Sergey Brin: Google Co-Founder Back at Work on Gemini AI

Sergey Brin is a co-founder of Google and a member of the board of its parent company, Alphabet, where he has been a director since 1998. He served as president of Google in several forms and then as president of Alphabet from October 2015 to December 2019.

He left daily management at the end of 2019, but has since gone back to technical work on Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence models. Fortune reported in December 2025 that he described the return in remarks at Stanford University, the campus where Google began.

Education

Brin studied at the University of Maryland at College Park and earned a Bachelor of Science with high honours in mathematics and computer science, according to Alphabet’s 2026 proxy statement.

He then went to Stanford University on a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship and completed a Master of Science in computer science. He began a doctorate in the same field but went on leave from the program to build Google. The Spanish business school Instituto de Empresa later gave him an honorary MBA.

Career

Google’s official history says the story began at Stanford in 1995, when Brin, then a graduate student, was asked to show a prospective student named Larry Page around the university.

By 1996 the pair were building a search engine together. Called Backrub at first, it ranked web pages by studying the links between them. The project was renamed Google soon after.

During his Stanford years Brin also published research on extracting information from the web and on mining large collections of data. His Google Research profile lists papers such as “Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web” and “Scalable Techniques for Mining Causal Structures”, both from 1998.

That same year he and Page described their search engine in “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, a paper in the journal Computer Networks. The prototype it presented used the web’s link structure to crawl and rank pages and held at least 24 million pages.

In August 1998 the company was incorporated as Google Inc. after Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, wrote a $100,000 check. The founders set up in a rented garage in Menlo Park, California.

From September 1998 to July 2001 Brin was Google’s president and chairman of its board, according to Alphabet’s filings. Page was chief executive during that period.

In July 2001 Brin took the title President, Technology, which he held until April 2011. For most of that decade he ran the company day to day together with Page and with Eric Schmidt, who was chief executive.

Brin kept the title of president at Google from May 2011 to October 2015. When Page set up Alphabet as a holding company in 2015, Brin became its president, while Sundar Pichai took over as chief executive of Google.

In December 2019 Page and Brin announced that they would no longer run the companies day to day. Pichai became chief executive of both Google and Alphabet, and the two founders stayed on the board.

The break from Google was short. Fortune reported that Brin rejoined colleagues at the company’s offices once small groups of staff were allowed back. He worked with the researchers building what became Gemini, and by 2023 he was in the office several times a week.

The work he joined is now led by Google DeepMind, the company’s AI unit, whose newest models include the one covered in our report Google opens Gemini 4 Argon to developers worldwide at $2 per million input tokens.

Current Roles

Co-founder of Google.
Member of the board of directors of Alphabet Inc., counting his time on the Google board since 1998.
Member of the Executive Committee of the Alphabet board.
Contributor to technical work on Google’s Gemini models, as reported by Fortune in 2025.

Key Achievements

Co-designing the Google search engine

Brin and Page wrote the 1998 paper that set out how Google crawled and ranked the web. Their method treated the links between pages as signals of how important each page was.

Research in data mining

Before Google became a company, Brin was an active academic researcher. His Google Research profile says he published more than a dozen papers, with interests in search engines, extracting information from unstructured sources and mining large text and scientific data sets.

1998: “Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web” (WebDB).
1998: “Scalable Techniques for Mining Causal Structures” (VLDB).
2003: “Query-Free News Search” (WWW conference).

Leading technology through Google’s first decade

As president and then President, Technology from 1998 to 2011, Brin was one of the three people who shared the running of Google. In those years the company grew from a garage start-up into a public company, listing its shares in 2004.

Back to hands-on AI work

At a Stanford School of Engineering event in December 2025, Brin argued that Google’s lead in AI rests on years of neural network research, its own AI chips and its data centres, Fortune reported. The company says its Gemini app passed 750 million monthly users at the end of 2025.

The Company in Numbers

Alphabet revenue: $402.8 billion in 2025, the first year above $400 billion.
Alphabet operating income: $129.0 billion in 2025.
Employees: 190,820 at the end of 2025.
YouTube revenue from ads and subscriptions: more than $60 billion in 2025.
Gemini models: more than 10 billion tokens a minute processed through direct customer API use, fourth quarter of 2025.

Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder Who Returned to Work on Gemini — Sergey Brin at the Web 2.0 Conference, 2005. Photo: JD Lasica, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Awards and Honours

National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, for study at Stanford.
2004: Marconi Prize, shared with Larry Page.
Honorary MBA, Instituto de Empresa.

The Marconi Society cited the two founders for an invention that changed how information is retrieved.

In Their Own Words

Speaking at Stanford in December 2025 about his return to technical work, Brin said: “To be able to have that technical creative outlet, I think that’s very rewarding,” Fortune reported.

In the December 2019 letter announcing their step back, Brin and Page wrote that they “will remain actively involved as Board members, shareholders and co-founders.” His partner’s path is covered in our profile of Larry Page.