August 21, 2010
Guess what i was doing three weeks ago, shortly after registering my Mini-WWW.com domain?
I WAS READING ABOUT GOOGLE!
The name of the book was "The Google story", and it was the first book I ever read about Google. My aim was far from becoming an expert on Google's history. I was wondering how it all began. What were the Google's very FIRST STEPS!
To my amazement, I found surprisingly big number of parallels with the life of Google's founder Sergey Brin. No, that's not that we both have the same first name! In the former USSR, where we were born, Sergey is a quite widespread name.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page met at Stanford in 1995 until the present.
Where I was in 1995?
Amazingly, but it was relatively close, - I lived in America at that time. I was studying in the American University in Washington, D.C. And my apartment was in suburbs of Washington, D.C. (it was cheaper than rents in my University's campus). Namely, in the state of Maryland, where, - what a coincidence!, - Sergey Brin used to attend high school after arriving in the U.S.
In 1993 the University of Maryland awarded Sergey Brin an undergraduate degree with honors in math and computer science. Now guess what kind of degree I was awarded by the American University just couple years later? It was the honor certificate in IS and computer science signed by the President of USA!
After graduating from Maryland, Sergey Brin went to Stanford as the recipient of a National Science Foundation graduate Fellowship. While I was the Hubert Humphrey Fellow at nearly the same time.
But then I had to return to Ukraine. To realize that even for people like me, it's practically impossible to obtain the US visa these days anymore ...
When Brin and Page took leave from Stanford University in the fall of 1998, they were able to rent apartment with a garage and several rooms. For $1,500 a month. The sum would be a fortune in my Ukraine. And they were just students. Well, American students ...
So let me state this clearly:
Mini-WWW was developed due to my financial problems. While I would be happy it help other people, the primarily aim was to earn money.
Sounds too cruel for Sergey Brin, who spent all his adult life in a rich country? Well, it's not so for Sergey Beloy, who spent the most of his life in the misery of poor Ukraine.
In fact, we began almost similarly. Father of Sergey Brin worked as an economist for Gosplan, the Soviet central planning agency. My father worked for Gosplan too, - for many years he was Head of a department in the Gosplan of Ukraine.
Like Sergey Brin, I used to have a dream to become a scientist. I even tried to arrange my first place of work at the Ukrainian Academy Of Science on graduating the Kiev's University (KISI). However, then I was shocked by the low level of salaries there, and ... found a job as an Engineer instead.
The same period of time, but spent in another country, differs substantially.
Sergey Brin has been living in a country of opportunities. Where Silicon Valley could make millionaire even from a teenager. Compare it to my country (it's Ukraine, a part of the former Soviet Union), where all biggest fortunes have been a result of speculating on natural oil and gas resources.
Page and Brin were lucky to have right business connections and real access to money. The things I never had ...
Anyway, Sergey Brin is 37 today.
Happy Birthday To You from 45 years' old Sergey Beloy!
P.S.
Although I'm very grateful to the books.google.com, where I found a free content preview for the book "The Google story", - I have to say an interface for their service is UNREADABLE by definition. Moreover, as I understand, it was specially designed to make the reading HARDER!
I was struggling to read the demo version of the book. Literally. I was looking to the text in clumsy non-adjustable fonts through a squeezed tiny window. Obviously, it wasn't allowed to copy. If you wanna know what PC-savvy users like me feel when they face heavy cluttered sites, go to that location!
Nevertheless, I had read the whole book, all its 255 pages, - for one day! Well, what its tricky license allowed me to read (the demo was cut at random places, so there were many "white spots" and messages like "Pages 59 to 125 are not shown in this preview", - very frustrating). Otherwise, this blog article would never been written :-)