Larry Page Bio: The Story Behind Google’s Co-Founder

I use Google every day, whether it is searching for something, using Google Maps, or one of their countless other products. However, I realized that I didn’t know a lot about the history of this company and its co-founder, Larry Page.

In this Larry Page bio, I’m going to take you through the history of his life and show you that, even from a young age, he seemed destined to create something big.

Before I get into how he got the idea for Google, here are some quick bio facts about Larry Page.

Larry Page Bio Facts

Larry Page Key Facts Summary

• He co-founded Google with Sergey Brin in 1998.
• His research project at Stanford University, nicknamed BackRub, created the basis for the Google search engine.
• He has a net worth of $94 billion.
• Known for his innovation, he created an inkjet printer using Lego while at Stanford University.
• Page stepped down as CEO of Google in 2002 due to poor management decisions but returned as head of Google in 2011.
• He grew up alongside technology as his father had a Ph.D. in computer science, and his mother was a computer programming instructor at college.
• Married and has two children with his wife, Lucinda Southworth.
• The family foundation, the Carl Victor Page Memorial Fund, donates money to many educational, societal, and medical causes.

Larry Page Birthplace and Early Life

When I started looking into the childhood of Larry Page, I thought there were many indications that he would be significant in the tech world.

Page was born in Lansing, Michigan, in 1973 to Carl Victor Page Sr and Gloria Page. His father had a PhD in computer science, and his mother was a computer programming instructor at college. So, you can already see where Page got his tech background from, and he grew up in a household obsessed with computers and technology.

His early years shaped his future business life, and his parents played a major role in this. I found it interesting that he was the first child in his school to turn in an assignment that was created on a word processor.

Page attended the Okemos Montessori School, East Lansing High School, and eventually went to the University of Michigan, where he earned a Bachelor of Science in computer engineering. He was awarded a Master’s in computer science from Stanford University in 1998.

One of the early indications of Page’s innovation was during his time at Stanford. He made an inkjet printer from Lego, which I thought was a pretty cool invention!

During his time at Stanford, Page started his interest in search engines and the mathematics behind the internet. His dissertation focused specifically on how web pages linked to each other and essentially created the basis for backlinks, as the premises explored the similarity between citations in academic research and potential backlink algorithms for a search engine.

This was when Larry Page met Sergey Brin, who joined his research project and would become two of the most important business operators in history.

They nicknamed the project ‘BackRub,’ and the earliest search algorithm used as the foundation of Google can be traced back to 1996. BackRub used a web crawler to analyze webpages across the internet and gathered valuable backlink data. This data and the relevance between links to different web pages created the PageRank algorithm, which is Google’s formula for ranking pages on its search engine.

By early 1998, the basic BackRub webpage and search query tool was getting 10,000 searches per day.

Larry Page Early Business Success

Page and Brin co-founded Google in 1998, and the search engine giant has become one of the biggest success stories in business history.

They got enough money together to buy some servers and worked out of a garage in Menlo Park, California. One of the early investors in Google was Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, who gave them $100,000. However, the pair hadn’t yet officially founded Google (as it wasn’t incorporated), but I think the fact that Bechtolsheim gave them $100,000 before they had properly registered the company showed the potential the concept of Google had.

By the end of the year, the Google search engine had indexed 60 million URLs, growing to 1 billion by June 2000. I found it interesting that Larry Page and Sergey Brin were initially against any form of ad’s on their search engine. However, they backtracked and allowed basic text advertisements in 2000.

I think one of the most significant business decisions Page and Brin made in the early years of Google was deciding not to sell the company to Excite. They initially decided to sell up for $1 million, and Vinod Khosla talked them down to $750,000 – but the Excite CEO rejected the deal at the time. Could you imagine if Google – with a market capitalization of 1.45 trillion in 2022 – had sold for less than a million dollars?

Page faced pressure in the early 2000s to step down as CEO as Google really began to grow in stature. Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital invested $50 million in the company and wanted to replace Page with a more experienced team, which he decided to do after meeting Steve Jobs and other tech CEOs, including Andrew Grove of Intel.

Page stepped down and became the President of Products, with Eric Schmidt assuming the CEO role. I think even though Page symbolically took a bit of a back seat, he was still very much involved in the decision-making at Google, and he pioneered the acquisition of Android for $50 million in 2005.

I think you can look at the period up until 2011 as somewhat lost years for Larry Page. Even though he was still a part of Google, he wasn’t as prominent (although he still wielded a significant degree of influence) and didn’t lead their IPO in 2004. However, it made him $3.6 billion, which took him into the exclusive billionaire category.

Eric Schmidt stepped down as Google’s CEO in 2011, and this brought Page back to the forefront of the company.

