Sergey Brin is an American businessman and internet entrepreneur known as the co-founder of Google, a company that specializes in internet-related services and products, which include online advertising technologies, search engine, cloud computing, software, and hardware.
Early years and education
Sergey Brin was born on August 21, 1973, in Moscow, Russia. He immigrated to the United States when he was 6. Brin attended the University of Maryland at College Park and graduated with a degree in mathematics and computer science. Brin met Larry page, co-founder of Google, while he was completing doctorates in Computer Science in Stanford University.
Google started out in January 1996 as a research project for Brin and Page at Stanford University. Brin focused on developing data mining system while Page researched on the importance of a research paper from its citations in other papers. They combined their ideas and used Page’s dormitory room as their office and programming center. This is where they developed and tested their new search engine. They found out that it is usually the most popular result that would be most useful and relevant, so they created a search engine that would list down results according to pages’ popularity. The name Google came from the mathematical term “googol”, which is the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeros. It is a representation of the vast amount of information that can be found on the web.
Funding
Brin and Page raised an initial capital of $1 million from family, friends and some other investors and launched the company in 1998. The initial funding of $100,000 was from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, and from three more other investors, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, professor David Cheriton, and entrepreneur Ram Shriram. In June 1999, Google received a new $25 million round of funding from the venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital.
Also in the same year, the company moved its office to Palo Alto, California. In the year 2000, Google started selling advertisements
IPO
In August 19, 2004, Google’s initial public offering (IPO) took place where it offered 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share. The online auction for shares had a sale of $1.67 billion which gave the company a $23 billion market capitalization. In 2006, Google acquired Youtube, a video-sharing and streaming website for $1.65 billion in stock. By January 2014, its market capitalization had grown to $397 billion. The 271 million shares remained with Google while Yahoo owned 8.4 million shares before the IPO took place so it also benefited. After the IPO, shares hit $350 on October 31, 2007 due to the company’s increase in sales and earnings in the online advertising. In May 2011, Google reached 1 billion monthly unique visitors search and in the year 2012, the company generated $50 billion in annual revenue, generating $38 billion the previous year.
In October 2013, it was reported that Google reached a revenue of $14.89 billion for the third quarter of 2013.
In November 2016, Brin was no. 13 on Forbes’ billionaire list with a net worth of $37.9 billion. Google became the most popular search engine with an average of more than a trillion searches a day in 2016.
Net Worth
Brin’s net worth as of January 2019 is $48.8 billion.