it was his signature on the day of Google’s initial public offering, Aug. 19, 2004, that turned hundreds of people into millionaires — and Page himself into a billionaire.

But gradually Page became a more distant, remote figure. To use a metaphor from Google’s earlier years, Page was no longer driving the van. He’d hired a driver and was daydreaming in the back.

It was a slow retreat. During the first few years, Page kept a tight grip on Google’s product development.

One of Schmidt’s first efforts after joining as CEO in August 2001 was to convince Page that Google needed to hire a vice president of product management. Page thought the role was superfluous.

Nonetheless, Schmidt persuaded him to hire Jonathan Rosenberg for the job. Rosenberg came from Excite@Home, a massively funded high-profile startup that failed in the late 1990s.

But just because Rosenberg got the job and had the title didn’t mean Page was going to make room for him at Google.

“I would come to the staff meeting with my structured agenda, the market research we needed to do, the one- and two-year road maps that we needed to develop, and Larry would basically mock them and me,” Rosenberg later told a reporter.

Rosenberg also had a very hard time hiring product managers. He kept bringing in top graduates from Harvard’s and Stanford’s MBA programs, and Page kept rejecting them.

Rosenberg eventually asked Page what he was doing wrong.

Page told him to stop telling engineers what to do — and to stop trying to hire other non-engineers to do it too.

One of Page’s closest confidantes at Google, a rising executive named Marissa Mayer, finally clued Rosenberg in, as Levy tells it. He should stop trying to hire MBAs to be product managers and start hiring computer science graduates with an interest in business.

The only way Page was ever going to loosen his grip and allow a management layer to come between him and Google’s engineers was if that layer was made up of other engineers.

Rosenberg took the advice and it worked. Soon Google had an army of product managers. Page took a step back.

A couple of years into Rosenberg’s career at Google, he met Larry Page’s mom. Her son was showing her around campus.

“What does he do?” Page’s mother asked about Rosenberg.

“Well, at first I wasn’t sure,” Page told her. “But I’ve decided that now he’s the reason I sometimes have free time.”

The Slow Fade

None of this is to say Page ever stopped reviewing, approving, and contributing to the products Google shipped.

Along with Brin, Page controlled a majority of the company’s voting shares. Basically, he owned the place. And doing work on products interested him in a way that dealing with people did not. Plus, he was really good at it.

Before Google launched Gmail in 2004, its creator, Paul Buchheit, brought it to Page’s open cubicle office for a review.

As Buchheit called the program up on Page’s computer, the boss made a face.

“It’s too slow,” Page said.

Buchheit disagreed. It was loading just fine, he said.

No, Page insisted. It had taken a full 600 milliseconds for the page to load.

“You can’t know that,” Buchheit said. But when he got back to his office, he looked up the server logs. It had taken exactly 600 milliseconds for Gmail to load.

Page remained a deciding voice in big strategic initiatives like Google’s multibillion-dollar bid for wireless spectrum and its $1.65 billion acquisition of video-sharing site YouTube in 2006.

But to Googlers, it felt like Page was much less involved with the day-to-day management of the company.

When Eric Schmidt held big meetings with his direct reports, a group called the Operating Committee, or OC, Page would show up, but he’d have a laptop open in front of him the whole time. Brin would do the same.

Neither would participate in the meeting until Schmidt said something like, “Boys, I need your attention now.” Then Page or Brin would look up and offer a sharp opinion on the matter at hand. Characteristically, Page would offer his two cents while staring off into an empty corner of the room.

On occasion, Page would grow more animated, and Schmidt would carefully shut him down, saying, “We heard you, Larry. Thank you.”

On some issues, Page’s opinion was simply ignored. For example, after Google had become the Internet’s most successful advertising business, Page decided the company should destroy the advertising agency industry. To his thinking, it was obviously a highly inefficient system that could be erased with the help of technology. Not only did the company opt not to take on this battle, but Schmidt and his top advertising executives, Tim Armstrong and Sheryl Sandberg, did their best to make sure none of Google’s many important ad-agency clients caught wind of Page’s ideas on the topic.

Over time, Page came to appreciate Schmidt’s strengths very much. Page’s goal had been to invent something that made the world better and to see it become properly commercialized. Google search had certainly done the former, and Schmidt had played a huge role in building the kind of company that could capitalize financially on Page’s vision. He wasn’t like any of the villains who had plagued Nikola Tesla’s life.

As his comfort level with Schmidt increased, Page receded further.

