Sergey Brin, every mention
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Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Sergey Brin comes up
10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis) · Acquired
- ▶ 6:23 Ben Gilbert And so Larry and Sergei's first desks when they got kicked out of Stanford's offices were right there.
Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 29:02 David Rosenthal So on the back of this win with ground truth, Sebastian starts lobbying to Larry and Sergey.
- ▶ 29:35 David Rosenthal So as you would expect, Larry and Sergey are like, yeah,
- ▶ 34:11 David Rosenthal So in the next couple years after 2007 here, Sebastian's concept of bringing these computer science machine learning academics into Google as contractors or part-time interns, basically letting them keep their academic posts and work on…
- ▶ 2:30:26 Ben Gilbert Yeah, I think Larry and Sergey were like, mm, if we're gonna compete seriously, we kind of need Gnome back and blank check to go get him.
- ▶ 2:32:27 David Rosenthal To Sundar, Larry, Sergey, all of Google leadership that this is an existential threat to Google.
- ▶ 3:08:45 Ben Gilbert Not to mention, apparently, Sergey Brin is, like, now back as an employee working on Gemini.
- ▶ 3:51:58 Ben Gilbert I mean, Larry and Sergey control the company.
Google Part II: Alphabet (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 17:14 David Rosenthal Shows it to Larry and Sergey.
- ▶ 17:18 David Rosenthal So supposedly Larry and Sergey become the first beta users of Gmail.
- ▶ 17:51 David Rosenthal So obviously Larry and Sergey are jazzed first because of just the incredible nature of this product and Larry, especially, he is a product person and his view is if we can build a better product
- ▶ 22:05 David Rosenthal For all the reasons we just described, Google, Larry, Sergey, Eric, they want it to be so compelling that consumers demand it.
- ▶ 26:36 Ben Gilbert You know, all the things that would then sort of come later in the public actually happened inside Google first, but Larry and Sergey loved it.
- ▶ 28:01 David Rosenthal So once Gmail starts to take off, Larry and Sergey and Eric see this and they're like, wow, we should do this a lot.
- ▶ 1:57:14 David Rosenthal Larry and Sergey wanted to build a web browser in 2001 for this very reason that we've been talking about the whole episode.
- ▶ 1:57:25 David Rosenthal And also, I mean, it was Larry and Sergey.
- ▶ 1:57:43 Ben Gilbert Calls like this are why Larry and Sergey brought in Eric.
- ▶ 2:01:36 David Rosenthal This was very clever on Larry and Sergey's part because of course these people doing Firefox are perfectly capable of going and doing another great web browser.
- ▶ 2:36:12 David Rosenthal Eric and Larry and Sergey, they all knew that they were late.
- ▶ 2:49:51 David Rosenthal What is widely reported, and you can actually see in photos, Larry and Sergey do show up.
- ▶ 2:50:01 David Rosenthal There are all these T-Mobile and HTC executives there in suits, and here come Larry and Sergey on rollerblades on stage.
- ▶ 3:23:40 Ben Gilbert I don't know if he raised his hand, I don't know if Larry said, hey, I really think you should do this on our behalf, but what is definitely true is it became Vic's thing, and Eric and Larry and Sergei stepped back and let Vic run with it,…
Google Part I: Origins of Search. How the Best Business in Human History Happened (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 7:52 David Rosenthal Part of the reason I say all this, and I want to include Sergey, too, in what I'm about to say, even though we haven't introduced him yet in the story, I think there's this perception today that Larry and Sergey were these, like, bumbling…
- ▶ 8:53 Ben Gilbert I think they publicly, Larry and Sergey, don't get the same sort of ethos that those two get, but the same fire was there.
- ▶ 9:37 David Rosenthal Yes, and Larry got this all along, and Sergey did too.
- ▶ 9:41 David Rosenthal Okay, so as we all know, Larry goes to Michigan undergrad, he graduates in 1995, and then he goes off to Stanford to get his PhD in computer science, where he has a fateful meeting with his business partner, friend, soulmate, Sergey Brin.
- ▶ 9:56 Ben Gilbert And isn't the way this all went down that Larry was visiting and Sergey was already in the program, I think Sergey was leading some kind of tour to try to sell Larry on joining the program, and
- ▶ 10:09 Ben Gilbert Larry is, even though he's like the new guy there, he's like challenging Sergei at every little corner.
- ▶ 11:02 David Rosenthal So she organized Larry and Sergey meeting.
- ▶ 11:21 David Rosenthal So Larry and Sergey, they end up shutting the bar down that night.
- ▶ 11:49 Ben Gilbert So Charles Schwab funded the first date of Larry and Sergey.
- ▶ 12:14 David Rosenthal I don't think we've really covered founders before that were true partners in the way that Larry and Sergey are.
- ▶ 13:19 David Rosenthal Okay, so Sergei, what's his story?
- ▶ 13:21 David Rosenthal Sergei was also born in 1973, a few months later in August, in some place even colder than Michigan, Moscow.
