Larry Page

Lawrence Edward Page was born on March 26, 1973, in East Lansing, Michigan, to Jewish parents who were both computer science professors at Michigan State University, fostering his early fascination with computers and technology. He earned a bachelor's degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan, where he experimented with projects like building an inkjet printer from Lego and proposing a driverless monorail system. Page then pursued graduate studies at Stanford University, earning a Master of Science in computer science and enrolling in a PhD program, during which he met Sergey Brin and began researching the World Wide Web. In 1996, Page developed a primitive search engine called BackRub, which evolved into the PageRank algorithm—a system that ranked web pages by analyzing links between them—leading to Google's founding in September 1998 with Brin as co-founder. Page served as Google's first CEO from 1998 to 2001, securing initial funding of about $1 million and a patent for PageRank, before stepping down to president of products when Eric Schmidt became CEO; both founders stayed deeply involved. Google grew rapidly, processing 500,000 queries daily by 1999 and going public in 2004, netting Page over $3.8 billion. Page returned as Google's CEO in 2011, overseeing acquisitions like YouTube ($1.65 billion in 2006) and Android ($50 million), and in 2015, he restructured Google under Alphabet Inc., becoming its CEO to pursue 'moonshot' projects such as Waymo (autonomous vehicles), life sciences, clean energy, AI, and voice computing. He envisioned Google as an 'AI-native company' from early on, laying foundations for modern AI advancements. In 2019, Page handed CEO duties to Sundar Pichai, transitioning to an advisory role on Alphabet's board while focusing on long-term vision and key decisions like mergers.