In 2007, he decided he was going to too many meetings. He tended to turn down these requests, but Google executives who wanted his input had found a workaround — sending their meeting invitations straight to his assistants, who would dutifully load up his calendar. So Page got rid of his assistants. This forced anyone who wanted to meet with Page to stalk him through Google’s office. In this situation, his longstanding social deficiencies served him well: He got good at dismissing people with a friendly seeming nod over the shoulder while he kept walking.

He also grew tired of giving interviews. In 2008, Page told Google’s communications team that they could have a total of eight hours of his time that year. Why should he have to talk to the outside world?

That’s what Schmidt was for.

  Maybe There’s More We Can Do

One day in late 1998, Google’s first HR boss, Heather Cairns, walked into the company’s garage office and caught Larry Page and Sergey Brin playing with Legos.

“What the hell are you doing?” Cairns asked, in her brassy but congenial way. The contraption on the table in front of Page had robot arms with rubber wheels at the end of them.

“We’re trying to figure out how to turn a page of a book without a human hand,” Page explained. “Someday we’re going to put every publication in the world on the Internet so everybody has access to it.”

“Sure,” Cairns said. “Sure.”

Not long after that, Page spent an entire day driving around Palo Alto with a small handheld camera. He’d drive for a few feet, and then stop and take a few pictures. Then he’d drive another few feet and do it again. He came home and uploaded the pictures to his computer. What he saw convinced him his latest big idea was feasible. Google could put a number of cameras on a number of cars and drive every street in the world, photographing all the way. The result would be a digital, searchable representation of the entire physical world — or the most relevant parts of it — available online.

During the Schmidt years, both the books and the photo project would become popular Google products. Google Books, launched in 2003, has come to encompass 20 million volumes, and it continues to grow. Google Street launched in 2007, and by 2014, made every thoroughfare in 50 countries viewable from almost every Web browser on the planet.

Even in Google’s earliest days, Page had always wanted the company to do more than just basic Web search. Since he was a kid, he’d been dreaming up world-changing schemes. As an undergrad at the University of Michigan, he’d proposed that the school replace its bus system with something he called a PRT, or personal rapid transit system — essentially a driverless monorail with separate cars for every rider. Later, at Stanford, he’d peppered his adviser, Terry Winograd, with thesis ideas that sounded as far out there as some of Tesla’s later schemes. One idea involved building a superlong rope that would run from the Earth’s surface all the way into orbit, making it cheaper to put objects in space. Another proposal called for solar kites that would draw energy from space.

With Google now essentially minting money from advertising and Schmidt managing its steady growth, Page began to realize that he was finally in a position to bring his visions to life.

By 2005, one of Page’s visions was to put handheld computers with access to Google in the pocket of every person on the planet. So, that year, Page directed Google corporate development to buy a small startup with the same ludicrously huge ambition. This startup was Android. Its CEO and co-founder was Andy Rubin, a former Apple executive who had also developed a failed but once-popular Internet-connected phone called the Sidekick.

The Android acquisition was a Larry Page production. Page didn’t tell Schmidt about the deal — which set the company back about $50 million — until after it was done. Brin knew all about it, but he didn’t take much interest.

Page set up Android as a separate entity, one that was only nominally a part of Google, and allowed Rubin wide latitude to run it without interference from the parent company. Android even had its own building, one that regular Googlers couldn’t access with their employee badges. Schmidt essentially acted as if it didn’t exist, mostly because $50 million wasn’t enough of Google’s massive money pile for him to worry if it had been well spent.

For his part, Page turned Android into a passion project. He spend huge amounts of time with Rubin, so much that he often felt guilty that he wasn’t looking after the rest of Google more closely. Then again, that’s what Schmidt was for.

Over the next two years, Rubin developed what he thought would be a state-of-the-art mobile operating system.

Then, during a 2007 trip to Las Vegas, Rubin flipped open his laptop in a cab to watch Steve Jobs introduce Apple’s version of an Internet-connected phone.

This was the iPhone, and it was amazing.

Holy crap, Rubin thought. We’re going to have to redo our phone.

Rubin had his cab driver pull over so he could watch the rest of Jobs’ demo.

A year or so later, in September 2008, T-Mobile launched the G1, the first phone using the software developed by Rubin’s team. The operating system looked and worked like an iPhone knock-off. But it was a good knock-off, and free for phone makers to install.

The OS proliferated as manufacturers raced to keep up with Apple and carriers tried to remain competitive with AT&T, the only network to carry the iPhone. In the second quarter of 2009, Android-loaded phones captured 1.8% of all sales. During the same quarter in 2010, Android sales made up 17.2% of the market, topping Apple, which had 14%, for the first time. Soon, Android would become the world’s most popular operating system.

