The Google Guys (4 page)

In 1977, Mikhail attended an international conference, where he met foreign researchers and academics. It was a life-changing event. He went home that night and told his wife that they had to get out of the country and settle in America, where real opportunities lay. The problem was that just expressing a desire to leave the Soviet Union put them in danger of being declared “refuseniks,” which would have caused even more discrimination.

But the one advantage Russian Jews had at that time was that they were among the few who were allowed to emigrate from the Soviet Union. Katok, also a mathematician suffering from the same ethnic advantage as Brin, had developed connections at the University of Maryland, and with their sponsorship, he managed to emigrate first, in 1978, and secured a teaching position at the university. He then worked to help his friend Brin find a position there as well.

In 1978, Brin's family applied for an emigration permit, one that included Mikhail's mother. They told the authorities that they wanted to settle in Israel, which is what many Jewish emigrants from the Soviet Union did. But applying for emigration got Mikhail fired from his job; Eugenia had to quit hers, and the family had to relinquish its Soviet citizenship. While they were waiting for their application to be reviewed, Mikhail earned money translating technical documents from English to Russian. Without jobs, they struggled for several months, but in 1979 their application was approved—just in time. Soon afterward, the Soviet government ended all emigration.

Leaving almost all their possessions behind, the Brin family set up temporary residence in Paris, often the first stop from Moscow. Some families end up as refugees, stranded in a country for months or years until they manage to obtain a visa to their new country. But Katok and other colleagues helped Mikhail (now Michael) secure a visa and a teaching position at the University of Maryland.

“Both myself and Michael Brin were fortunate because there was tremendous empathy and solidarity from our colleagues,” says Katok. “We were able to avoid being refugees in the usual sense.”

Sergey didn't know the extent of the anti-Semitism his parents faced until much later in life. But it affected him nevertheless; he has said that even as a child he never felt at home in Russia. Although the family was never deeply religious, Sergey has visited Israel three times, the first time as a teenager with his family. While there in 2008, he gave a rare interview to
Ha'aretz
magazine, and confirmed that the difficulties his family had experienced in Russia “certainly had a significant effect on my life subsequently.” He noted, “My family had a lot of challenges in the Soviet Union.... I think that just kind of gave me a different perspective in life.”
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The Brins had very little when they reached the United States. Sergey told
Ha'aretz
: “The U.S. was very good to us. It was a great place, but we started with nothing. We were poor. . . . When we first moved to the States we rented a little house, and my parents didn't have a proper room to sleep in. They had to wall off the kitchen. It was a very humble beginning.”

What role did this play in molding his character as an entrepreneur? “We learned to get by,” Sergey said. “I think being scrappy and getting by is important. . . . The most important thing is the background [of being Jewish]—of just having gone through hardship and being able to survive and thrive. I think that's at the core of the Jewish experience.” But he never went through the process of having a Bar Mitzvah at age thirteen. “At least in the U.S., bar mitzvahs are associated with getting lots of gifts and money, and I was never comfortable with that.”

The family did thrive, although not nearly to the extent Sergey has. Michael Brin is now a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland. His mother—over sixty when the family emigrated—taught Russian for several years at the University of Maryland. Eugenia became a scientist at NASA. Sergey was six years old when his family landed in Maryland. His brother, Sam, was born in Maryland in 1988.

The elder Brin is still a curmudgeonly and short-tempered man, although, says Kenneth Berg, a fellow professor at the University of Maryland, “There is not a ruthless bone in his body.” But he was a tough professor, gruff enough to hand graded papers back with the comment “My sincere condolences.” He's also a stern parent. “Michael has always been very demanding and judgmental,” says Katok. “Sergey was certainly very bright, but kind of quiet. His dad had exacting standards and I don't think at an early age he really appreciated the brilliance of his son.”

Michael Brin discovered his son's promise one day when Sergey was eight or nine years old. Katok and other colleagues from the university were sitting around the Brin house listening to Michael complain about how stupid his undergrads were. He had tried giving them a graduate-level math problem, just a little above the capabilities of most undergrads, he grumbled, yet not one of the students had had the brains to solve it.

Sergey, who had been quietly sitting in the corner, decided to speak up, and in his “squeaky little voice,” according to Katok, offered a solution to the problem. At first, his father dismissed him. Katok then interjected: “No, Michael. That's the correct answer.” Adds Katok: “In my memory, it was the first time Michael took his son seriously.”

Sergey was also fascinated with computers at an early age. He got his first computer, a Commodore 64, around 1982, when he was nine years old. He soon discovered the Internet. For a while, he frequented primitive chat rooms, then called IRCs, or Internet relay chats, but later recalled that he grew bored with them once they became dominated by “10-year-old boys trying to talk about sex.”
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He, on the other hand, was a ten-year-old boy interested in computer games, and graduated to multi-user dungeons (MUDs) where computer whiz kids stayed up late to battle each other as virtual warriors. He even wrote his own MUD game.

Like Larry, Sergey also attended a Montessori school until about age ten, and was quite happy there. But he was bored with high school and dropped out after three years. There was simply nothing left for him to learn there. His father started calling him the “high-school dropout.” Instead, however, he applied to the University of Maryland and was accepted a year earlier than the average high-school graduate. He was taking senior-level mathematics classes after about a year, and took several graduate-level courses before he graduated. He also took summer jobs at prestigious research labs at Wolfram Research, General Electric Information Services, and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies.

Around 1993, he downloaded an early version of Mosaic, the graphical interface that evolved into the Netscape browser and turned the esoteric Internet into the point-and-click World Wide Web, leading millions of people online. “I thought it was pretty cool,” he said in January 2000. “It was a fun thing to play with.”
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Kenneth Berg, from whom Sergey took a differential equations course at the University of Maryland, knew he was a very promising mathematician. Berg recalls writing on the board a geometrical proof of a problem when Sergey politely raised his hand and explained, from a purely conceptual level, why that proof could not possibly be true. Berg looked at the board and realized he had written down the proof incorrectly.

