Sergey Brin: Googling billions

**Zing Tsjeng** (0:00)
New episodes of Good Bad Billionaire will be released weekly on Mondays, wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

**Simon Jack** (0:05)
But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes a week early, first on BBC Sounds.

**Zing Tsjeng** (0:17)
Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Each episode, we pick a billionaire and we find out how they made their money.

**Simon Jack** (0:24)
And then we judge them. Are they good, bad, or just another billionaire?

**Zing Tsjeng** (0:28)
My name is Zing Tsjeng, and I'm a journalist, author and podcaster.

**Simon Jack** (0:31)
And I'm Simon Jack, I'm the BBC's business editor.

**Zing Tsjeng** (0:34)
And this episode, we've got the man who revolutionized the way that we search for information. It might even be the man who invented How You Found This Podcast.

**Simon Jack** (0:42)
And in fact, invented a verb, and that verb is to Google.

**Zing Tsjeng** (0:47)
That man is none other than Sergey Brin.

**Simon Jack** (0:50)
Co-founder of Google and about the 7th or 8th richest person in the world with these tech guys. It all depends on what their share price is doing on any given day.

**Zing Tsjeng** (0:59)
But currently, he's still sitting pretty in the top 10 And at the age of 50, he is worth $135 billion. Now we actually looked this up and this is actually around the GDP of Morocco.

**Simon Jack** (1:11)
Now the majority of his fortune obviously comes from his stake in Alphabet. Which that is the parent company of Google.

**Zing Tsjeng** (1:18)
This is all based off the search engine that he created while at Stanford University with his best friend, a man who is also incredibly rich, Larry Page. They've been described as quite private, quite enigmatic. But Sergey is also somewhat of a playboy. He loves partying at a festival called Burning Man, which is very famous for attracting tech entrepreneurs.

**Simon Jack** (1:38)
Yeah, they've really shaped the way we consume stuff on the internet. In many ways, it's not only a search engine, it's the biggest shop window in the world.

**Zing Tsjeng** (1:48)
And advertisers make a lot of money from that.

**Simon Jack** (1:51)
Yeah, and they make a lot of money from the advertisers. And we'll try and figure out how they do that later in the program. First of all, let's hear a little clip with Sergey back in 2003 This is just as Google was becoming a household name. Let's listen to him.

**Sergey Brin** (2:04)
One thing we decided early on is that instead of having very flashy advertising pop-ups, things that blink, fly around, pop out of the screen and hit you on the nose, instead of doing all those things, we don't want to distract the user. Instead, we want to show them something they care about right at the time.

**Simon Jack** (2:25)
And that's interesting because to this day, the Google front page, the search page is still pretty simple. Because I remember when I was working in financial services, there was this guy who had come in, who was a programmer, and he was the first person I had ever seen put the Google up. And I walked by his desk and I said, what's Google? And he couldn't believe that I hadn't seen it. Because in those days, it was things like AltaVista and Yahoo and what have you.

**Zing Tsjeng** (2:49)
Ask Jeeves.

**Simon Jack** (2:50)
Ask Jeeves. But Google started out and then became totally dominant.

**Zing Tsjeng** (2:55)
And also somewhat unusually for tech founders, and for many of our billionaires actually, both Sergey and Larry actually stepped away from Google when it was at the height of its power.

**Simon Jack** (3:04)
And we will find out why they did that. But first, let's wind right back to the very beginning of the story and figure out how Sergey Brin goes from zero to a million.
Sergey Mikhailovich Brin was born in 1973 in the Soviet Union.

**Zing Tsjeng** (3:23)
To a very smart, actually intellectual family, Sergey's granddad was a PhD mathematician. His parents were academics, and they were actually better off than many other people under the regime.

**Simon Jack** (3:34)
But they still lived in a three-room apartment in central Moscow, which they shared with Sergey's grandmother.

**Zing Tsjeng** (3:39)
They were also Jewish, and they faced anti-Semitism under the communist regime, because Jews were excluded from lots of positions. So that meant that Sergey's dad's ambition of being an astrophysicist was not going to happen.

**Simon Jack** (3:51)
And not for the first time among our billionaires, Zing, the parents decided that the prospects of the kids were really important. So they made some big decisions to give Sergey the best opportunities in life.