Larry Page
Larry Page |
Larry Page is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur who is best known as the co-founder of Google. He was born on March 26, 1973, in East Lansing, Michigan, and grew up in a family of computer science professors. His father, Carl Victor Page, was a computer science professor at Michigan State University, and his mother, Gloria, was a computer programming teacher.
Page attended the University of Michigan, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering. He then went on to Stanford University to pursue a PhD in computer science, where he met Sergey Brin, with whom he later co-founded Google.
Page and Brin started working on Google in 1996, while they were still PhD students at Stanford. They developed a search algorithm that ranked web pages based on the number and quality of links pointing to them, which they called PageRank. This algorithm became the foundation for Google's search engine.
In 1998, Page and Brin incorporated Google as a company, and the following year, they received $25 million in funding from venture capital firms. Google quickly became the most popular search engine on the internet, and in 2004, the company went public in one of the largest IPOs in history.
Page served as Google's CEO from 1998 to 2001, and then again from 2011 to 2015. During his tenure, he oversaw the development of many of Google's most important products, including Google Maps, Google Earth, and Google Books. He also oversaw the acquisition of YouTube and the development of Android, Google's mobile operating system.
In addition to his work at Google, Page has been involved in a number of other projects. He co-founded the XPrize Foundation, which offers cash prizes to encourage technological development, and he has invested in a number of startups through his venture capital firm, Google Ventures.
In 2015, Page announced that he was stepping down as CEO of Google's parent company, Alphabet, to focus on other projects, including a startup called "Kitty Hawk," which is developing flying cars. He remains an advisor to Alphabet and serves on its board of directors.
Overall, Larry Page is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the technology industry, and his work has had a profound impact on the way we live and work in the digital age.