“It was really impressive,” Berg says. “He really understood how to think mathematically from a very young age.” Even then, adds Berg, Sergey offered his opinion without arrogance. “He simply saw something wrong” and felt the need to correct it, says Berg. Still, no one today would accuse Sergey of any lack in the ego department. He always had a tendency to correct teachers, professors, and colleagues, and retains that habit today.

Still, Berg adds, “He's a super nice guy. There's a gentle spirit about him. He seems to be somebody who wants to use his intellect to do good.”

Sergey graduated in 1993 with a dual degree in math and computer science, and entered the Ph.D. program at Stanford in 1994. He had turned out to be such a brilliant mathematician that his father expected big things from him. But business mogul was not one of them. After Google was started, Michael Brin told the University of Maryland student newspaper, “I expected him to get his Ph.D. and become somebody, maybe a professor.”

Dr. Larry Brilliant, who is now chief philanthropy evangelist at
Google.org
, the company's philanthropic arm, believes that both Larry's and Sergey's family backgrounds are what make them idealists with a tendency to favor small corporations and individuals over the business elite. “Inside their minds, what's at the core of Larry and Sergey—and they'll disagree on this, so it's not like it's an absolute—but they come from a very moral base,” he says. “Sergey was raised in the Soviet Union and his family went through a hell of a lot. He doesn't ever want to see that happen again. He approaches things not necessarily looking at them from the top of the food chain. He's much more sympathetic to regular people.”

There's no denying Sergey's brilliance. In fact, when he joined the Ph.D. program at Stanford, he passed all his qualifying exams in the first couple of months after arriving. Most students don't pass all the exams until their third year. That meant he didn't actually have to take any classes—just write a thesis in order to get the degree (which he never did). “Sergey didn't have to take the Ph.D. program seriously,” says Scott Hassan, a grad student at Stanford who worked with him (and later went on to cofound his own company, eGroups, now part of Yahoo).

But Sergey Brin is not simply a pasty geek with no life outside his math and his computers. He's an athlete with many interests: dancing, sailing, gymnastics. He trained on the trapeze as a youth and once said he seriously considered running off to join the circus. He's physically fit and known to walk around on his hands for the fun of it (and to impress women).

He's a competitive swimmer, and when he first entered the graduate program at Stanford, his father groused that he “majored in swimming.” Michael Brin has claimed that the only course Sergey ever took at Stanford that required him to write a paper was one on computer cryptology. When he asked his son if he was planning on taking any advanced classes, Sergey reportedly answered he was “thinking about advanced swimming.” His father didn't know about Sergey's fondness for skinny-dipping with friends or picking locks to office doors in the old Economics Building at Stanford. “He's a phenomenal lock pick,” says Brian Lent, a former Stanford colleague. But Lent insists they never did anything illegal, such as entering the dean's office to change grades. But they thought about it.

As smart, precocious boys with access to education and technology in the 1980s, both Sergey and Larry became very early users of the Internet, absorbing its culture, the world of Dungeons & Dragons and MUDs, and the free software on offer.

Sergey and Larry are the hobbits of the Shire of the Internet. Although they were born a generation after Steve Wozniak, Apple Computer's cofounder and the original technology hobbit, they were more like him than like Steve Jobs or most of the Bubble generation of Internet entrepreneurs.

Internet technologists are comfortably rooted in their personal shire of science and technology and academe, leagues away from the turmoil of the modern business world. Many of them have day jobs. They're prone to being easy-going pranksters with a fondness for a good online party with others like them. In 2001, when the first
Lord of the Rings
movie was released, Larry and Sergey rented out an entire theater and took the Google staff to see it.

They grew up in an environment that encouraged open programming, and they shared their creations freely in the academic tradition. What college student doesn't appreciate free beer, music, games, programs, and information to get them through the next exam? The Internet provides everything but the beer.

Larry not only used Legos to build a computer printer in grade school, he repeated the stunt when he built Google's first computer server at Stanford. However, he did not actually use Legos at Stanford, but rather knockoffs of larger blocks called Duplos. “They're imitation Duplos, because they were cheaper than the real thing,” Sergey once explained. “This turned out to be a big mistake, because the tolerances [the deviations in the way the parts fit together] on the imitation Duplos are much worse than the tolerances on real Duplos, and as a result our system would crash from time to time, because these things would fall apart and the whole disc array would go down and you couldn't do any searches.”
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(The device is now on display in the Gates engineering building at Stanford.)

Even today, Sergey and Larry—especially Larry—are still shy when outside the circle of other technologists. In person, they don't generate that air of superiority so common in Silicon Valley CEOs. They even seem deferential. Still, having succeeded so effectively in school and as entrepreneurs, they developed the luxury of rarely dealing with outsiders, a trait that many people see as arrogant and dismissive—which it often is.

When Larry and Sergey met at Stanford and started working together, they found they shared not only a profound love of computers, but also a strong left-wing bias and a devil-may-care attitude. They distrusted business moguls.

This is true also of the rest of the technology elite who helped build the Internet. The original designers of the Internet never intended it to reach out and touch anyone beyond the domain of the universities and government labs for which it was created. These groups used the Internet to share their research, ideas, and software programs—all for free. Most of them are advocates of the Open Source movement, which believes technology standards should be built not on patented, corporate-owned software, but on generally agreed-upon technology available to anyone. They contributed technology to the Internet's growth as well. In the 1980s, the Internet started quietly growing in capability right alongside the much noisier personal computer industry.