One of the co-founders of the Google Inc. and the inventor of PageRank, Lawrence “Larry” Page was born on the 26th of March 1973 in East Lansing, Michigan, USA as the son of Carl Vincent Page, Sr. and Gloria, who were both involved in computer sciences.
His father had a PhD in computer science and was a pioneer in A.I., teaching at the Michigan State University, while his mother was a computer programming instructor at the Michigan State University and at Lyman Briggs College.
Page remembers the old home as a mess where computers and magazines were spread throughout and thus it was quite easy for him to become interested in the field from a very early age. To this the attention and care of the parents allowed his creativity to develop and he began playing the saxophone, studying music composition. He said that “in some sense I feel like music training led to the high-speed legacy of Google for me” since “In music you’re very cognizant of time”.
With so many computers lying around Page was the first child in elementary school to turn in an assignment written on a word processor and as most smart kids of his age do, he took everything apart to see how it works. He recalls that this got him interested in technology and business: “Probably from when I was 12, I knew I was going to start a company eventually”.
After graduating the Okemos Montessori School he went to East Lansing High School until 1991 and then got his Bachelor of Science in computer engineering from the University of Michigan where he was also the president of the Beta Epsilon chapter of the Eta Kappa Nu fraternity. He was a member of the Maize & Blue University of Michigan Solar Car team in 1993 and during this time he developed a business plan for a company which would use software to create a music synthesizer.
He went to Stanford University to get his Master of Science and then pursued a PhD program in the field of computer science. Here he met Sergey Brin in 1995 who was a fellow graduate and they worked together on a research project that sought to maximize Internet search through the analysis of websites interconnectivity, calling the project BlackRub.
This research was made at the encouragement of the supervisor Terry Winograd and he now considers it the best advice he ever received, since at the time he was also pondering fields like autonomous cars and telepresence. The resulting work signed by the two is entitled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine” and it quickly became one of the most downloaded documents in the history of the Internet.
The BackRub web crawler needed a ranking algorithm to output the data and thus PageRank was born, leading to a much more efficient and precise search engine than the ones available at the moment. They transformed Brin’s dorm room into an office and programming center, while Page’s room was hosting the machine laboratory with spare parts taken from cheap computers to host the server.
The popularity of the program grew and they required more servers. This is how Google came into being, which was incorporated in 1998 with $100,000 secured from Andy Bechtolsheim, with the initial domain name of Googol, which was derived from a number consisting of one and then a hundred zeros, to signify the massive amount of data explored with the search engine.
After the inception of the company Larry Page appointed himself as CEO and Brin was the president of Google. Together, they sought “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Something they managed with great success, having the company’s impact compared to that of the printing press.
The beginning of the 2000s allowed the owners to move to a Mountain View office with the help of loans from friends or relatives amounting to one million dollars. In June 2000 it was already the most comprehensive search engine on the Internet.
Page working as CEO had some original ideas that were later extended to the whole Silicon Valley, such as not allowing any non-engineers to supervise engineers due to their lack of technical knowledge, but at the time of 2001 it proved hard to sustain, leading to tensions between workers. Another important focus of his work was on search times, trying to improve the speed with which Google returned answers due to his idea that the faster it would be, the more persons would use it.
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as well as Sequoia Capital invested $25 million into Google and wanted a more experienced CEO, so Eric Schmidt was hired as Chairman of Google in March 2001, after leaving his position as CEO of Novell and Page was made the President of Products. With Schmidt holding the reigns (although always consulting with Page and Brin about important decisions), the company expanded and had its initial public offering on August 20, 2004.
In 2005 Android was acquired for $50 million by Page and in 2008 the first phone using Android software was launched, becoming increasingly popular and managing to overtake Apple in 2010. Today it is the most popular mobile operating system in the world. In April 2011 Schmidt stepped down as CEO to put Page back in charge and left with a Twitter remark saying “Adult-supervision no longer needed”.
Page married Lucinda Southworth in 2007 and they have two children together, one born in 2009 and the other in 2011.
With Page as CEO the company tried to develop a greater autonomy and improve the communication and collaboration between teams. He placed managers that had almost the same authority as the CEO in charge of the most important divisions, such as YouTube, AdWords or Google Search. The products that couldn’t be unified were shut down (meaning almost 70 of them) and the ones that remained became closer in touch, although there was a lot of criticism about Page’s vision of things.
The influence of Facebook led Google to create its own social network in 2011 called Google+ and they acquired Motorola Mobility in August 2011 for $12.5 billion, thus securing patents that would protect Android from lawsuits. Google became the largest Internet company in the world with a revenue of $40 billion each year and in October 2014 Page left the day-to-day product decision making to Senior Vice President Sundar Pichai to work at the long-term strategy of the company.
He is an advocate of clean energy, being an investor in Tesla Motors, and has a philanthropic family foundation that donated $15 million in November 2014 to help the fight against Ebola.
