Lawrence Edward Page is an American business magnate, computer scientist and internet entrepreneur. He is best known for co-founding Google with Sergey Brin.

Page was the chief executive officer of Google from 1997 until August 2001 (stepping down in favor of Eric Schmidt) and then again from April 2011 until July 2015 when he moved to become CEO of its newly formed parent organisation Alphabet Inc. which was created to deliver "major advancements" as Google's parent company, a post he held until December 4, 2019 when he along with his co-founder Brin stepped down from all executive positions and day-to-day roles within the company. He remains an Alphabet board member, employee, and controlling shareholder.

As of April 2023, Page has an estimated net worth of $95.8 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, making him the eighth-richest person in the world. He has also invested in flying car startups Kitty Hawk and Opener.

Page is the co-creator and namesake of PageRank, a search ranking algorithm for Google. He received the Marconi Prize in 2004 with co-writer Brin.

Early life

Page was born on March 26, 1973, in Lansing, Michigan. His mother is Jewish; his maternal grandfather later immigrated to Israel, though Page's household growing up was secular. His father, Carl Victor Page Sr., earned a PhD in computer science from the University of Michigan. BBC reporter Will Smale described him as a "pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence". Page's paternal grandparents came from a Protestant background. Page's father was a computer science professor at Michigan State University and his mother Gloria was an instructor in computer programming at Lyman Briggs College at the same institution.

During an interview, Page recalled his childhood home "was usually a mess, with computers, science, and technology magazines and Popular Science magazines all over the place", an environment in which he immersed himself. Page was an avid reader during his youth, writing in his 2013 Google founders letter: "I remember spending a huge amount of time pouring [sic] over books and magazines". According to writer Nicholas Carlson, the combined influence of Page's home atmosphere and his attentive parents "fostered creativity and invention". Page also played instruments and studied music composition while growing up. His parents sent him to music summer camp — Interlochen Arts Camp at Interlochen, Michigan, and Page has mentioned that his musical education inspired his impatience and obsession with speed in computing. "In some sense, I feel like music training led to the high-speed legacy of Google for me". In an interview Page said that "In music, you're very cognizant of time. Time is like the primary thing" and that "If you think about it from a music point of view, if you're a percussionist, you hit something, it's got to happen in milliseconds, fractions of a second".

Page was first attracted to computers when he was six years old, as he was able to "play with the stuff lying around"—first-generation personal computers—that had been left by his mother and father. He became the "first kid in his elementary school to turn in an assignment from a word processor". His older brother Carl Victor Page Jr. also taught him to take things apart and before long he was taking "everything in his house apart to see how it worked". He said that "from a very early age, I also realized I wanted to invent things. So I became interested in technology and business. Probably from when I was 12, I knew I was going to start a company eventually."

Education

Page attended the Okemos Montessori School (now called Montessori Radmoor) in Okemos, Michigan, from ages 2 to 7 (1975 to 1979). He attended East Lansing High School, graduating in 1991. In summer school, he attended Interlochen Center for the Arts at Interlochen, Michigan, playing flute but mainly saxophone for two summers.

Page received a Bachelor of Science in a major in computer engineering with honors from the University of Michigan in 1995 and a Master of Science in computer science from Stanford University in 1998.

While at the University of Michigan, Page created an inkjet printer made of Lego bricks (literally a line plotter), after he thought it possible to print large posters cheaply with the use of inkjet cartridges—Page reverse-engineered the ink cartridge and built the electronics and mechanics to drive it. Page served as the president of the Beta Epsilon chapter of the Eta Kappa Nu honor society, and was a member of the 1993 "Maize & Blue" University of Michigan Solar Car team. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, he proposed that the school replace its bus system with a personal rapid-transit system, which is essentially a driverless monorail with separate cars for every passenger. He also developed a business plan for a company that would use software to build a music synthesizer during this time.

PhD studies and research

After enrolling in a computer science PhD program at Stanford University, Page was in search of a dissertation theme and considered exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph. His supervisor, Terry Winograd, encouraged him to pursue the idea, and Page recalled in 2008 that it was the best advice he had ever received. He also considered doing research on telepresence and self-driving cars during this time.

Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages linked to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks as valuable information for that page. The role of citations in academic publishing would also become pertinent for the research. Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford PhD student, would soon join Page's research project, nicknamed “BackRub.” Together, the pair authored a research paper titled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine", which became one of the most downloaded scientific documents in the history of the Internet at the time.

John Battelle, co-founder of Wired magazine, wrote that Page had reasoned that:

"[the] entire Web was loosely based on the premise of citation—after all, what is a link but a citation? If he could devise a method to count and qualify each backlink on the Web, as Page puts it “the Web would become a more valuable place.”

