Both were born in 1973 into families of computer science and mathematics professors: Page's father taught computer science at Michigan State; Brin's family emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1979, driven out by antisemitic discrimination in Soviet academia, when he was six. They met at Stanford in 1995 — Brin was showing prospective students around campus, and the two argued about nearly everything. Page's doctoral project, BackRub, began crawling the web's link structure in 1996, and Google was incorporated on 4 September 1998. Then: Eric Schmidt as CEO in 2001, the IPO in 2004, Page's return as CEO in 2011, the Alphabet restructuring in 2015, and their exit from management in December 2019. Since 2023 Brin has been back at a desk, working on Gemini.
One, 1999: better no deal than becoming a feature. They approached Excite; Vinod Khosla negotiated the price down to $750,000 and CEO George Bell turned it down. But what really decided the outcome was Page's added condition — Excite would have to rip out its own search technology and replace it with Google's. What they were protecting was not the price but the refusal to be demoted into a feature inside someone else's product. With no money in the bank and both still nominally doctoral students, that looks like judgement in hindsight and was a bet at the time.
Two, August 2001: give up the CEO title, weld the control shut. Doerr and Moritz pressed for "adult supervision" for over a year; Page interviewed a slate of candidates, rejected all of them, and said he would accept only Steve Jobs. He took Schmidt on condition of a three-way partnership — and three years later the IPO's dual-class structure (Class B shares carrying ten votes each) locked the voting power with the founders. What they ceded was operations, never control; for most founders those two things are bundled, and they unbundled them.
Three, 10 August 2015: the Alphabet restructuring. Page handed Google to Pichai and went off to run moonshots. Nominally a delegation of power; in substance, outsourcing the profitable-but-boring part and keeping only the work he wanted. On 3 December 2019 both left management altogether — while still holding roughly 51% of the votes between them. It is a carefully designed position: all of the power, none of the duty to explain.
Sources: David Vise, The Google Story (2005); Steven Levy, In the Plex (2011); Alphabet's 2004 founders' letter and successive 10-K voting-power disclosures.Stanford, 1996 to 1998. Page's doctoral project started as little more than "can the entire World Wide Web be downloaded?" The turn came when he carried academia's citation counting over to web links: whether a page is worth seeing is decided not by judging its content but by the structure of links pointing at it. Brin supplied the mathematical half, turning it into a computable eigenvector problem. In August 1998 Bechtolsheim watched a few minutes of demo on a porch and wrote a cheque for $100,000, made out to a "Google Inc." that had not been registered.
January 2010, leaving China. When the censored google.cn launched in 2006, Brin was its strongest internal opponent — fleeing the Soviet Union at six had made censorship a personal matter for him. After the Aurora attacks at the end of 2009 he drove the decision to withdraw, and told the Wall Street Journal that March that he saw certain earmarks of totalitarianism in China. It is one of very few cases of a large American company voluntarily abandoning its biggest growth market. But the censored-search project Dragonfly resurfaced in 2018 — proof that the withdrawal rested on one man's conviction rather than on any institution.
Sources: Steven Levy, In the Plex, chs. 2 and 9; Wall Street Journal interview with Brin, March 2010; The Intercept on Dragonfly, August 2018.Both attended Montessori schools and have publicly credited their way of thinking to it (Barbara Walters interview, 2004): they do not accept "that is how it is done" as a reason. It is the one thing they most consistently share — every default must justify itself.
In 2001 Page abolished every engineering manager, leaving some 130 engineers reporting to a single director. It was reversed within months. His default assumption was that management equals noise, and this was one of the few times he made that assumption falsifiable.
Brin rollerbladed around campus and kept gymnastic rings in his office, working the bar between meetings; in 2012 he skydived from a plane wearing Google Glass and streamed the descent into the I/O stage.
Page has had a paralysed left vocal cord since 2005 (the right one was already affected in 1999), which makes speaking an effort. He shifted heavily to written communication and appeared in public less and less — half of his later "absence" was physical, but the company absorbed it wholesale and turned it into culture.
Sources: Steven Levy, In the Plex; Page's 2013 Google+ note on his health; Google I/O 2012 keynote.Andy Rubin's ninety million dollars. In October 2018 the New York Times reported that Google, having internally found a sexual misconduct claim against the father of Android credible, nonetheless paid him an exit package of about $90 million, approved by Page. On 1 November some 20,000 employees walked out worldwide. Neither founder has ever publicly addressed it.
The rise and fall of "don't be evil." The phrase came from engineers Paul Buchheit and Amit Patel around 2000 and was written into the 2004 founders' letter; in April 2018 it was moved from the opening of the code of conduct to its final line. On 5 August 2024 Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google had illegally maintained a monopoly in general search — the central fact being the tens of billions it pays Apple and others each year to buy default placement. A company built on not paying for traffic ended up sustaining its position by paying to own the entry points.
Power separated from responsibility. After leaving management in 2019 the two still held roughly 51% of the votes, while no longer appearing on earnings calls or answering for crises. Brin's 2013 affair with a Google Glass project manager and his 2015 divorce from Anne Wojcicki likewise happened while he sat at the top of the company. They kept every founder's privilege and shed every founder's obligation to show up.
Sources: New York Times on Rubin, 25 October 2018; US v. Google opinion, 5 August 2024; Alphabet proxy statements.One: swap expensive semantic judgement for a cheap structural signal. PageRank never understood a page; it counted links. Before building an AI system, ask whether the problem that seems to need a model's judgement has a structural signal that routes around it. Two: operations and control can be unbundled. Handing over execution is not handing over direction — most people negotiate the two as one item, and so either concede nothing or concede everything. Three: a principle that lives only in one person's conviction leaves when they do. Leaving China in 2010 rested on Brin alone, and Dragonfly was back by 2018; a principle not written into process and review does not exist. Four: do not set a standard you do not intend to be measured against. From the day "don't be evil" entered the IPO letter it became the yardstick others would hold them to — the value and the risk of a public commitment are the same thing.