By 2010, Page had now played a key role in creating two ubiquitous technologies that had arguably improved life for people around the world. Google, which had begun life as a thesis project, had helped make the Internet a vastly more powerful tool for everyday users. Then, without any adult supervision, Page fostered the development of Android. Now, Android was turning smartphones into such cheap commodities that it was only a matter of time until everyone on the planet owned a computer connected to the Internet.

Achieving such a resounding second success — as a manager this time — gave Page enormous confidence in his own executive abilities. Page had enough self-awareness to realize that earlier in his career he’d been bad at delegating. He was glad to see he’d been able to do that with Rubin.

Page had always had issues trusting people. That was changing. Maybe it was because he had a family now. In a May 2009 commencement speech at the University of Michigan, Page talked about his father, his mother, his new wife Lucy Southworth, and their child. “Just like me, your families brought you here, and you brought them here,” he said. “Please keep them close and remember: They are what really matters in life.”

While Android boomed and Page matured, Google’s core business built around search and advertising blossomed under Schmidt’s management. By 2010, Google had a $180 billion market capitalization and 24,000 employees. It was a big company.

It had also developed some big-company problems. New York Times reporter Claire Cain Miller detailed several of them in a November 2010 article headlined “Google Grows, and Works to Retain Nimble Minds.”

In her story, Miller quoted several Googlers and former Googlers who said the company had become too bureaucratic and bloated. She wrote that Google used to limit groups of engineers working on projects to 10, but that number had swollen to 20 or even 40 in recent years. Worse, she reported, “Engineers say they have been encouraged to build fewer new products and focus on building improvements to existing ones.”

One project manager told her he knew it was time to quit Google because of all the people he had to copy on his emails. He said, “I think that there is a class of person who is able to walk away from this relatively easy, consistent money because they are so dissatisfied with the processes of a big company.”

Another product manager told Miller he was considering leaving because working at Google meant working on products that got very little public exposure.

Miller even quoted Schmidt saying he was worried about the situation.

“There was a time when three people at Google could build a world-class product and deliver it, and it is gone,” Schmidt said in the story.

When Miller’s article ran, Schmidt was furious. A Google spokeswoman called the paper and demanded Miller be removed from the beat. (She wasn’t.)

Besides bureaucracy, Schmidt’s Google was also dealing with another big-company problem by 2010. It wasn’t the cool new mega-power in Silicon Valley anymore. Facebook was.

In 2007, a product manager named Justin Rosenstein quit Google for Facebook. He then wrote a memo to his former co-workers describing Facebook as “the Google of yesterday … that company that’s on the cusp of Changing the World, that’s still small enough where each employee has a huge impact on the organization.”

By 2010, 142 of Facebook’s 1,700 employees were Google refugees.

Among Google’s more senior executives, the company’s age was felt in another way. Schmidt had never fully reformed the argumentative, heated way that decisions were made at the top during the Page era. A decade on, repeated clashes had turned executives into bitter rivals who nearly refused to work with one another.

In fall 2010, Page felt all these new weaknesses in Google. He also sensed another issue that he found even more worrying: Under Schmidt’s otherwise successful tenure, the company had dialed back its ambitions.

In 2009, Google made $6.5 billion in profits and had 20,000 employees. Page looked at those numbers and thought, we have all this money, we have all these people; why aren’t we doing more stuff?

He couldn’t help but think about how the only really big thing Google had done lately was Android, which Schmidt hadn’t been interested in.

Page, happily married and more or less out of the public eye, was enjoying his life as the visionary behind-the-scenes leader of Google. But he had begun to wonder if Schmidt was the right person to lead the company into the future.

Late that year, Page sat down for an interview with Steven Levy for what would become Levy’s book, “In the Plex.” Levy asked Page if he hoped to become CEO again. Page offered a bland reply. “I really enjoy what I do,” he said. “I think I’m able to positively affect a lot of things, which makes me feel really good, and I don’t see any likely change in that.”

Then he got up and left the room. The interview was over.

A minute later, though, Page came back. He told Levy, “I just feel like people aren’t working enough on impactful things.” He said Google was “not yet doing a good job getting the kinds of things we’re trying to do to happen quickly and at scale.”

