Larry Page born in Michigan in 1973, Larry Page’s parents were both computer experts. Following in their footsteps, he studied computer engineering at Stanford University, where he met Sergey Brin. The duo developed a search engine that listed results according to the popularity of the pages and, with Page as CEO, Google became the world’s most popular search engine after launching in 1998. Page and Brin later took charge of Google’s new parent company, Alphabet, until stepping down from their everyday roles in late 2019.
- Name: Larry Page
- Birth Year: 1973
- Birth date: March 26, 1973
- Birth State: Michigan
- Birth City: East Lansing
- Birth Country: United States
- Gender: Male
- Best Known For: Larry Page is an internet entrepreneur and computer scientist who teamed up with grad school buddy Sergey Brin to launch the search engine Google in 1998.
- Industries
- Internet/Computing
- Business and Industry
- Astrological Sign: Aries
- Schools
- Stanford University
- University of Michigan
Early Life and Education
Lawrence Page was born on March 26, 1973, in East Lansing, Michigan. His father, Carl Page, was a pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence, and his mother taught computer programming. After earning a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering from the University of Michigan, Page decided to concentrate on computer engineering for graduate school at Stanford University, where he met Brin.
Creating Google With Sergey Brin
As a research project at Stanford University, Page and Brin created a search engine that listed results according to the popularity of the pages, after concluding that the most popular result would often be the most useful. They called the search engine “Google” after the mathematical term “googol,” which refers to the No. 1 followed by 100 zeros, to reflect their mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the web.
After raising $1 million from family, friends and other investors, the pair launched the company in 1998. Google has since become the world’s most popular search engine, receiving an average of 5.9 billion searches per day in 2013. Headquartered in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, Google held its initial public offering in August 2004, making Page and Brin billionaires.
Evolving Conglomerate
In 2006, Google purchased the most popular website for user-submitted streaming videos, YouTube, for $1.65 billion in stock.
In September 2013, Page was ranked No. 13 on the Forbes 400 list of the richest people in America. That October, he was ranked No. 17 on Forbes‘ 2013 “Most Powerful People” list. As Google’s CEO, Page shared responsibility for the company’s operations with Brin, who served as director of special projects for Google, and Eric Schmidt, the company’s executive chairman.
In 2015, Page and Brin announced the creation of a new parent company called Alphabet to oversee Google and other subsidiaries. Page and Brin became Alphabet’s CEO and president, respectively, with Sundar Pichai stepping in as Google’s top executive.
Diminishing Presence and Company Exit
The restructuring gave Page and Brin the opportunity to step away from day-to-day operations of the company they founded, and the CEO was noticeably absent from Alphabet’s meetings and quarterly earnings calls. In 2018, Page declined to appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee as part of hearings into the use of Big Tech to meddle in foreign elections, and he came under scrutiny for giving a $90 million exit package to a former senior executive accused of sexual misconduct.
On December 3, 2019, Page and Brin announced that they were stepping down from their roles as CEO and president of Alphabet, handing the reins to Pichai. However, the duo were expected to retain their influence over the company’s direction as Alphabet’s largest individual shareholders.
Autonomous Air Taxi
In March 2018, it was announced that a company personally funded by Page, called Kitty Hawk, had reached an agreement with officials in New Zealand to begin the certification process on a fully electric, self-piloting flying taxi.
Kitty Hawk had been testing its aircraft, nicknamed Cora, over New Zealand since the previous October. With Boeing, Airbus and Uber among the companies looking to break ground in the burgeoning air taxi industry, Kitty Hawk is aiming to have a commercial network of vehicles up and running by 2021.
Personal Life
Page has been married to research scientist Lucinda Southworth since 2007. The couple has two children.
The Career of Larry Page
While his academic endeavors would suggest a future career in transportation, automation, or even music production, these collegiate side projects were merely side projects. A vision of Page’s actual future could be seen in his master’s dissertation. Focused on the exploration of the World Wide Web’s mathematical properties, Page’s thesis set out to describe the Web’s structure of links as an enormous graph. Professor Terry Winograd — himself an innovator of artificial intelligence — pushed Page to take this idea further.
