Lawrence Page

Lawrence Edward Page was born in Lansing, Michigan. His father, Dr. Carl Victor Page, was a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at Michigan State University, where Lawrence's mother, Gloria, also taught computer programming. The Page family home was full of first-generation personal computers and scientific magazines, and young Larry, as he was called, immersed himself in them. Significantly, his older brother, Carl Page, Jr., also became a successful Internet entrepreneur.

Larry Page attended a Montessori school in the primary grades and later graduated from East Lansing High School. He was an honors student at the University of Michigan, where he also participated in the University's solar car team, reflecting another lifelong interest: sustainable transportation technology. After graduating with a B.S. in computer engineering, he undertook graduate studies in computer science at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. It was here that he first undertook the project of analyzing patterns of linkage among different sites on the World Wide Web. It was also at Stanford that he first met fellow computer science graduate student Sergey Brin and recruited him to join his research project.

The Internet and the World Wide Web were just taking shape as major forces in telecommunication when Larry Page entered Stanford. Larry Page wanted to devise a method for determining how many other web pages linked to any one given page. Existing facilities for exploring the Web could only rank search results by the frequency of appearance of a given word on any page of the Web. Searches often produced endless lists of web sites of very little pertinence to the user's query. Page soon found that ranking web sites by the number of links leading to it from other sites was a far more useful measure of a Web document's relevance to a user's search criteria. To explore the possibilities of his new "PageRank" mechanism more fully, he called on the data mining expertise of his classmate, Sergey Brin

Together, Page and Brin wrote the paper "Dynamic Data Mining: A New Architecture for Data with High Dimensionality," and followed it with "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine." The latter paper quickly became one of the most downloaded scientific documents in the history of the Internet. For a time, Page and Brin ran the prototype of their search engine, which they named "BackRub," on an assortment of inexpensive personal computers stored in Larry Page's dorm room. Word quickly spread beyond the walls of Stanford that the two graduate students had created something far more useful than existing search technology

They registered the domain name google.com in 1997. The domain name was derived from the term "googol," the very large number written as a one followed by 100 zeros, an expression of the vast universe of data the Google search engine was designed to explore. Page and Brin incorporated Google as a privately held company in 1998 and relocated their servers from Larry Page's dorm room to a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. Having completed their Master's degrees, they took a leave of absence from the Ph.D. program to concentrate on building their business. At first, Larry Page served as the company's CEO, Sergey Brin as its President. Their stated mission was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

After quickly outgrowing a series of office locations, the company leased a complex of buildings in Mountain View, California in 1999. Google has since purchased the entire property, known as the GooglePlex, one of the most unusual and innovative workplaces in the world. In 2000, they began selling text-based advertisements associated with search keywords. The text-only ads on their graphics-free home page kept their download time to the bare minimum, and their ability to deliver ads directly related to the interests of the user made the ad space highly valuable.

That same year, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, still enrolled as Ph.D. candidates at Stanford, attended the Academy of Achievement's International Achievement Summit in London, England as graduate student delegates. The interview recorded at that time can be read on this web site. They returned to the annual event in 2004 as recipients of the Academy's Golden Plate Award.

By 2001, a vast number of once-promising Internet start-ups had folded, but Google was growing explosively and turning a profit. Page and Brin recruited Novell executive Eric Schmidt to serve as CEO, with Larry Page taking the role of President for Products, and Sergey Brin as President for Technology. The three have continued to run the enterprise as a triumvirate ever since.

Google's initial public offering in 2004 raised $1.67 billion, giving the company a market capitalization of $23 billion. A number of Google employees with shares in the company became millionaires overnight, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin found themselves multi-billionaires at age 27. Google was an immediate favorite with individual investors and the stock price has soared. All three top executives _ Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt _ have reduced their annual salaries to a dollar a year and refused bonuses, tying their personal wealth directly to the company's performance in the stock market.

The company has continued to grow dramatically, through strategic alliances with AOL and Netscape, along with a number of cunning acquisitions, most spectacularly that of online video site YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006. Google has introduced a number of popular new services and applications, including a toolbar that allows users to perform searches from their desktops, without visiting the Google web site. The web site itself enables searches for video and still imagery as well as HTML documents. Google also provides a free web-based e-mail service called G-Mail. Google Apps Premium Edition offers a suite of business tools including e-mail, word processing and spreadsheet applications at a fraction of the cost of competing office software packages. One of Google's most dramatic projects is Google Earth, which allows users to access satellite imagery to zoom in on locations all over the world. The most ambitious project of all, Google Book Search, aims to make the contents of vast libraries of books available and searchable online.

By the end of 2006, Google had over 10,000 employees and annual revenues well over $10 billion. Various estimates place Larry Page and Sergey Brin among the two dozen richest people on earth, and the dozen richest Americans. Despite its enormous success, Google has largely succeeded in preserving a uniquely informal and creative atmosphere at its Mountain View campus. In 2007, Fortune magazine, in its annual Top 100, ranked Google as the best company in the world to work for.

In January 2011 Google announced that Page would replace Schmidt as CEO in April the same year. Both Page and Brin earn an annual compensation of one dollar. On April 4th 2011, Page will officially become the chief executive officer of Google, while Schmidt steps down to become executive chairman.

Ref: http://www.achievement.org