Larry Page & Sergey Brin
Stanford University · Google / Alphabet
Two PhD Students Who Organised the World's Information
4 April 2026
Larry Page and Sergey Brin met as PhD students at Stanford in 1995. Their research project, "BackRub," explored how web pages linked to each other — and they realised this link structure could rank search results far better than existing engines.
Garage Startup
They incorporated Google in September 1998 with $100,000 from Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, working from a rented garage in Menlo Park. The name was a play on "googol" — the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.
Rapid Domination
By 2000, Google was processing 100 million searches per day. The launch of AdWords turned the company into a money-printing machine. Google went public in 2004 at a $23 billion valuation.
The Result
Alphabet (Google's parent company) is now worth over $2 trillion. Page and Brin's Stanford research project became the gateway to the internet for billions of people worldwide.
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