Brin and Page

An interesting profile of Google founder Sergey Brin, emphasizing his family background. Both Brin and co-founder Larry Page are from Jewish academic backgrounds -- Brin's father escaped anti-semitism in Russia and became an applied math professor at Maryland, while Page's father is a computer scientist at Michigan. Brin was rejected by MIT but luckily got into the graduate CS program at Stanford :-)

“Don’t Be Evil” always did sound a bit to me like tikkun olam, or repairing the world.

By the way, Google are obsessed with IQ as well -- for a long time they've used SAT scores, tough interviews and a university GPA-cutoff in hiring decisions.

Several years ago, Sergey and Larry visited a high school for gifted math students near Tel Aviv. When they came onto the stage of the darkened auditorium, the audience roared, as if they were rock stars. Every student there, many of them immigrants like Sergey from the former Soviet Union, knew of Google.

Larry took the podium first, urging the students to maintain a “healthy disregard for the impossible,” a favorite Google phrase. When it was Sergey’s turn to speak, he began, to the crowd’s delight, with a few words in Russian, which he still speaks at home with his parents.

“I have standard Russian-Jewish parents,” he then continued in English. “My dad is a math professor. They have a certain attitude about studies. And I think I can relate that here, because I was told that your school recently got seven out of the top 10 places in a math competition throughout all Israel.”

The students applauded their achievement and the recognition from Sergey, unaware that he was setting up a joke. “What I have to say,” he continued, “is in the words of my father: ‘What about the other three?’”