Page recognized that Google’s search-advertising business, with its insane profit margins and sustained growth, was exactly the kind of cash-generating machine that his hero Nikola Tesla would have used to fund his wildest dreams. Now, he had the chance to do things differently. Seeing Google work on anything short of insanely ambitious was driving him a little nuts.

The frustration was audible in Page’s voice when he gave that commencement speech at the University of Michigan in 2009. He told the graduates about how he and his wife had gone to India a couple of years before. They visited a poor village where sewage ran in the streets. The sewage, Page said, was infected with polio — the same disease that killed his father.

“He would have been very upset that polio still persists, even though we have a vaccine,” Page said. “The world is on the verge of eliminating polio, with 328 people infected so far this year. Let’s get it done soon.”

In the fall of 2010, Page’s frustrations flared out into the open during a product-review meeting. Eric Schmidt, Brin, Page, and Google’s top product executives were there along with their respective senior staffs. Page, as usual, sat quietly at the table looking at his phone. Up front, an executive pitched a new product that helped users find the right offline store to do their shopping.

The executive was well into his pitch when, suddenly, Page interrupted him.

“No,” Page said emphatically. “We don’t do this.”

The room grew quiet.

“We build products that leverage technology to solve huge problems for hundreds of millions of people.”

He went on. “Look at Android. Look at Gmail. Look at Google Maps. Look at Google Search. That’s what we do. We build products you can’t live without.”

“This is not it.”

Page didn’t shout. He didn’t have to. The message was loud and clear.

That December, Page, Brin, and Schmidt met to discuss the obvious.

During Google’s earnings call on Jan. 20, 2011, Schmidt announced he was done as CEO. The job was once again Larry Page’s.

Schmidt, who would become executive chairman, sent out a tweet later that day: “Adult-supervision no longer needed.”

A Different Larry Page

Page took on the CEO job with fast-moving determination.

First, he re-organized the company’s senior management. He took a handful of the company’s most important product divisions, including YouTube, Ads, and Search, and put a CEO-like manager at the top of each. Page wanted to repeat the success he’d had with Rubin at Android.

Then, Page and Google finally responded to the threat of Facebook with its own social network, Google+.

By the end of that first summer, Google had redesigned all of its products with a single, coherent look.

In 2012, Page spent $12.5 billion to buy Motorola, mostly to acquire patents to protect Android from lawsuits by Apple and others.

Google got into hardware, unveiling the Chromebook, a laptop run on a Google operating system, and a futuristic Web-enabled computer that users could wear like eyeglasses called Google Glass.

At the end of 2012, Google began installing fiber-optic Internet cables in Kansas City, providing anyone in town with a free Internet connection 100 times faster than broadband.

These moves surprised the wider world but not those who knew Page. Ever since he was a kid, he’d been a guy with big, improbable dreams who did everything he could to make them reality as quickly as he could.

It wasn’t until later, however, that it became clear to those who worked closest with Page how much he had changed during his years away from the thick of the action.

In February 2013, Google's senior executives flew in from around the world to meet at the Carneros Inn, a rustic resort in the hilly vineyards of Napa Valley. This was Google's annual two-day, top-secret retreat for senior executives.

Among the attendees were Susan Wojkicki, responsible for Google's massive advertising business; Andy Rubin, head of Android; Salar Kamangar, the CEO of YouTube; Sundar Pichai, leader of Google's Chrome division; and Vic Gundotra, the Google+ boss. Each brought his or her senior staff members.

On the first day of the retreat, everyone gathered in the Carneros Inn’s white-curtained Napa Ballroom for a speech from Page.

In his raspy voice, Page told the room that Google's ambitions were incredibly high, but that it would never reach its goals if the people in that room did not stop fighting with one another. From now on, Google would have “zero tolerance for fighting.” Page admitted that the organization, in its younger days, had demanded its leaders be aggressive with one another. He himself had been perhaps the most aggressive of all.

But that was when Google's problems were linear problems — for instance, the need to grow the market share of all its products from nil to competitive to winning. Now, with Google leading the world in most of the product categories it competed in, the company faced what Page called n-squared problems. Google needed to grow by “10X.” It needed to create whole new markets, to solve problems in as yet unimagined ways. To solve n-squared problems, Google executives would have to learn to work together.

The speech surprised the Google executives, particularly the company veterans. Since the days of Page and Brin calling every idea they didn’t like “stupid” — if not “evil” — fighting was the way things got done at Google.

