SERGEY BRIN

Born in Moscow in 1973. His family emigrated to the United States in 1979 to escape antisemitic persecution in the Soviet Union.

His father was a mathematician, his mother a researcher at NASA.

Met Larry Page at Stanford in 1995. They were both PhD students in computer science.

They argued about everything in their first meeting. Then they built a search engine called Backrub in their dorm room, which ranked pages by incoming links instead of keyword frequency.

That insight — that links are votes — became PageRank, and PageRank became Google.

Google incorporated in September 1998 with an initial investment of $100,000 from Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim — who wrote the check before Google even had a bank account. The company went public in 2004 at $85 per share.

It's now worth over $2 trillion.

Alphabet Inc. is the parent company.

Google is the core business — search, YouTube, Android, Chrome, Google Cloud, Google Maps, Gmail. Together they generate over $300 billion in annual revenue, mostly from advertising.

Brin ran Google X (now just "X"), the moonshot factory responsible for self-driving cars (Waymo), Google Glass, Project Loon (internet balloons), and other ambitious experiments. He was the one who pushed for Google to go beyond search.

His personal investments include Bayshore Global Management (his family office), significant funding for Planetary Ventures (Google's real estate arm), and investments in longevity research. He also secretly funded the construction of a massive airship in a NASA hangar in Silicon Valley.

Brin doesn't invest like a traditional investor. He funds moonshots.

His personal portfolio leans toward biotech, longevity research, space, and deep tech. He's not writing Series A checks into SaaS startups.

Through Bayshore Global Management, he runs a family office that manages his fortune across public equities, private investments, and philanthropy. The details are private.

His investing philosophy at Google X set the template: take 100 shots at massive problems. Expect 90 to fail.

The ones that work will be worth trillions. Waymo alone is now estimated to be worth $30-50 billion.

Google itself. Brin's roughly 3% economic stake in Alphabet is worth about $60 billion.

But his real win is creating Google in the first place — a company that went from a Stanford dorm room to $2 trillion in market cap in 26 years. It's one of the most successful company creations in human history, in the same league as Standard Oil and Apple.

Google Glass. Launched in 2013 as the future of computing.

It was awkward, creepy, and nobody wanted to wear a computer on their face. People who wore them were called "Glassholes." The product was shelved for consumers by 2015.

It was ahead of its time by a decade — Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses are essentially Glass done right — but the execution and public reception were a disaster.

Brin believes technology should solve problems that matter. Not apps, not social media — real problems.

Disease, death, transportation, information access. His time at Google X reflected this: every project had to address a problem affecting at least a billion people.

He's spoken about the responsibility that comes with building a company as powerful as Google. The company's original motto was "Don't Be Evil" — though critics argue Google has drifted far from that ideal.

On personal wealth: Brin seems genuinely uninterested in living like a $145 billion person. He cares about making things work.

Was married to Anne Wojcicki (co-founder of 23andMe) from 2007 to 2015. Two children together.

Later married Nicole Shanahan in 2018, one daughter. They divorced in 2024 — Shanahan became Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.'s running mate during her divorce proceedings, which made headlines.

His parents Mikhail and Eugenia Brin were both academics. His father became a math professor at the University of Maryland.

The family's escape from the Soviet Union is a foundational part of Sergey's personal narrative.

Born in Moscow, grew up in Maryland. Attended the University of Maryland, College Park, double-majoring in computer science and mathematics.

Graduated with honors at age 19. Then Stanford for his PhD in computer science — which he never completed because Google happened.

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