Battelle further described how Page and Brin began working together on the project:

"At the time Page conceived of BackRub, the Web comprised an estimated 10 million documents, with an untold number of links between them. The computing resources required to crawl such a beast were well beyond the usual bounds of a student project. Unaware of exactly what he was getting into, Page began building out his crawler. The idea's complexity and scale lured Brin to the job. A polymath who had jumped from project to project without settling on a thesis topic, he found the premise behind BackRub fascinating. "I talked to lots of research groups" around the school, Brin recalls, "and this was the most exciting project, both because it tackled the Web, which represents human knowledge, and because I liked Larry."

Google

1998-2000

Mark Malseed wrote in a 2003 feature story:

"Soliciting funds from faculty members, family and friends, Brin and Page scraped together enough to buy some servers and rent that famous garage in Menlo Park. [Soon after], Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a $100,000 cheque to "Google, Inc." The only problem was, "Google, Inc." did not yet exist—the company hadn't yet been incorporated. For two weeks, as they handled the paperwork, the young men had nowhere to deposit the money."

In 1998, Brin and Page incorporated Google, Inc. with the initial domain name of "Googol", derived from a number that consists of one followed by one hundred zeros—representing the vast amount of data that the search engine was intended to explore. Following inception, Page appointed himself as CEO, while Brin, named Google's co-founder, served as Google's president. Writer Nicholas Carlson wrote in 2014:

“The pair's mission was 'to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” With a US$1-million loan from friends and family, the inaugural team moved into a Mountain View office by the start of 2000. In 1999, Page experimented with smaller servers so Google could fit more into each square meter of the third-party warehouses the company rented for their servers. This eventually led to a search engine that ran much faster than Google's competitors at the time."

2001-2011

Before Silicon Valley's two most prominent investors, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, agreed to invest a combined total of $50 million in Google, they applied pressure on Page to step down as CEO so that a more experienced leader could build a "world-class management team." Page eventually became amenable to the idea after meeting with other technology CEOs, including Steve Jobs and Intel's Andrew Grove. Eric Schmidt, who had been hired as Chairman of Google in March 2001, left his full-time position as the CEO of Novell to take the same role at Google in August of the same year, and Page moved aside to assume the President of Products role.

Under Schmidt's leadership, Google underwent a period of major growth and expansion, which included its initial public offering (IPO) on August 20, 2004. He always acted in consultation with Page and Brin when he embarked on initiatives such as the hiring of an executive team and the creation of a sales force management system. Page remained the boss at Google in the eyes of the employees, as he gave final approval on all new hires, and it was Page who provided the signature for the IPO, the latter making him a billionaire at the age of 30.

Page led the acquisition of Android for $50 million in 2005 to fulfill his ambition to place handheld computers in the possession of consumers so that they could access Google anywhere. The purchase was made without Schmidt's knowledge, but the CEO was not perturbed by the relatively small acquisition. Page became passionate about Android and spent large amounts of time with Android CEO and cofounder Andy Rubin. By September 2008, T-Mobile launched the G1, the first phone using Android software and, by 2010, 17.2% of the handset market consisted of Android sales, overtaking Apple for the first time. Android became the world's most popular mobile operating system shortly afterward.

2011-2013

As Google's new CEO, Page's two key goals were the development of greater autonomy for the executives overseeing the most important divisions, and higher levels of collaboration, communication, and unity among the teams. Then Page also formed what the media called the "L-Team", a group of senior vice-presidents who reported directly to him and worked near his office for a portion of the working week. Additionally, he reorganized the company's senior management, placing a CEO-like manager at the top of Google's most important product divisions, including YouTube, AdWords, and Google Search.

Following a more cohesive team environment, Page declared a new "zero tolerance for fighting" policy that contrasted with his approach during the early days of Google, when he would use his harsh and intense arguments with Brin as an exemplar for senior management. Page had changed his thinking during his time away from the CEO role, as he eventually concluded that ambitious goals required a harmonious team dynamic. As part of Page's collaborative rejuvenation process, Google's products and applications were consolidated and underwent an aesthetic overhaul.

2013-2015

In January 2013, Page participated in a rare interview with Wired, in which writer Steven Levy discussed Page's "10X" mentality—Google employees are expected to create products and services that are at least 10 times better than those of its competitors—in the introductory blurb. Astro Teller, the head of Google X, explained to Levy that 10X is "just core to who he [Page] is", while Page's “focus is on where the next 10X will come from.” In his interview with Levy, Page referred to the success of YouTube and Android as examples of "crazy" ideas that investors were not initially interested in, saying: “If you're not doing some things that are crazy, then you're doing the wrong things.” Page also stated he was "very happy" with the status of Google+, and discussed concerns over the Internet concerning the SOPA bill and an International Telecommunication Union proposal that had been recently introduced:

“I do think the Internet's under much greater attack than it has been in the past. Governments are now afraid of the Internet because of the Middle East stuff, and so they're a little more willing to listen to what I see as a lot of commercial interests that just want to make money by restricting people's freedoms. But they've also seen a tremendous user reaction, like the backlash against SOPA. I think that governments fight users' freedoms at their peril.”