Some of them remembered that day in July 2001 when Page had insulted and fired a handful of project managers in front of all their peers. But when the people in the Carneros Inn ballroom looked at Page that day, they saw someone who looked very different from the kid who built Google’s first server rack in his dorm room. Page’s hair had turned gray. He'd put on a middle-aged man’s weight around the waist and in his face. As a result of a vocal-cord paralysis , his voice had grown gravelly and worn.

Understanding Every Want And Need

On March 19, 2014, Larry Page gave an interview at a TED conference in Vancouver, Canada. During the keynote, Page and his interviewer, Charlie Rose, sat in tall chairs on a stage with a table between them.

The interview was essentially scripted. Page, his chief PR executive Rachel Whetstone, and Google’s CMO Lorraine Twohill, had spent the day before in a Vancouver hotel room working on the presentation.

Now, Page and Rose were looking away from the audience at a giant screen above and behind the stage. On the screen, there was a video-game boxing match. One boxer had the other trapped in a corner and was mercilessly whaling on his opponent.

The winning boxer was being controlled by an artificially intelligent computer program created at Google.

This, Page explained to Rose, was the future of Google. Page pointed out that all the Google artificial intelligence could “see” were the same pixels on the screen that a human player could see. It had learned to play the game all by itself. Look how well it’s doing, Page said. Imagine if that kind of intelligence were thrown at your schedule.

Rose, enthusiastic but a little confused, chuckled. Likewise, the audience had no idea what Page was getting at. The rehearsals hadn’t worked. And neither Whetstone nor Twohill were to blame.

In terms of his ability to relate to other humans, Larry Page has come a long way since that one awkward day in July 2001. But he’s still bad at public speaking. All the content is there, but it’s buried in a jumble of half-finished sentences and digressive run-ons. Steve Jobs, Larry Page is not. He’s not even Mark Zuckerberg. As a result, the public is essentially unaware of what, exactly, Google and Larry Page are up to these days.

As Page enters his fourth year in charge of Google again, the company is in fantastic shape. The stock price is above $700 per share, and it’s not hard to imagine a day when Google revenues will cross $100 billion per year.

And yet, Page believes the company faces an existential question: Can Google come up with another great business after search?

Between Google search and Android, Larry Page and Google can take credit for creating two technology platforms used worldwide by billions of people.

But Google gives Android away for free. Android’s contribution to Google’s bottom line is that it puts Google search and Google search ads into the pockets of millions of people around the world. In that sense, it’s not a great new business for Google at all, it’s merely an extension of Google’s primary business. Google still makes 90% of its revenues from advertising; 70% of Google’s total revenues still come from search ads.

One danger to Google is that eventually — not this year, not this decade, but inevitably — it will be so huge that it will capture nearly all the money any businesses on the planet spends on marketing. As crazy as this sounds, it’s plausible. Google revenues are already bigger than all the money marketers spend on magazine and newspaper ads combined. It already owns all but the tiniest sliver of the online ad market. Google search is running out of room to grow.

For Page, this means he now spends much of his time asking himself what that future is going to be and how Google creates it.

He’s got lots of ideas, and now that he’s in charge he’s got his engineers hacking away at plenty of them.

He never gave up on the transportation system he pitched to the University of Michigan, so now he has Google engineers working on self-driving cars.

Then there’s artificial intelligence. Besides dominating video games, Google’s AI was also able to watch all of YouTube, learn from the experience, and draw a picture of a cat.

There’s a Google subsidiary called Calico that’s working on solutions to the problems of aging and death.

Google has another subsidiary, Google Fiber Inc., connecting homes in Kansas City; Austin, Texas; and Provo, Utah with Internet that’s 100 times faster than broadband. Google Fiber may soon expand to nine other cities, including Phoenix, Arizona; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Portland, Oregon.

In 2013, Page moved Andy Rubin from the top of Android and asked him to start working on robots. Page envisioned a world in which robots could do things like take care of the elderly and load our self-driving cars with groceries and household supplies while we’re busy at work. At the end of 2013, Google bought a company called Boston Dynamics, which makes humanoid and animal-like robots — some of them for the military.

Also in 2013, Page met former Apple executive Tony Fadell — the guy who designed the iPod — and persuaded him to sell his new company, Nest, to Google for $3.2 billion. Nest makes thermostats that are connected to the Internet. Just this month, Google purchased Titan Aerospace, a company that produces drones.

At Google, they call the biggest ideas moonshots. There are many more of them, from hot-air balloons that broadcast the Internet spectrum — providing access to areas of the world that have lacked it — to plans to produce Android-powered watches.

