The Immigrant Who Built Google

In 1979, the Soviet Union gave a Jewish family from Moscow an exit visa. The father was a brilliant mathematician who had been blocked from physics because of his religion. The mother was a scientist. Their six-year-old son sat in the back of a car staring out the window, amazed at how big American vehicles were. That boy was Sergey Brin. He grew up to co-create the system that 8.5 billion searches flow through every single day. His father gave him a Commodore 64 at nine. He was taking university classes at fifteen. He graduated at nineteen with honors in mathematics and computer science and drove to Stanford on a National Science Foundation fellowship. There he met Larry Page — a PhD student he found immediately annoying — and together they built an algorithm called PageRank that ranked web pages by links rather than keywords. Their prototype ran on computers held in LEGO brick cases in a dorm room. It kept crashing Stanford's servers because too many people used it. They tried to sell it for $1 million. Yahoo said no. Excite said no. Then a Sun Microsystems co-founder wrote them a $100,000 cheque in a car park — made out to "Google Inc." — before the company even legally existed. They moved into a garage. Three people. Duct-taped servers. By 2004, Google went public at a $23 billion valuation. Both founders cut their salaries to $1. The country that told a Jewish family their talents were unwanted sent them to the one place where those talents could build something incomprehensible in scale. 👉 Subscribe for a new story every week! #Google #SergeyBrin #LarryPage #FounderStory #ImmigrantStory #TechHistory #Stanford #SiliconValley #PageRank #StartupStory #SovietUnion #GoogleOrigin #Entrepreneur #Innovation #SearchEngine