Sergey Mikhailovich Brin (Russian: Сергей Михайлович Брин; born August 21, 1973) is an American computer scientist and businessman who co-founded Google with Larry Page. He was the president of Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., until stepping down from the role in 2019. He and Page remain at Alphabet as co-founders, controlling shareholders, and board members. Brin is a centibillionaire and among the richest people in the world; as of August 2026, his estimated net worth is US$264.9 billion.
Born into a Russian-Jewish family in Moscow, Soviet Union, Brin immigrated to the United States at the age of six. He earned his bachelor's degree at the University of Maryland, College Park, following in his father's and grandfather's footsteps by studying mathematics as well as computer science. After graduation, in 1993, he enrolled in Stanford University to pursue a PhD in computer science. There, Brin met Page, with whom he built a web search engine. The program became popular at Stanford, and he discontinued his PhD studies to start Google in Susan Wojcicki's garage in Menlo Park, California. In 2023, Brin came out of retirement to contribute to AI research at Alphabet.
Brin was born into a Russian-Jewish family on August 21, 1973, in Moscow, then the capital of the Soviet Union. Both of Brin's parents, Mikhail and Eugenia Brin (1948–2024), graduated from Moscow State University (MSU). His father is a retired mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, and his mother was a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
The Brin family lived in a three-room apartment in central Moscow, which they also shared with Sergey's paternal grandmother. In 1977, after returning from a mathematics conference in Warsaw, Poland, Mikhail announced that, because of antisemitism in the Soviet Union, it was time for the family to emigrate. They formally applied for their exit visa in September 1978, and as a result, his father was "promptly fired". For related reasons, his mother had to leave her job. For the next eight months, without any steady income, they were forced to take on temporary jobs as they waited, afraid their request would be denied as it was for many refuseniks. In May 1979, they were granted their official exit visas and were allowed to leave the country.
The Brin family lived in Vienna and Paris while Mikhail Brin secured a teaching position at the University of Maryland with help from Anatole Katok. During this time, the Brin family received support and assistance from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. They arrived in the United States on October 25, 1979.
He attended Eleanor Roosevelt High School. In September 1990, Brin enrolled in the University of Maryland, where he received his Bachelor of Science from the Department of Computer Science in 1993 with honors in computer science and high honors in mathematics at the age of 19. In 1993, he interned at Wolfram Research, the developers of Mathematica.
Brin began his graduate study in computer science at Stanford University on a graduate fellowship from the National Science Foundation, receiving a Master of Science degree in computer science in 1995. As of 2008, he was on leave from his Doctor of Philosophy studies at Stanford.
During an orientation for new students at Stanford, he met Larry Page. The two men seemed to disagree on most subjects, but after spending time together they "became intellectual soul-mates and close friends." Brin's focus was on developing data mining systems while Page's was on extending "the concept of inferring the importance of a research paper from its citations in other papers". Together, they authored a paper titled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine".
To convert the backlink data gathered by Backrub's web crawler into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm, and realized that it could be used to build a search engine far superior to those existing at the time. The new algorithm relied on a new kind of technology that analyzed the relevance of the backlinks that connected one Web page to another, and allowed the number of links and their rank, to determine the rank of the page. Combining their ideas, they began utilizing Page's dormitory room as a machine laboratory, and extracted spare parts from inexpensive computers to create a device that they used to connect the nascent search engine with Stanford's broadband campus network.
After filling Page's room with equipment, they then converted Brin's dorm room into an office and programming center, where they tested their new search engine designs on the web. The rapid growth of their project caused Stanford's computing infrastructure to experience problems.
Page and Brin used Page's basic HTML programming skills to set up a simple search page for users, as they did not have a web page developer to create anything visually elaborate. They also began using any computer part they could find to assemble the necessary computing power to handle searches by multiple users. As their search engine grew in popularity among Stanford users, it required additional servers to process the queries. In August 1996, the initial version of Google was made available on the Stanford Web site.
By early 1997, the Backrub page described the state as follows:
Some Rough Statistics (from August 29, 1996)
Total indexable HTML urls: 75.2306 Million
Total content downloaded: 207.022 gigabytes
BackRub is written in Java and Python and runs on several Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums running Linux. The primary database is kept on a Sun Ultra series II with 28GB of disk. Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg have provided a great deal of very talented implementation help. Sergey Brin has also been very involved and deserves many thanks.
- Larry Page pagecs.stanford.edu
BackRub already exhibited the rudimentary functions and characteristics of a search engine: a query input was entered and it provided a list of backlinks ranked by importance. Page recalled: "We realized that we had a querying tool. It gave you a good overall ranking of pages and ordering of follow-up pages." Page said that in mid-1998 they finally realized the further potential of their project: "Pretty soon, we had 10,000 searches a day. And we figured, maybe this is really real."