Page admits that the diversity and number of ideas leave some of the company’s investors anxious. They worry: Can Google keep its focus? Or is it about to follow in the footsteps of so many technology giants before it, spreading itself too thin, chasing too many wild ideas? And really, who needs a computer that can beat a human at a video game?

Page’s answer to those concerns is twofold. First, he believes that it will be easier for Google to work on moonshots than on more mundane products. His logic: There’s less competition. Also, the best people will work for Google because the best people like working on ambitious projects.

Secondly, Page argues that all of these schemes are part of providing the world better search.

Page has, over the years, come up with a broad definition for what Google search should be.

In 2012, he told a reporter that “the perfect search engine would understand whatever your need is. It would understand everything in the world deeply [and] give you back kind of exactly what you need.”

During a keynote at a Google conference in 2013, Page said that in the long term — “you know, 50 years from now or something” — he hopes Google’s software will be able to “understand what you’re knowledgeable about, what you’re not, and how to organize the world so that the world can solve important problems.”

So, in Page’s vision, if you walk into your house and feel cold, your Google-powered wristwatch will be performing a search to understand that feeling. The search result will be for your Google-powered thermostat to turn up the heat.

Likewise, if you run out of milk and your Google-powered fridge notifies your Google-powered self-driving car to go collect some more from the Google-powered robots at the local grocery warehouse (no doubt paying with your Google wallet), it will all be a function of search.

The key to understanding the diversity of Google’s moonshots is understanding that Page’s vision of “perfect search” only works if all the products you interact with are compatible with one another.

For example, Google’s most advanced search product today, Google Now, is able to do things like alert Android users that they need to leave now if they are going to beat traffic and make a flight on time. But it can only do that because it has access to the Android users’ inboxes, Google Maps, Google Flight Search, Google Calendar, and, of course, the users’ smartphones.

So while it may seem random for Google to get into businesses as diverse as cars, thermostats, robotics, and TV production, there is an overriding objective behind it all: Page is envisioning a world where everything we touch is connected with and understood by an artificially intelligent computer that can discern patterns from our activity and learn to anticipate our needs before we even know we have them. Someday, Page has said several times, this AI will be hooked directly to our brains — perhaps through an implant.

Some of these ideas would scare people if Page were better at talking about them. He is, after all, directing billions of dollars every year toward making them a reality as quickly as possible. He’s said several times that Google should be employing 1 million engineers. With all of Google’s money, that’s actually possible.

The good news for the world is that Page’s goal of developing a pervasively connected AI that understands and provides for our every need is not about taking advantage of us.

He is, at heart, a passionate utopian — one who believes that technology has overwhelmingly made life better for humans and will only continue to do so.

In a question-and-answer session at a Google conference in 2013, Page told attendees that in the future, people would look back on how humans lived their lives today the same way we look back on our ancestors who spent all their time hunting and farming, as “crazy.”

In 2014, Page is living an alternate ending to the Nikola Tesla biography that made him cry when he was 12 years old.

Instead of ending his life destitute and ignored, Page, still just 41, will spend the final half of his life pouring billions of dollars and countless hours into his wildest visions.

“Anything you can imagine probably is doable,” Page told Google investors in 2012. “You just have to imagine it and work on it.”

A Note On Sources

This story is indebted to the work of two authors of books on the history of Google: Steven Levy and Douglas Edwards. Levy’s book, “ In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, And Shapes Our Lives ,” is a crucial and deeply reported must-read for anyone who wants to dive deeper into the workings of Google than this story goes. Few early Googlers are responsible for the way you think about the company as Douglas Edwards, who for years wrote all the words that ever appeared on Google.com. After his time at the company was done, Edwards wrote a fascinating book about his experience called “ I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 .” It's a must-read for anyone curious about what it’s like to join a tiny, weird startup and ride it to the top.

This story is also based on conversations with a few dozen current and former Google employees, people from Larry Page’s past, and others with firsthand knowledge of the events described.

Bibliography

  Batelle, John. “The Birth Of Google.” Wired. August 2005 .

Bohn, Dieter and Hamburger, Ellis. “Redesigning Google: how Larry Page engineered a beautiful revolution” The Verge. Jan. 24, 2013 .

Bouman, Amber and Snell, Jason. “Hello, Larry! Google's Page on negativity, laws, and competitors.” TechHive. May 15, 2013 .

Edwards, Douglas. “I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59.” Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. July 12, 2011 .

Helft, Miguel. “Fortune Exclusive: Larry Page on Google.” Fortune. Dec. 11, 2012 .

Levy, Steven. “Google’s Larry Page on Why Moon Shots Matter.” Wired. Jan. 17, 2013 .