- ▶ 13:28 David Rosenthal Which, of course, then was part of the Soviet Union, and Sergei's family was Jewish, Soviet Union was
- ▶ 13:47 David Rosenthal They shared it with his paternal grandmother, but his dad was a extremely talented mathematician, and so when Sergei's four years old, his dad attends an international mathematics conference, this is like, 1977, 1978, and realizes
- ▶ 14:23 Ben Gilbert Sergei's dad is a math professor and his mom works for NASA.
- ▶ 14:35 David Rosenthal As you would imagine, Sergei is very precocious.
- ▶ 15:10 David Rosenthal So yes, Sergei, every bit Larry's intellectual equal, every bit his sparring partner, uh, maybe a little more zany, too.
- ▶ 15:30 Ben Gilbert Sergey's the one doing stuff like Google Glass and skydiving videos.
- ▶ 15:36 Ben Gilbert The zany parts of Google are sort of Sergey's DNA, and the really honed products, and products that make the business work are a little bit more Larry's DNA, but to be honest, there's incredible overlap everywhere between the two of them.
- ▶ 15:51 David Rosenthal Okay, so fall of 1995, Larry arrives at Stanford, Sergey's already there.
- ▶ 15:56 David Rosenthal Terry Winograd is his PhD advisor, and Larry and Sergey are already building this great friendship.
- ▶ 16:03 David Rosenthal Larry, that academic year, presents a dissertation topic to Terry, to his advisor, in collaboration with Sergey, and the idea they have is this World Wide Web thing seems to be becoming a thing.
- ▶ 18:12 David Rosenthal So Larry goes off, and of course he's collaborating with Sergey on this, and as they think about it, they realize that, ah, actually there's sort of a fundamental flaw in what they were planning for this annotation system, which is that…
- ▶ 25:27 David Rosenthal So with Terry's encouraging Larry and Sergey go forth to undertake this ambitious project, they set up a page on the Stanford internet.
- ▶ 26:09 David Rosenthal Scott's a better coder than Larry and Sergey is.
- ▶ 27:33 David Rosenthal So Larry and Sergey are building Batgrub here, and I mentioned Scott, Hassan, their friend who helps code it up in Python, doesn't end up joining Google.
- ▶ 28:25 David Rosenthal So here we are, we've got Larry and Sergey doing this research project to improve search engines.
- ▶ 28:49 David Rosenthal Larry and Sergey start thinking, ooh, wait, maybe we should do something commercial around this.
- ▶ 30:54 David Rosenthal And so somehow Larry and Sergey, and I think they bring Scott along, get a meeting with Vinod and they hammer out a deal that Excite is going to license this back rub search technology from the two of them for about a million dollars.
- ▶ 31:12 David Rosenthal And Larry and Sergey are gonna come, work at Excite that summer, implement Backrub for their search, you know, basically make Excite into Google, and then they're gonna leave and they're gonna go back to Stanford in the fall.
- ▶ 33:46 David Rosenthal That fall in 1997, Larry and Sergey go back to school.
- ▶ 36:14 David Rosenthal Yes, and the legend is that Larry loves the name, Sergey likes it, they go to register the domain name, and Larry misspells it, and thought that Google was spelled G-O-O-G-L-E.
- ▶ 36:54 David Rosenthal So Sergei designs the homepage and makes the first logo using the open source drawing program GIMP.
- ▶ 39:03 Ben Gilbert So Larry and Sergey would go grab them off the loading dock, spin them up, use them for Google just for a few months until they need to go and hand them over for the other research projects.
- ▶ 40:50 David Rosenthal So Larry and Sergey go to a professor in the CS department at Stanford named Dave Cheridan, and Dave had started an Ethernet company called Granite Systems with Andy Bechtelsheim from Sun, while also staying as a professor at Stanford at…
- ▶ 41:12 David Rosenthal Cisco had just acquired Granite for two hundred and twenty million, and so Larry and Sergey are like, oh, okay,
- ▶ 44:06 David Rosenthal Larry and Sergey rouse themselves out of bed over on the Stanford campus, head on over to downtown Palo Alto at Dave's house, and Andy drives up.
- ▶ 44:24 David Rosenthal And Larry and Sergey are like, but we weren't talking about raising money.
- ▶ 44:35 David Rosenthal He writes a check to Larry and Sergey made out to Google Inc. for a 100,000 dollars, basically just throws it at them, hops in his car and takes off.
- ▶ 45:09 Ben Gilbert So, Larry and Sergey need to be able to, like, spin up an entity, have that own the intellectual property from Stanford, and set up a bank account for that entity such that they can deposit this check before it expires.
- ▶ 45:27 David Rosenthal Which, depending on who you ask, is either very good or very bad, because in the intervening months, Dave himself decides to throw in another 100,000 dollars to the funding here, and Larry and Sergey meet a former Netscape guy named Ram…
- ▶ 46:29 Ben Gilbert I mean, it's kind of crazy that at this point in time, it was little old Larry and Sergey's grad students meeting public CEO Jeff Bezos.
