“I don’t feel comfortable being one of the crowd…It’s kind of interesting—I really liked the schools that I went to, but I never rooted for the sports teams. I was never one of the crowd supporting something or not. I like to maintain my independence.”

In a talk with a reputable journalist Sergey Brin uttered the above cited words. In fact this statement can be accepted as an axiom of all his life. Starting from his birth and up to present days Sergey has been a special person with a special destiny. Here below you will find the story about the 5th richest businessman in the United States who became famous for his project aimed at convenience of all Internet users. Read about the life of a cofounder of what today is the best searching tools in the world, named Google.

Behind the iron curtain

The earlier life of Sergey Brin is connected with not very simple times of the Soviet empire. And even though his family was not among those who dragged out a miserable existence later Sergey himself acknowledged that it was not the brightest one as well.

Sergey’s parents Mikhail and Evgenia Brin were the citizens of the Soviet Union. Both mathematicians who graduated from the Moscow State University they went through numerous obstacles on their way to the scientific arena so as to practice the things they liked. With Jewish origins they were discriminated by the government institutions which constantly tried to prevent the representatives of this diaspora to gain better places in any field. Mikhail was forced to abandon his dream of becoming an astronomer. In spite of the fact that there was no official persecution of Jews Communist Party leaders were extremely resisting all the efforts of Jews to get upper professional ranks by denying them entry to universities.

Having entered the Moscow State University after a scandalously biased examination procedure and with the support of a well-connected family friend Mikhail obtained his honors degree in the field of mathematics yet. After he successfully defended his thesis at a university in Kharkov, Ukraine he got his Ph.D. Mikhail worked as an economist for GOSPLAN, the central planning agency with 100 rubles salary.

As for Evgenia she too managed to push through the severe path of bureaucracy and grauate from the School of Mechanics and Mathematics. Along with a number of other Jews Evgenia worked at the Soviet Oil and Gas Institute, a prestigious industrial school.

The family had their own a tiny, three-room apartment in central Moscow, 350 square feet in all shared with Michael’s mother, considered to live better than other Muscovites who still lived in communal apartments. On August 21, 1973 Sergey was born.

In the summer 1977 Mikhail decided to leave the country for abroad. The decision was prompted by Mikhail’s visit to a mathematics conference in Warsaw. There for the first time in his life he was able to have free discussion with colleagues from the United States, France, England and Germany. Then he could see himself that western culture and people were not so ugly and inhuman as represented by the Soviet government. After described opportunities and comforts of life behind the iron curtain Mikhail was firmly determined to depart.

Still, the decision had a lot of weak spots. Mikhail and Evgenia had no guarantees they will find better positions in foreign country while here in Russia they had any work after all. Besides, their application for an exit visa could have ended up with exile to Siberia or imprisonment with no perspectives for their son to see good future.

They submitted their application in September 1978. Mikhail was fired while Evgenia also left her work. Taking into consideration the existent conditions at that time Evgenia could not tell the real reasons of her resignation. Thus she lied.

They barely made ends met searching for temporary jobs and waiting for the response. Many Jews never received exit visas. In May 1979 when Sergey was already six years old the Brins were granted the permission to leave the USSR.

Life in America

Initially the Brins visited Vienna and then lived in Paris. They met with the representatives of HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which helped thousands of Eastern European Jews establish new lives in the free world. Mikhail got the temporary position at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques.

On October 25, 1979 the family landed at New York’s Kennedy Airport where they were met by friends from Moscow. The Brins found a house in Maryland near the University campus. Sergey went to Paint Branch Montessori School in Adelphi.

The first year was very difficult for Sergei who had poor skills in English but his parents were hopeful as they knew that children are more likely to master new languages than adults.

Sergey’s school director Patty Barshay became the friend of his family. She tells that though Sergey wasn’t very outgoing he always vigorously pursued his aims. The school method accepted by the Montessori that allowed children the freedom to choose activities that suit their interests was more than compatible with Sergey’s preferences who was glad to grow on his own.

Once in the summer 1990 Sergey was taken by his father back to the USSR where Mikhail led a group of gifted high school math students on a two-week exchange program. In spite of all possible risks related to the Communist Party attitude Brins came to Russia where they were able to meet their old friends and relatives. Having looked at his former environment Sergey noticed drab, cinder-block landscape and people’s stony mien of resignation and realized what kind of future would have been his if he had lived there. While the group toured a sanitarium in the countryside near Moscow, Sergey took his father aside, looked him in the eye and said, “Thank you for taking us all out of Russia.”

After the Montessori he studied at Eleanor Roosevelt High School, a large public school in Greenbelt. Having accumulated a year’s worth of college credits he managed to finish college in three years. Later he graduated with honors in the University of Maryland in Mathematics and IT. After he received the prestigious scholarship National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship for graduate school Sergey insisted on Stanford.

At Stanford Sergey showed himself as forward and sometime arrogant youth. He could burst in on professors without knocking. He was interested in computer science, specifically the field of “data mining,” or how to extract meaningful patterns from mountains of information. Yet he also went in for sports: skiing, rollerblading, gymnastics, even trapeze. His father once remarked, “I asked him if he was taking any advanced courses, and he said, ‘yes, advanced swimming.’”

Google story

In 1995 during a weekend in a group of potential new students which Brin had volunteered to show around the campus he met Larry Page, an opinionated computer science student from the University of Michigan.

