Larry Page & athe story of Google
“Always deliver more than expected”- Larry Page.
And deliver he did! Google is arguably one of the greatest inventions in the history of the IT industry. Google has transformed the way we consume information and has become synonym with all types of information search on the internet. So much so that ‘Google It’ is a popular lingo amongst the youngsters now. Today, Google as a company has grown to offer products far beyond just the search engine domain. In this article, we take a look at the co-founder of Google Larry Page and the story of Google, its inception, growth & success
Larry Page: A Brief Introduction
Lawrence ‘Larry’ Page is an American Computer Scientist and an internet entrepreneur who co-founded Google with Sergey Brin in 1998. Larry Page is the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. Born on March 26, 1973, in East Lansing, Michigan, his father was a Ph. D in Computer Science and a professor at Michigan State University and his mother an instructor in computer programming. A voracious reader in his youth, Page spent a lot of time poring over Science & Technology books and magazines. Page always liked to invent things and at the age of 12 knew that someday he was going to start a company. Page holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan, with honors and a Master of Science in Computer Science from Stanford University.
Page took over as the CEO of Google in 2011 taking over the reins from Eric Schmidt and stepped down and handed over the charge to Sundar Pichai in 2015. Page is now the CEO of Alphabet and Sergey Brin its President.
Personal Life
In 2007, Larry Page married Lucinda Southworth, a research scientist and the sister of actress and model Carrie Southworth. Page and Southworth have two children born in 2009 and 2011.
Page’s life has been hugely influenced by four factors; his grandfather’s history in the early labour movement, his education in Montessori schools, his admiration for his hero- the visionary inventor Nikola Tesla, and his participation in the leadership institute at the University of Michigan’s Engineering School. Page admitted in an interview that the hardships of his grandfather’s story made him want to make Google an entirely different kind of workplace, one that, instead of crushing the dreams of workers, encouraged their pursuit.
Page suffers from paralyzed vocal cords that are caused by an autoimmune disease called Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. The Page family foundation frequently donates to charities and in 2014 Page donated $15 million to aid the efforts against the Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa.
The ‘Who Founded Google’ Story
In the year 1995, while in the Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergei Brin initiated the process of developing a search engine as part of their research project & named it as the “BackRub”. This search engine was designed to explore the connecting links between web pages so as to determine a site’s authority.
In the year 1996, Page’s web crawler began to explore the web, with Stanford home page serving as the initial phase. Later in the year 1998, Page and Brin decided to formally incorporate their company & set up their first data center in a garage.
Soon Page & Brin started looking for investors to back their initiative. Eventually, Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, invested about $100,000 in their company. Over a period of time, the duo managed to raise over $1 million.
Finally, Google, Inc. was established on September 7, 1998, with its first employee being Craig Silverstein, who later became Google’s Director of Technology. Initially, Google served over 10,000 queries a day & steadily gained a reputation of the most reliable source of information. By 1999, it was serving over 500,000 queries a day and the company soon expanded from a mere four wall garage to now a mega office that is headquartered in Mountain View, California.