Though Larry Page had interest in other fields of computer science — such as automation, telecommunications, holograms, and electric self-driving cars — Winograd’s encouragement pushed Page toward the exploration of web pages and backlinks. What’s more, Winograd paired Page with a fellow Sanford student named Sergey Brin. As we know, this would be a match made in computer heaven. The two linked up on a research project they dubbed “BackRub.” The rest, as they say, was history.
BackRub
Now working under the name BackRub, Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s first order of business was to co-write a research paper: “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.” The gist of it argued that the World Wide Web was nothing more than a series of loosely connected citations, a.k.a. links. If one could establish a way to track, organize, and index these citations, then Web users could hypothetically browse the entire internet easily.
Secondly, they defined what’s now known as the PageRank algorithm: a way to count and qualify the number of links on a page in an effort to determine the website’s importance. (The logic being that the more links and backlinks a website has, the more important it likely is.) This thinking helped the two create the most advanced search engine the world had seen thus far.
In constructing BackRub, Page and Brin filled filled both of their rooms with computer equipment. Their project was so powerful, it actually began interfering with Stanford’s entire computing infrastructure. Taking any and every spare computer part available, the two assembled a search engine strong enough to handle multiple searches by multiple searchers at once. By 1996, BackRub — still rooted on Stanford’s computing infrastructure — was ready for public Internet use. By 1998, BackRub saw 10,000 searches a day.
By the fall of 1998, it was clear that BackRub’s true potential was outgrowing BackRub’s actual capabilities. As a result, Larry Page and Sergey Brin took their search engine to the next level. It was then that they incorporated incorporated Google, Inc. Page named himself CEO, while Brin was named president of the newfound company. The goal of Google was to go far beyond the limits of Stanford’s infrastructure. They wanted to go global, hoping to organize the entire planet’s online information and make it both useful and accessible for all. With $1 million and a dream, they headed to Mountain View.
Page and company’s biggest hurdles were twofold: To reduce the size of the search engine’s physical hardware, and speed up the computing power of the search engine’s virtual software. By 1999, Page and co. found a way to fit their servers into a number of square meters in rented third-party warehouses. By 2000, Google had indexed more than a billion sites. It was now the most comprehensive, most thorough search engine in history.
The following year, at the pressure of much-needed investors, Page stepped down from his position as CEO to allow a more experienced person to steer Google in the right direction. He obliged, and Novell CEO Eric Schmidt took his place. Page then became President of Products. The move proved to be the right one, as Schmidt led Google through an era of profound growth and massive expansion. Even with Schmidt in his former spot, Page was still viewed as the boss to Google employees. He gave final approval on almost everything, including the decision to go public in 2004. Page was now a billionaire.
Alphabet
In 2011, Schmidt stepped down as Google CEO and allowed Page to resume his post. (Despite the fact that Page had essentially been acting as CEO all those years regardless.) Schmidt’s leadership was nevertheless vital to Google’s success, lifting the company up to a $180 billion valuation and nearly 25,000 employees in all. Still, while Page was able to exert significant control over Google’s product development throughout the 2000s, the former CEO still found himself feeling more and more disconnected from his greatest accomplishment.
Page spent the early 2010s consolidating, redesigning, reorganizing, and overhauling the company from the top down. More autonomy for Google executives, more collaboration between the development teams, new looks for several of the company’s main products and features… Seemingly nothing was immune to Page’s companywide rejuvenation efforts. By 2013, more than 70 of the products and services at Google had been shut down. Even more had been consolidated. Page’s work during this time helped to establish Google as the clean, simple, refined company we know it as today.
Still, Page suffered from that same disconnect he was feeling at the start of the decade. When the opportunity arose for Page to restructure Google and establish a parent holding company above the search engine, he took it. In August of 2015, Page left his post as CEO of Google and became CEO of Alphabet, Inc. He described the move as an effort to make Google even cleaner and hold the company even more accountable and transparent than ever before. With this move, Page could keep control of Google without having any day-to-day tasks there. He stepped down as CEO of Alphabet in 2019.