Sergey says: “I and Larry quickly became friends when we where working together.” That was true but it didn’t turn out to occur immediately. In the course of their boisterous discussion of the subject they were interested in Sergey and Larry found each other cocky and obnoxious. Nevertheless, they soon found a common platform: retrieving relevant information from large data sets.

By 1996, Larry had hit on the idea of using the links between web pages to rank their relative importance. Borrowing from academia the concept of citations in research papers as a measure of topicality and value, he and Brin applied that thinking to the Web: if one page linked to another, it was in effect “citing” or casting a vote for that page. The more votes a page had, the more valuable it was.

Larry and Sergey come to a decision to make money out of their idea and offered it to various companies for the price of $1 million. But no one was interested. Popular Internet giants like Yahoo! and AOL thought that advertisement was what really made profit while users’ convenience was neglected as long as it brought no revenue. Thus, in view of the companies customers cared about weather, news, email and more offered on the Internet at the time while search didn’t interest them.

However, Larry and Sergey were sure that their idea was unique and useful. Therefore they took leaves of absence from their study at Stanford and started building the future company on their own. With the help of family members, friends and relatives Larry and Sergey scraped up some amount to buy several servers and loan that famous garage in Menlo Park. They hired their first employee - Craig Silverstein, who later became Google's Director of Technology.

Having viewed a quick memo of their work Andy Bechtolsheim, Sun Microsystems cofounder, wrote a check on $100,000. But they didn’t manage to deposit this money in view of the fact that the check was written to “Google, Inc.” which didn’t exist yet.

That time Google .com was answering 10,000 search queries a day. Articles about the new Web site with relevant search results appeared in USA Today and Le Monde. In December, PC Magazine named Google to its list of Top 100 Web Sites and Search Engines for 1998.

With the number of queries growing to 500,000 a day, and the number of employees growing to eight, Google moved its offices to University Avenue in Palo Alto in February 1999. With interest in the company growing as well and Google's commitment to running its servers on the Linux open source operating system, Google signed on with RedHat, its first commercial customer.

Since then their success has been carrying on up to our days. By early June 1999, Google had secured $25 million in equity funding from two leading venture capital firms in Silicon Valley: Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Buyers. Staff members from the two investors joined Google's board of directors. Joining as new employees were Omid Kordestani from Netscape, who became Google's Vice President of Business Development and Sales; and UC Santa Barbara's Urs Hölzle, who became Google's Vice President of Engineering. Having again outgrown their work space, the company moved to the Googleplex, their current headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Sergey and Larry had an interesting story with their initial public offering of stock that took place on April 29, 2004. Along with the filing they included a letter where Sergey and Larry stated that Google was “not a conventional company” and did not intend to become one. Besides, they played a trick a day before the public offering when securities regulations restrict company executives’ public comments. Sergey and Larry gave an interview to Playboy which prompted many to wonder whether the Google founders were careless and immature or just incorrigible troublemakers. Yet this misdeed wasn’t inflicted any penalty.

As of March 9, 2007 Sergey possesses a capital of $18.7 billion in Goggle stocks with a symbolic salary of $1 a year. Being named by Forbes as the 5th billionaire in the USA and the 26th in the world Sergey none the less leads a comparatively moderate life.

Instead of luxurious sport cars he drives hybrid Toyota Prius from considerations of environment protection and he is shopping at Costco.

“It’s interesting—I still find myself not wanting to leave anything on the plate uneaten. I still look at prices. I try to force myself to do this less, not to be so frugal. But I was raised being happy with not so much,” says Sergey.

Meantime Sergey is quite a philanthropic person. Sergey and Larry have pledged $1 billion of Google’s profits to the company’s philanthropic arm, known as Google.org, which will funnel money both to nonprofit charities and companies that deal with global poverty, environmental issues and renewable energy.

The famous Google’s principle “Don’t’ be evil” was once explained by Eric Schmidt who said: “Evil is whatever Sergey says is evil.” A moral code is what the company’s all operations are based on with no exceptions at any level at that.

Once there was the case when the anti-Semitic web site “Jew Watch” appeared prominently in Google results for searches on the term “Jew,” prompting some Jewish groups to demand that Google remove the defamatory site from the top of its listings. But in Google’s view tampering with or otherwise censoring the list of results produced by a Google search is malevolent. So, Sergey said: “I certainly am very offended by the site, but the objectivity of our rankings is one of our very important principles.” Still, the company made some compromise. Google displays a warning at the top of questionable pages entitled “Offensive Search Results,” which links to a fuller explanation of Google’s policy: “Our search results are generated completely objectively and are independent of the beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google.”

“Not a conventional company” and “never one of the crowd”, that is all about Sergey, that is all about the greatest love in his life, Google. Numerous events related both to personal and business decisions in Sergey’s life reflect these axioms. And when Google had to yield to requirements of Chinese governing elite to make restrictions on the site so as to prevent the residents of the country from searching the information of anti-government character Sergey acknowledged that Google had “compromised” its principles.

Within just ten years Sergey and Larry achieved magnificent success evolving from a garage service with 10,000 search inquires a day to a $150-billion company. He will never forget how it all started. In his personal blog Sergey wrote: “Now, after all those years we bought this garage . As a symbol it will always remind us that everything is possible and it may seem funny but the greatest things appear from nothing and as if they wait for their day.”