#7 Larry Page

Age: 37yrs

Birth Place: East Lansing, Michigan, USA

Industry: I.T entrepreneur, Computer Science

Influence: Revolutionized Online Searching and Media

Net Worth: $15 billion

Why they made the list…

Co-Founder of one of the most recognized search engines in the world, Google. It’s no wonder why Larry became interested and later an entrepreneur within the computer science industry; his parents were both computer science professors at the University of Michigan. Being of quite a wealthy background Larry was a very lucky person. He attended the Montessori Radmoor School (formerly the Okemos Montessori School), and later completed a degree in the science of computer engineering (BA Honors Degree) as well as completing a Masters Degree in Computer Science from Stanford University. In 1995 Larry met Sergey Brin, who was also a fellow Stanford student. They became close friends and eventually went into business together in 1996, forming the company Google Incorporated. Larry alongside his partner Brin ran Google Inc. as co-presidents of the company, until hiring the CEO Eric Schmidt.

Larry and Brin got their first financial backing from Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems, with the sum of $100,000. It was here that Page’s “Web Crawler” was soon to become the search engine we know today. Starting from his own Stanford University home page the web crawler began to search the internet for web pages, with the home page being the only starting point. To assess the importance of the information which the Web Crawler had found; Page and Brin created a complex algorithm which the late named PageRank. In 1999 just three years since they went into business, Larry and Brin found themselves becoming hounded by investors, and they finally accepted $25 million from Kliener Perkins Caufield and Sequoia Capital. By 2001 Google, now global; was producing profits of over $100 million, and by 2003 had raised those profits to $960 million a massive amount growth in just two years! Google as of today is now worth $172,399,800,300 or there about.