In this episode, we profile Sergey Brin, the computer scientist and business magnate who co-founded Google and forever changed how the world accesses information. We trace Brin’s journey from his early childhood in the Soviet Union, where his Jewish family faced anti-Semitism before immigrating to the United States when he was six years old.

Listeners will learn about his academic path, from graduating with honors from the University of Maryland at age 19 to enrolling at Stanford University. It was there that Brin met Larry Page; despite initially disagreeing on most subjects, the two became "intellectual soul-mates" and collaborated on a search engine initially called "BackRub". We discuss the development of the PageRank algorithm, which they ran on inexpensive computers in a dorm room before moving operations to a garage in Menlo Park.