Walk into any coffee shop today and you'll see a dozen glowing screens. Most of them are running a browser tab aimed at a single, stark white page with a colorful logo. It's so ubiquitous we've turned the company name into a verb. But if you're asking who is founder of google, you aren't just looking for two names you might have heard in a passing news clip. You’re looking for the weird, slightly chaotic, and remarkably lucky convergence of two PhD students who actually kind of disliked each other when they first met.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin. That’s the short answer.
But the long answer is way more interesting because it involves a garage in Menlo Park, a $100,000 check made out to a company that didn't technically exist yet, and a mathematical dissertation that accidentally reorganized the entire world's information.
The day the founders met
It started at Stanford. 1995. Larry Page was considering the school for his grad studies, and Sergey Brin, who was already a second-year student there, was assigned to show him around the campus. They didn't hit it off. Honestly, they argued about almost everything. They were both brilliant, both opinionated, and both possessed that specific kind of intellectual stubbornness that usually leads to a fistfight or a billion-dollar company.
By the following year, they were working together.
Larry was obsessed with the link structure of the World Wide Web. He had this idea that you could treat the entire internet like a massive graph of citations. In academia, a paper is considered "important" if a lot of other papers cite it. Larry wondered: what if the web worked the same way? He called his initial research project "BackRub." Yeah, the most powerful company in history was almost called BackRub. Thankfully, that name didn't stick.
Sergey, who had a massive talent for data mining and mathematics, saw the potential in Larry's idea immediately. They realized that a search engine shouldn't just look for how many times a keyword appeared on a page. That was what AltaVista and Excite were doing, and it was mostly garbage. Instead, they built PageRank.
PageRank: The algorithm that changed everything
Most people think Google succeeded because it was fast. It was, but the real secret sauce was the math. PageRank, named after Larry Page (not because it ranks "web pages," though that’s a convenient pun), assigned a numerical weight to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents.
Think of it like a popularity contest where the votes of popular people count for more than the votes of nobodies.
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If a high-quality site like The New York Times linked to your blog, Google’s algorithm decided your blog was probably pretty important. If ten thousand spam sites linked to you, it didn't matter nearly as much. This was a fundamental shift in how information was retrieved. It turned the wild west of the 90s internet into a searchable library.
From a dorm room to Susan’s garage
By 1998, the duo had maxed out their credit cards buying cheap hard drives. They were basically scrounging for parts to build a terabyte of storage in their dorm rooms. They tried to sell their technology to the big players of the day. They actually went to Excite and offered to sell Google for about $750,000.
Excite said no.
Imagine being the executive who turned down the chance to own Google for less than the price of a mid-sized house in Palo Alto today.
Since they couldn't sell it, they decided to make a go of it themselves. They incorporated on September 4, 1998. The funding came after a quick demo on a porch in Palo Alto to Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems. He saw the demo, realized the potential, and wrote a check for $100,000 on the spot.
One problem: The check was made out to "Google Inc."
At that moment, Google Inc. didn't exist. There was no bank account, no legal paperwork, nothing. Larry and Sergey had to keep the check in a drawer for a couple of weeks while they frantically filed the incorporation papers so they could actually cash the money.
They moved their operations into a garage owned by Susan Wojcicki (who would later become the CEO of YouTube). They hired their first employee, Craig Silverstein, and the rest is basically history. But even back then, they were different. They had a "Don't Be Evil" manifesto. They had a "20% time" rule where employees could work on whatever they wanted. It was a playground for geniuses.
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The roles of Larry and Sergey
While they are always mentioned in the same breath, the two founders had very different vibes. Larry Page was the visionary, the guy who was always looking 20 years down the road. He was the one who pushed for Google to buy Android when it was just a tiny startup, even though people thought a search engine company had no business making phone software.
Sergey Brin was the tinkerer. He was the one heading up Google X, the "moonshot" factory. He’s the guy you’d see wearing Google Glass at a fashion show or jumping out of a plane to promote a new tech gadget. He was more about the "what if" and the raw engineering challenges.
The arrival of Eric Schmidt
By 2001, the "adults" in the room—namely the investors at Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins—decided that two guys in their late 20s maybe shouldn't be running a multi-billion dollar rocket ship alone. They brought in Eric Schmidt as CEO.
For a decade, Google was run by a "triumvirate." Larry, Sergey, and Eric made the big decisions together. It was a weird arrangement that shouldn't have worked, but it did. Eric provided the business "adult supervision," while Larry and Sergey were free to keep inventing things like Gmail, Google Maps, and Chrome.
Why knowing the founders matters today
You might wonder why we still talk about who is founder of google when neither of them is the CEO anymore. Sundar Pichai took over the reins of Google in 2015, and later Alphabet (the parent company) in 2019.
But the DNA of Larry and Sergey is still everywhere.
The move to Alphabet was actually a classic Larry Page move. He wanted to separate the "cash cow" of Google search and advertising from the "crazy stuff" like self-driving cars (Waymo) and life-extension research (Calico). He wanted to make sure the founders could still play with the future without the stock market freaking out every time they spent money on a moonshot.
The Misconceptions
People often think Google was the first search engine. It wasn't. It was actually quite late to the party. Yahoo, Lycos, and Ask Jeeves were already household names.
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The difference was the philosophy. While Yahoo was trying to be a "portal" with news, weather, and horoscopes, Google was just a search bar. They trusted their algorithm so much that they didn't feel the need to distract you. They wanted to get you off their site and onto the right page as fast as possible. That was a radical idea in 1998.
Another misconception is that they were just "lucky." Sure, luck played a part. But Larry and Sergey were also ruthless about speed. They obsessed over how many milliseconds it took for a result to show up. They knew that if the internet felt like a brain, people would use it like one.
The legacy of 1998
Today, Larry and Sergey are among the wealthiest people on the planet, but they’ve mostly stepped back from the limelight. They still hold the majority of the voting power at Alphabet, meaning they are still the ultimate bosses, but they aren't in the office every day checking code.
They left a legacy of "Moonshot Thinking." The idea that you shouldn't just try to make something 10% better—you should try to make it 10 times better.
Actionable Takeaways for the Curious
If you’re looking at the story of the Google founders for inspiration, don't just look at the billions of dollars. Look at the process.
- Focus on the "Why" of the link: Larry Page didn't just want to organize data; he wanted to understand the relationship between pieces of information. In your own work, look for the connections, not just the items.
- Don't fear the pivot: Remember, they tried to sell the company for peanuts. If they had succeeded, we’d be "Excite-ing" things today. Sometimes a "no" from a buyer is the best thing that can happen to your career.
- The "Adult Supervision" Principle: Even geniuses need a hand. Bringing in Eric Schmidt didn't make Larry and Sergey less successful; it gave them the structure to become a global empire. Know when you need a manager and when you need a creator.
- Read the original paper: If you're a tech nerd, go find the original Stanford paper: "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine." It’s surprisingly readable and shows exactly how two kids changed the world with nothing but math and some borrowed servers.
The story of the Google founders isn't finished, even if they aren't in the headlines every day. Every time you ask your phone for directions or look up a recipe, you're using a system built on a foundation laid by two guys who couldn't agree on a campus tour in 1995. It’s a reminder that sometimes, the best partnerships start with a really good argument.
To dig deeper into how their influence still shapes the internet, you can look into the current structure of Alphabet Inc. and see how many of their original "moonshots" have actually become reality. From self-driving cars to AI that can predict protein structures, the fingerprints of Page and Brin are all over the next century of technology.