Levy, Steven. In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, And Shapes Our Lives. Simon & Schuster. April 12, 2011 .

Levy, Steven. “Larry Page Wants To Return Google To Its Startup Roots.” Wired. March 18, 2011 .

Malseed, Mark. “The Story of Sergey Brin.” Moment. Feb. 2007 .

Miller, Claire Cain. “Google Grows, and Works to Retain Nimble Minds.” New York Times. Nov. 28, 2010 .

Page, Larry. “Beyond Today: Zeitgeist 2012,” YouTube. May 22, 2012 .

Page, Larry. “Larry Page’s University of Michigan Commencement Address.” Google. May 2, 2009 .

Page, Larry. “Larry Page & Q&A with Eric Schmidt at Zeitgeist Americas 2011.” YouTube. Sept. 27, 2011 .

Rose, Charlie. “Guests: Larry Page, Wael Ghonim, Sebastian Thrun, Eric Schmidt.” PBS. May 21, 2012.

Roush, Chris. “NYTimes tech reporter Miller joining Upshot.” Talking Biz News. March 14, 2014 .

Usborne, David. “Larry Page: A very private poster boy.” The Independent. Jan. 22, 2011 .

Vogelstein, Fred. Dogfight: How Apple And Google Went To War And Started a Revolution Sarah Crichton Books. Nov. 12, 2013 .

Acknowledgements

I'd like to thank BI's long-form editor Aaron Gell for spending so much time helping me get this story into shape. It was a doozy! Thanks also to Daniel McMahon and Jill Klausen for saving me from so many typos.

Watch: What's going on with TikTok?

• Main content

• Achievements

Larry Page is a computer scientist and entrepreneur who co-founded Google with Sergey Brin in 1998. Page served as Google’s CEO twice: from 1997 to 2001, before stepping down in favor of Eric Schmidt, and from April 2011 to July 2015 when he became CEO of Alphabet Inc. – the parent company of Google – to focus on delivering “major advancements”. He held the position until December 2019 and currently remains an Alphabet board member, employee, and controlling shareholder.

Born on March 26, 1973, in East Lansing, Michigan, Page’s parents were both computer science professors. Page grew up in a family where computers and technology were always present, which fueled his early interest in computing. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan and went on to obtain a Master of Science degree in computer science from Stanford University.

During an interview, Page recollected his childhood home as disorganized, with computers, science, and technology magazines, as well as Popular Science magazines scattered all over the place. This setting allowed him to fully immerse himself in his interests. As a young person, Page was an enthusiastic reader, as he spent a considerable amount of time poring over books and magazines.

According to Nicholas Carlson, a writer, the combination of Page’s home environment and attentive parents encouraged creativity and innovation. While growing up, Page played musical instruments and studied music composition. His parents sent him to Interlochen Arts Camp in Interlochen, Michigan, where he learned about music.

Page mentioned that his musical training inspired his fascination with speed and impatience in computing. “I feel like music training led to the high-speed legacy of Google for me,” he said in an interview. Page explained that “In music, you’re very cognizant of time. Time is like the primary thing” and that “If you think about it from a music point of view, if you’re a percussionist, you hit something, it’s got to happen in milliseconds, fractions of a second”.

At six years old, Page’s interest in computers began to develop when he was able to tinker with first-generation personal computers that were left lying around by his parents. He was even the first student in his elementary school to submit an assignment typed on a word processor.

His older brother, Carl Victor Page Jr., taught him how to disassemble items, and soon after, Page began taking apart everything in his house to understand how it functioned. He realized at an early age that he had a strong desire to invent things and was interested in technology and business. By the age of 12, he already had the inkling that he would eventually start his own company.

Page, along with Brin, developed the PageRank algorithm, which was the foundation of Google’s search engine technology. The algorithm analyzes links between web pages to determine their relevance and importance, and this approach revolutionized the way people searched for information on the internet. In 1998, the two launched Google as a search engine that quickly became the dominant player in the market. Page served as Google’s CEO from 1998 to 2001, and again from 2011 to 2015.

Under Page’s leadership, Google expanded its operations into a variety of new areas, including email, web analytics, and mobile operating systems. He also oversaw the development of numerous Google products, such as Google Maps, Google Books, and Google News. In addition to his work at Google, Page has invested in a number of other companies and start-ups, including Tesla, Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), and Planetary Resources.

