Larry Page

• Born: March 26, 1973
• Place of Birth: Lansing, Michigan

• Cofounder of Google
• Primary Field: Business and commerce
• Specialty: Management, executives, and investors
• Primary Company/Organization: Google

Introduction

As a codeveloper of the PageRank algorithm, Larry Page provided the tools that led to the creation of Google, a multinational corporation that provides a variety of internet-related products and services. Based on the success of its internet search engine, Google extended its products to include e-mail, an office productivity suite, social networking tools, and other online productivity software. Page twice served as chief executive officer (CEO) of Google before becoming CEO of Alphabet Inc., organized as Google's parent company. He then stepped down from that role in late 2019.

Early Life

Lawrence "Larry" Page was born on March 26, 1973, in Lansing, Michigan. Both of Page's parents were professors of computer science at Michigan State University (MSU), located in nearby East Lansing. Page's father, Carl, earned a PhD in computer science from the University of Michigan in 1965 and taught at the University of North Carolina before joining MSU in 1967. One of the first members of MSU's Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Carl was a pioneer in the field and was a specialist in artificial intelligence. Page's mother, Gloria, taught computer programming classes. Although Page's mother was Jewish, he was raised in a home without religion, favoring his father's view that his religion was technology.

Page began his schooling at the Okemos Montessori School and graduated from East Lansing High School in 1991. As a child, Page became interested in computers, whetted by the availability of computers and computer science journals. Page's older brother, Carl Jr., encouraged his propensity to disassemble common household appliances. Even before he reached his teens, Page states that he realized he wanted to be an inventor as an adult, and he tried to learn what he could about business and technology. While in high school, Page demonstrated a high degree of proficiency in mathematics and the sciences, and he was accepted into the University of Michigan as a student. While a student at Michigan, Page participated in a variety of competitions, including making a solar car and an inkjet printer from Legos. Page graduated from Michigan with honors with a bachelor of science degree in computer engineering. He was accepted at Stanford University to do graduate work in computer science.

Page quickly earned a master's degree in computer science from Stanford, and he applied to and was accepted by its doctoral program in that subject in early 1995. At a new student orientation in March of that year, Page first met Sergey Brin, who had been a computer science doctoral student at Stanford since 1993. Brin was assigned to give a group of the new students, including Page, a campus tour, and the two quickly became friends.

Life's Work

While completing course work at Stanford, Page began thinking about possible dissertation topics. Page thought it might be interesting to determine the number of website links to a given page, including the number and nature of such connections, known as backlinks. Page's adviser, Terry Winograd, encouraged him to pursue this line of research, and he was soon joined in this work by Brin. Together, Page and Brin devised a web crawler, BackRub, that would measure the number of links a given website had. To then access the data, Page and Brin created an algorithm known as PageRank that would sort websites based on the number of links that site had. Page and Brin soon recognized that this could help establish a web browser that provided better results than those then available. Until this point, most web browsers had sorted websites on the vague concept of "relevance," as based on the number of times a term appeared on that website. Using BackRub and PageRank, Page and Brin were quickly able to create a web browser that returned a results list in which those websites that were most frequently referenced by others appear at the top of the screen. By August 1996, an early version of the web site that was to become Google appeared on Stanford's website, as google.stanford.edu.

The Google search engine quickly became very popular with web users. As more users flocked to the website, Stanford requested that Page and Brin find a different host, as the rush of users was causing the Stanford website to respond very slowly. On September 15, 1997, Page and Brin registered Google's domain name, and they incorporated it as a business the following year. Originally working from a borrowed garage in Menlo Park, California, Google was able to move its offices to nearby Palo Alto in 1999. Google was granted a patent for PageRank, and although the patent was assigned to Stanford, the company received an exclusive license to use the algorithm in exchange for stock in Google.

In mid-1998, Google received its first funding, $100,000, from Sun Microsystems' cofounder Andy Bechtolsheim. In early 1999, Page and Brin decided that Google was taking up too much of their time and entered into negotiations to sell it to Excite, a popular web portal, for $1 million. After this offer was turned down, Page and Brin dropped out of Stanford to devote their efforts to building Google, and by June they had received funding of $25 million from a group of venture capitalists. While Page and Brin had initially wanted to keep Google free of advertising, by 2000 they had begun selling advertisements that were linked to certain search words. As Google's revenues began to grow rapidly, Page and Brin determined that they needed someone with management experience to help run the company. To that end, they hired Eric Schmidt, the former president of Sun Technology Enterprises and president and chairperson of Novell, Inc., as Google's chairperson in March 2001, and he took over from Page as Google's CEO in August. While Schmidt "ran" Google, he shared responsibility for many of the company's daily operations with Page and Brin. At this point, Google began a series of mergers and acquisitions that greatly expanded its appeal and scope.

Google's most popular service continued to be its search engine, the web page for which is the most often visited page on the Internet and used for two-thirds of searches conducted in the United States. Because Google generated 99 percent of its revenues from advertising, it continued to search for other services to provide that would attract users to its website. To augment its search services, Google hosts Google Books, which makes scanned copies of book previews, and in some cases, full books, available to users at no cost. Google also invested in a series of online productivity tools, beginning with Gmail, a free online email service. A beta version of Gmail was made available to the public in 2007 and upgraded two years later to provide its nearly 150 million users with one gigabyte of storage, with additional storage available for a fee.