At the May 2013 I/O developers conference in San Francisco, Page delivered a keynote address and said "We're at maybe 1% of what is possible. Despite the faster change, we're still moving slow relative to the opportunities we have. I think a lot of that is because of the negativity [...] Every story I read is Google vs someone else. That's boring. We should be focusing on building the things that don't exist" and that he was "sad the Web isn't advancing as fast as it should be", citing a perceived focus on negativity and zero-sum games among some in the technology sector as a cause. In response to an audience question, Page noted an issue that Google had been experiencing with Microsoft, whereby the latter made its Outlook program interoperable with Google but did not allow for backward compatibility—he referred to Microsoft's practice as "milking off". During the question-and-answer section of his keynote, Page expressed interest in Burning Man, which Brin had previously praised—it was a motivating factor for the latter during Schmidt's hiring process, as Brin liked that Schmidt had attended the week-long annual event.

2019

On December 3, 2019, Larry Page announced that he will step down from the position of Alphabet CEO and would be replaced by Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Pichai will also continue as Google CEO. Page and Google co-founder and Alphabet president Sergey Brin announced the change in a joint blog post, "With Alphabet now well-established, and Google and the Other Bets operating effectively as independent companies, it's the natural time to simplify our management structure. We’ve never been ones to hold on to management roles when we think there's a better way to run the company. And Alphabet and Google no longer need two CEOs and a President."

Other interests

Page is an investor in Tesla Motors co-founded by friend and fellow billionaire Elon Musk. He has invested in renewable energy technology, and with the help of Google.org, Google's philanthropic arm, promotes the adoption of plug-in hybrid electric cars and other alternative energy investments. He is also a strategic backer in the Opener startup which is developing aerial vehicles for consumer travel.

Page has also invested in flying car startups Kitty Hawk and Opener.

Page is also interested in the socio-economic effects of advanced intelligent systems and how advanced digital technologies can be used to create abundance (as described in Peter Diamandis' book), provide for people's needs, shorten the workweek, and mitigate the potential detrimental effects of technological unemployment.

Page also helped to set up Singularity University, a transhumanist think-tank. Google is one of the institution's corporate founders and still funds scholarships at Singularity University.

Awards and accolades

1998-2009

PC Magazine has praised Google as among the Top 100 Web Sites and Search Engines (1998) and awarded Google the Technical Excellence Award for Innovation in Web Application Development in 1999. In 2000, Google earned a Webby Award, a People's Voice Award for technical achievement, and in 2001, was awarded Outstanding Search Service, Best Image Search Engine, Best Design, Most Webmaster Friendly Search Engine, and Best Search Feature at the Search Engine Watch Awards.
In 2002, Page was named a World Economic Forum Global Leader for Tomorrow and along with Brin, was named by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s Technology Review publication as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35, as part of its yearly TR100 listing (changed to "TR35" after 2005).
In 2003, both Page and Brin received an MBA from IE Business School, in an honorary capacity, “for embodying the entrepreneurial spirit and lending momentum to the creation of new businesses.”
In 2004, they received the Marconi Foundation's prize and were elected Fellows of the Marconi Foundation at Columbia University. In announcing their selection, John Jay Iselin, the Foundation's president, congratulated the two men for “their invention that has fundamentally changed the way information is retrieved today.”
In 2004, Page and Brin received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.
Page and Brin were also Award Recipients and National Finalists for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2003.
Also in 2004, X PRIZE chose Page as a trustee of their board and he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
In 2005, Brin and Page were elected Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In 2008 Page received the Communication Award from Prince Felipe at the Prince of Asturias Awards on behalf of Google.

2009-present

In 2009, Page received an honorary doctorate from the University of Michigan during a graduation commencement ceremony. In 2011, he was ranked 24th on the Forbes list of billionaires, and as the 11th richest person in the U.S.
In 2015, Page's "Powerful People" profile on the Forbes site states that Google is "the most influential company of the digital era".
As of July 2014, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index lists Page as the 17th richest man in the world, with an estimated net worth of $32.7 billion.
At the completion of 2014, Fortune magazine named Page its "Businessperson of the Year", declaring him "the world's most daring CEO".
In October 2015, Page was named number one on the Forbes "America's Most Popular Chief Executives" list, as voted by Google's employees.
In August 2017, Page was awarded honorary citizenship of Agrigento, Italy.