Page’s tenure as CEO from 2011 to 2019 led to a substantial restructuring of the company as he granted more autonomy to some of Google’s products, such as YouTube and AdWord. He also led the acquisition of other products with mixed success, some of which I will touch on below.

Page stepped down as CEO in 2019 to be replaced by Sundar Pichai.

Google dominates the search engine market, and by creating and acquiring other services, we all use some form of Google products daily. I think it is undeniable the success Page (alongside Sergey Brin) achieved. From turning Google as a concept while at Stanford University into creating a company that has so much influence over our lives.

Larry Page Videos

Larry Page Business Failures

I think one of the most significant failures in Larry Page’s career was during his first stint as CEO of Google in the early 2000s.

He was obsessed with being part of every project at the company, even as Google grew enormously in this period. One of his mantras was “Don’t delegate: Do everything you can yourself to make things go faster,” which I think caused a lot of issues at Google at the time.

In 2001, he decided to fire all the project managers at Google, which, understandably, caused an uproar and subsequently led to him stepping down as CEO in favor of Eric Schmidt. I think this highlights that he wasn’t ready for this level of leadership. Instead, the company fared better with a more experienced leader.

However, to show how much he learned from this experience, Page was voted number one on the Forbes “America’s Most Popular Chief Executives” list by Google employees in 2015.

There are other failures during Page’s career that I think it is useful to highlight. He admitted that he should have paid more attention to developing a social media platform. Google tried to buy Friendster in 2003 and then parked the social media concept for a number of years until Google Buzz and Google+ came along. Both failed, and by this point, Facebook had taken off.

Another failure is his decision to purchase Motorola for $12.5 billion in 2011. Three years later, he sold Motorola to Lenovo for $2.9 billion, representing a substantial financial loss.

Larry Page Family

Larry Page’s parents played a significant role in shaping this internet entrepreneur into the head of a company worth over a trillion dollars. His father, Carl Victor Page, Sr, had a Ph.D. in computer science, while his mother, Gloria, worked as a computer instructor. He has Jewish roots from his mother’s side of the family.

Larry Page’s brother, Carl Victor Page Jr, also had a big impact on his life and has become a successful internet entrepreneur in his own right. Carl owned eGroups, which was sold to Yahoo! in 2000 for $432 million.

Larry Page is married to Lucinda Southworth.

The couple married in 2005, and the ceremony was held on Necker Island, owned by a certain Richard Branson. The couple has two children.

Larry Page Career Earnings

Larry Page has an impressive net worth of $94 billion, which he earned by co-founding Google (now under the parent company, Alphabet).

His net worth has risen significantly over the last decade. In 2013, his net worth was estimated to be $23 billion, and it grew to almost $100 billion in 2022.

Page is a prominent investor in Tesla Motors. I found out that he has also contributed funds to various renewable energy technology.

The Page family runs the Carl Victor Page Memorial Foundation, which has assets of around a billion dollars. The fund has donated money to numerous charitable causes, including education and societal programs, helping to fight Ebola in Africa, and also the Voice Health Institute. Page suffers from Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, which paralyzes his vocal cords, and has prevented him from holding meetings and speaking at Google business events.

Larry Page Real Estate Holdings

I wasn’t surprised to find out that Larry Page has a pretty impressive home. If you are worth nearly $100 billion, I would expect you to have a large real-estate portfolio.

I never thought of Larry Page as particularly extravagant, although he does have a sizeable collection of real estate, a super yacht, and a fleet of airplanes.

Page bought a home in Palo Alto, California, for $7.2 million, in 2005. This was his first real estate purchase. He subsequently purchased other properties in the area to create a 9,000-square feet estate with a significant eco house.

I also wasn’t surprised to learn that Larry Page owns a yacht. Page bought a 193-foot (59m) superyacht called Senses in 2011, and he paid $45 million. Also, Page and Eric Schmidt also own a fleet of eight private jets and a private terminal at San Jose International Airport, which he paid $82 million for in 2013.

Larry Page Quotes

“You never lose a dream; it just incubates as a hobby.”

“My job as a leader is to make sure everybody in the company has great opportunities, and that they feel they’re having a meaningful impact and are contributing to the good of society. As a world, we’re doing a better job of that. My goal is for Google to lead, not follow that.”

“Good ideas are always crazy until they’re not”

Frequently Asked Questions – Larry Page Bio

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Research

• https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/29/google-excite/
• https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-share-of-search-engines/
• https://www.businessinsider.com/larry-page-the-untold-story-2014-4?page=2&r=US&IR=T
• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Larry-Page
• https://www.leadersleague.com/en/news/fortunes-2020-larry-page-co-founder-alphabet

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Jodie Chiffey

As a fellow business owner and business strategist, Jodie shares valuable insight into the strategies and tactics business owners can use to increase their growth.

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