Google Docs provides users with word-processing, spreadsheet, drawing, and presentation software, along with cloud-based storage and web-based access. Google Calendar supplies users a way to share schedules with families and friends. Google also offers geospatial software services through Google Earth and Google Maps, and Google Translate is a free translation service. As rival Microsoft Corporation increased its efforts to divert users from Google's search functions with its own search engine, Bing, Google developed a free web browser, Google Chrome. Google was also a driving force behind the development of the Android smartphone operating system.

In 2011, Page again became Google's CEO after Schmidt stepped down and became executive chair of the company. That year, in response to the popularity of social networking sites, such as Facebook, Google introduced Google+, which permitted users to stream information, form and join affiliation circles, "hang out" with friends, or coordinate information with smart phones.

Page was deeply involved with Google's move to its new headquarters in Mountain View, California, a complex known as Googleplex. The corridors at Googleplex were filled with bicycles and other exercise equipment, and all employees were encouraged to make use of the Google recreation center. Weight rooms, locker rooms, laundry facilities, game rooms, and snack rooms were available to employees for no cost. Page believed that such progressive amenities made for a happier and more productive workforce for Google, also serving as an example for other employers. Google also worked, under Page's guidance, to assure that its operations were as environmentally neutral as possible. To this end, Google made use of solar energy, used goats to trim the grass around Googleplex, and used servers that were as energy-efficient as possible.

In 2015, Page left the position of CEO of Google to become CEO of its new parent company, Alphabet Inc. In this role, he soon became most notable for his very low public profile, especially at a time when many other hi-tech leaders were highly visible. He avoided press coverage as well as product launches, earnings announcements, and other business operations. Public and government scrutiny of Google increased as the role of online platforms in society, including their impact on the 2016 US presidential election, attracted serious debate, but Page's conspicuous absence from the headlines continued. Notably, he failed to appear after being called to testify in front of the US Senate Intelligence Committee in September 2018 about state-sponsored exploitation of online services. Meanwhile, Google faced challenges including a $5.1 billion fine from the European Union in an antitrust case regarding the Android operating system and calls to regulate the extremely popular video-sharing website YouTube.

In early December 2019, as he had continued to be criticized for his reportedly minimal presence, Page announced that he would be stepping down as CEO of Alphabet. At the same time, Brin announced that he was leaving the position of Alphabet's president. In a statement, the Google cofounders claimed that they were making these moves because Alphabet and Google had reached a place developmentally where they could function effectively without separate CEOs and a president. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, was named as Page's replacement to serve as CEO of both Google and Alphabet. Both Page and Brin also remained Alphabet board members.

Personal Life

In 2007, Page married Lucinda Southworth, whom he had been dating for a year. Southworth earned a master's degree from Oxford University and was a doctoral student studying biomedical informatics at Stanford when she and Page met. Page and Southworth had a son in 2009.

In the 1990s, Page was first diagnosed with a nerve condition causing vocal cord paralysis. While the underlying cause of the condition was not initially known, it eventually forced him to speak only quietly. He later suggested his careful speech influenced his activity and reputation as a business leader.

Long interested in environmental issues, Page developed a keen attraction to alternative energy vehicles. He owned a Zero X motorbike, a Tesla electric roadster, and a Toyota Prius. Indeed, Page was an active investor in alternative energy companies, including Tesla Motors, and worked with Google.org, Google's philanthropic organization, to encourage the development of renewable energy sources. These activities helped give him a reputation for preferring to focus on large-scale, speculative projects rather than daily business activities. Among his other noted "futurist" interests were autonomous cars and flying vehicles, robotics, and ultra-high-speed internet technologies.

Long a participant in outdoor adventure sports, Page was known to enjoy kiteboarding and hiking. The owner of the 193-foot yacht Senses, Page also shared a 767-200 jet airplane with Brin. As of 2024, Page also owned at least five private islands in the Caribbean and South Pacific. In 2018, he purchased a 300-acre island in Puerto Rico for $32 million. Two years later, he bought an island near Fiji.

Page has been honored by a number of organizations, including the University of Michigan, which granted him an honorary doctorate in 2009; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which named him a Fellow in 2005; and the Marconi Foundation at Columbia University, which gave him the Marconi Foundation Prize and elected him a Fellow in 2004. With a net worth of approximately $136.7 billion in late 2024, Page was ranked by Forbes magazine as the seventh richest individual in the world. While he invested much of his fortune into business ventures, he also often contributed to charitable causes. A major example was his $15 million donation to Ebola relief efforts in western Africa in 2014.

Bibliography

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Brandt, R. L. The Google Guys: Inside the Brilliant Minds of Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. New York: Penguin, 2009. Print.

Conrad, Jennifer. "Google Co-Founder Larry Page Bought an Island in Puerto Rico. Here’s How Rich You Have to Be to Do That." Inc., 2 Feb. 2024, www.inc.com/jennifer-conrad/google-co-founder-larry-page-bought-an-island-in-puerto-rico-heres-how-rich-you-have-to-be-to-do-that.html. Accessed 16 Oct. 2024.

D'Onfro, Jillian. "Larry Page Steps Down as CEO of Alphabet." Forbes, 3 Dec. 2019, www.forbes.com/sites/jilliandonfro/2019/12/03/larry-page-steps-down-as-ceo-of-google-parent-alphabet/#77ae72d03aa3. Accessed 16 Oct. 2024.

D'Onfro, Jillian. "The Spectacular Life of Google Founder and Alphabet CEO Larry Page." Business Insider. Business Insider, 17 Mar. 2016. Web. 22 Apr. 2016.

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