He has also invested in various renewable energy technologies, including Tesla Motors, and actively promotes the adoption of plug-in hybrid electric cars and alternative energy investments through Google.org, Google’s philanthropic arm. Additionally, he supports the development of aerial vehicles for consumer travel as a strategic backer of the Opener startup.

Moreover, Page has a strong interest in understanding the societal impact of advanced intelligent systems and digital technologies. He believes in utilizing these advancements to create abundance and provide for people’s needs while reducing the workweek and mitigating the negative effects of technological unemployment. To support this vision, he helped establish Singularity University, a transhumanist think-tank that receives funding from Google and offers scholarships to students.

Page has received numerous awards and accolades for his work in the technology industry. In 2002, he was named a World Economic Forum Global Leader for Tomorrow, and in 2004, he was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. In 2007, he received an honorary doctorate of science from the University of Michigan. Page has also been listed among Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World” several times.

His net worth is estimated to be $83.5 billion in March of 2023.

Achievement

Larry Page has received numerous awards and accolades throughout his career, including:

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Larry Page biography: Salary and career history of Google’s co-founder and CEO

The lowdown on Larry Page’s salary, net worth, education and career history

Full name: Lawrence "Larry" Page

Age: 41 (26 March, 1973)

Nationality: US

Net worth: $32 billion (September 2013)

Salary: $1 per annum

Education: Page gained a BSc (hons) in computer engineering from the University of Michigan his home state followed by an MSc in computer science from Stanford University.

Best known for: Being the co-founder of Google.

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Current role: CEO of Google

Career history: Page is Google through and through and has never had another job.

He met fellow co-founder of Google, Sergey Brin, while both of them were studying for a PhD in computer science at Stanford University.

Page was interested in exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web and his tutor encouraged him to pursue this as the topic of his thesis.

He decided he wanted to work out how many pages link back to any other given web page something that was impossible to establish previously taking his inspiration from the academic process of citing sources.

In order to do this, he created a web crawler called BackRub that was designed to examine the 10 million pages and innumerable additional documents that made up the web at that time.

Page initiated the research project by himself, but was shortly joined by Brin, who told Wired in 2005 that he was drawn to BackRub "because it tackled the Web, which represents human knowledge, and because [he] liked human knowledge."

Out of BackRub came PageRank, a system for establishing the importance of each web page examined by BackRub.

The two then realised this technology could be used to create a search engine that they believed would outstrip all other offerings available at the time. The product - Google - has since become the most popular search engine in the world and the company has also branched out into email, social media, and cloud collaboration and storage.

Google the company was founded in 1998 and Page ran the company in partnership with Brin as co-president until they hired Eric Schmidt as CEO in April 2001. In 2011, Page took over from Schmidt as CEO and has remained in place ever since.

Interesting fact: While studying for his BSc, he was a member of the 1993 Maize & Blue Solar Car Team and has since gone on to become an investor in electric car manufacturer Tesla Motors.

Jane McCallion is ITPro's Managing Editor, specializing in data centers and enterprise IT infrastructure. Before becoming Managing Editor, she held the role of Deputy Editor and, prior to that, Features Editor, managing a pool of freelance and internal writers, while continuing to specialize in enterprise IT infrastructure, and business strategy.

Prior to joining ITPro, Jane was a freelance business journalist writing as both Jane McCallion and Jane Bordenave for titles such as European CEO, World Finance, and Business Excellence Magazine.

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Larry Page and Sergey Brin: Biography of the Secretive Google Billionaires Paperback – September 26, 2019

Take a look inside the lives of Google’s secretive founders.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin are the two masterminds behind Google’s empire, but little is known about their lives and legacies. Now, this biography takes a detailed look into their roles in Google’s founding, and their company’s journey to becoming one of the largest and most famous internet superpowers of all time.

With an account of their early years and personal lives, as well as Google’s rise to power, its IPO, and its current place in the world, Larry Page and Sergey Brin: A Biography of the Secretive Google Billionaires also reveals fascinating insights into Google’s former growing pains, current legal issues, and the company’s social responsibility to the world.

Buy now to uncover the lives, achievements, and legacies of these two extraordinary entrepreneurs.

• Print length 85 pages
• Language English
• Publication date September 26, 2019
• Dimensions 5 x 0.22 x 8 inches
• ISBN-10 1695699661
• ISBN-13 978-1695699663
• See all details

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Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Independently published (September 26, 2019)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 85 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1695699661
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1695699663
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3.52 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5 x 0.22 x 8 inches
• #6,402 in Scientist Biographies
• #9,700 in Biographies of Business & Industrial Professionals

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