- ▶ 57:33 Ben Gilbert The opinion of Larry and Sergey is, A, we don't want to do a homepage like that.
- ▶ 59:35 David Rosenthal So right after they raised the angel round, Larry and Sergey go out and they recruit just, like, unbelievable top-tier
- ▶ 1:00:17 David Rosenthal And Larry and Sergey recruit him out of academia to come join as employee number eight, and his initial job title was search engine mechanic because, quote, everything was broken.
- ▶ 1:01:42 Ben Gilbert The dot-com bubble hadn't burst yet, and Larry and Sergey managed to recruit this talent.
- ▶ 1:01:55 Ben Gilbert In a hot talent market really speaks to Larry and Sergey's vision, the excitement around the idea, how novel their approach was, everything.
- ▶ 1:04:42 David Rosenthal Because you have all these chunks, and they can live anywhere, and Larry and Sergey already had to grab commodity hardware, you know, hard drives and motherboards directly back at Stanford.
- ▶ 1:15:52 David Rosenthal And so the first thing that Larry and Sergey give to him to do is kind of, you might argue the most important thing in the company.
- ▶ 1:16:08 David Rosenthal So salary goes off and he writes the pitch deck for the Google series, a collaboration with Larry and Sergey.
- ▶ 1:17:42 David Rosenthal Also, before the Series A, somehow Larry and Sergey had managed to actually sell one of these deals to the company Red Hat.
- ▶ 1:18:41 David Rosenthal I think part of the reason Larry and Sergey were like, okay, seller, new guy, you go do this, is like, they didn't actually want to tell VCs that much.
- ▶ 1:20:17 Ben Gilbert The fact that Larry and Sergei were able to say
- ▶ 1:20:50 Ben Gilbert Larry and Sergey, are they in Google-branded shirts?
- ▶ 1:23:06 David Rosenthal Larry and Sergey meet a guy from Netscape named Omid Kordestani.
- ▶ 1:23:41 David Rosenthal Yeah, and of course, Larry and Sergey, as the great recruiters that they are, like, hey, why don't you come work here?
- ▶ 1:26:31 David Rosenthal So importantly, Larry and Sergey insisted that, okay, if we have to have ads on here, they need to be text only.
- ▶ 1:28:23 David Rosenthal So the very first project that Jeff Dean did when he came over from DEC is Larry and Sergey and Erz told him, all right, the VCs say we got to sell ads.
- ▶ 1:34:22 Ben Gilbert Omid gets an urgent call from Sergei saying the traffic is about to tip over, and this is potentially company killing, because this is their big strategic priority.
- ▶ 1:41:33 David Rosenthal The board is also pushing Larry and Sergey to hire a CEO.
- ▶ 1:41:38 David Rosenthal So as part of the Series A process, John Doerr had very begrudgingly extracted a promise from Larry and Sergey to hire a quote-unquote professional CEO.
- ▶ 1:42:39 David Rosenthal So they do this with Larry and Sergey.
- ▶ 1:43:44 David Rosenthal Through all of it, you know, 1617, 18 months in, finally, Eric Schmidt emerges as probably the only viable candidate out there, and I think Eric was acceptable to both sides, both because he was an actual engineer and had been at Sun, he…
- ▶ 1:44:13 David Rosenthal And so Eric joins in March of, and again, I think Larry and Sergey were still kind of resentful of the process.
- ▶ 1:44:59 Ben Gilbert It was CEO, and then Larry was president of products, and Sergei was president of technology.
- ▶ 1:49:09 David Rosenthal Eric hasn't started yet, but Larry and Sergey now turn their attention back to ads, and they're really not happy.
- ▶ 1:51:48 Ben Gilbert This is the same exact problem that Larry and Sergey recognized.
- ▶ 1:53:23 Ben Gilbert Larry and Sergey sort of figured it out on the organic side and Bill sort of figured it out on the paid side.
- ▶ 1:58:57 David Rosenthal Look, originally Larry and Sergey were thinking this too, right?
- ▶ 2:02:47 Ben Gilbert And Larry and Sergey
- ▶ 2:03:54 David Rosenthal Larry and Sergey and Google can now finally focus on improving their ads product.
- ▶ 2:04:01 David Rosenthal Once they saw how well the go-to and overture model was working, I think Larry and Sergey were kicking themselves of like, ah, we should have just done this from the beginning.
- ▶ 2:04:23 Ben Gilbert Obviously, Larry and Sergey, geniuses.
- ▶ 2:27:04 Ben Gilbert So Sergey Brin has a quote.
- ▶ 2:27:43 David Rosenthal Yeah, this was a really, really contentious decision, and I think it ultimately came down to Larry and Sergey pushing for this.
- ▶ 2:57:10 David Rosenthal And I think this is also a major difference in mindset of Larry and Sergey and Google versus the other search providers.
- ▶ 3:03:06 David Rosenthal Well, I think the question is, did Larry and Sergey care about that?
- ▶ 3:03:17 Ben Gilbert Larry and Sergey controlled the company.
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