January 21, 2011
Sergey Brin is a co-founder of Google, the search engine and advertising giant, and its president of technology.
In January 2011, Google made the biggest management shake-up in a decade, handing the reins of the company to the other co-founder, Larry Page, in an effort to rediscover its start-up roots.
Mr. Page will take over as chief executive from Eric E. Schmidt, a technology industry veteran who was brought in a decade ago to provide adult supervision, as Silicon Valley calls it.
Mr. Brin and Mr. Page co-founded Google when they were graduate students in computer science at Stanford in 1998.
While Mr. Page is aloof, cerebral, intensely private and occasionally brusque, Mr. Brin is more gregarious.
The co-founders and Mr. Schmidt all have controlling stakes in the company. Forbes magazine recently estimated that Mr. Page and Mr. Brin had a net worth of $15 billion each, and Mr. Schmidt, $5.5 billion.
The company, and the search industry, face challenges on several fronts.
Google remains immensely powerful and successful. But the sudden rise of Facebook has exposed Google’s failures in areas like social networking and threatens its vast share of the online advertising market. Meanwhile, although Google has had success in new areas like mobile and display advertising, it has struggled to branch out into other businesses like television.
The unspoken fear within Google is that it could become like Microsoft, a once-dominant technology company that seems past its prime and perceived as stodgier, despite successes like XBox and Kinect. Indeed, for all its financial success, Google, which has 24,400 employees, is no longer considered by many top engineers as the most desirable place to work in the Valley; a new generation of start-ups has taken that place.
