Where Google's First Employees Are Today
Google recently celebrated its 25th birthday, which means it's now old enough to rent a car (which is good because its self-driving car company isn't slowing down). The massive corporation that helped define the modern internet was officially founded in Menlo Park, California, on September 4, 1998. However, the company can trace its roots even earlier, to 1995, when Stanford grad students Larry Page and Sergey Brin began developing a search algorithm for the web.
When Google officially launched in 1998, it was still headquartered out of a garage. Slowly, Page and Brin started hiring others and growing their business — adding less than two dozen employees in its first year. Today, it's the fourth-largest company in the world, with a market cap of $1.73 trillion and over 190,000 employees. Google went public with its IPO in 2004, and its stock price has grown thirtyfold since that time. For various reasons, Google restructured itself into Alphabet Inc. in 2015, a conglomerate of separate companies that specialize in certain industries, like its search engine, fiber network, and "moonshot" factory.
Many of Google's first employees have moved on to other ventures since those early days or retired with significant stock gains. Some have only just recently left, while others still remain there to this day. Here is what some of Google's first employees are currently up to.
Sergey Brin
Google's co-founder Sergey Brin no longer needs to work for a living; he's currently the eighth-richest person in the world, thanks in part to his co-inventing the search algorithms that made Google what it is today. Despite being one of the biggest names in tech for a quarter-century, Brin is only 50 years old, so it's no surprise he isn't looking to retire anytime soon. However, in December 2019, Brin stepped down as president of Alphabet, while remaining a board member and a controlling shareholder. His partner and Google co-founder Larry Page stepped down at the same time, and the executive control of their company went to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who is still currently the CEO of Alphabet.
Brin worked on various ventures after that, including an attempt to resurrect the airship industry. Earlier this summer, though, Brin returned to Google in a more involved capacity, looking to help shape the company's role in the current AI revolution. Like most other major tech companies these days, Google is developing their own multimodal AI, currently under the name Gemini. Brin, who has a passion for the technology, has been coming into Google's California office several days a week to help work on Gemini. He's had a major say in discussions and research, and has even participated in the hiring of researchers who can help Google expand its AI program. Since AI is expected to soon dominate the tech industry, Brin may not be going anywhere soon.
Larry Page
Like Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Larry Page is 50 years old and one of the wealthiest people on the planet, with a net worth over $100 billion. And like Sergey Brin, Page remains a board member and controlling shareholder of Alphabet despite stepping down as CEO in 2019. After his successor, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, sounded a "Code Red" alarm in response to ChatGPT's advancements in AI technology, Page and Brin returned to Google to consult on the company's own AI program. However, Page has been less hands-on with Google's Gemini AI project than Sergey Brin.
Instead, Page has dedicated more of his time to a different venture — Kitty Hawk. The enterprise is looking to be a forerunner in autonomous air taxis — self-driving airplanes that could revolutionize transportation. The company has been testing prototype flights in New Zealand, where Page (alongside, notably, several other billionaires) has been granted a residential visa.
Susan Wojcicki
Technically, Susan Wojcicki was Google's 16th employee, but she's actually been involved with the company even longer than that. It was her and her husband's garage in Menlo Park that Larry Page and Sergey Brin first operated out of after founding their startup. After being hired in 1999, Wojcicki worked on several of Google's earliest and most profitable ventures, including Adsense, Google Images, Google Books, and Google Analytics.
From 2014 until February 2023, Wojcicki ran YouTube, a subsidiary of Alphabet, as its CEO. That wasn't a random assignment, either; it was Susan Wojcicki who advocated for Google to acquire YouTube in the first place. The company paid $1.65 billion to buy the growing video platform and has since expanded it into an extremely lucrative arm of the business. Much of its growth, including its spinoff into live TV streaming with YouTube TV, occurred under Wojcicki's leadership. Though she stepped down as YouTube CEO in February, Wojcicki — whose current net worth is $780 million — still works in an advisory role at Alphabet.
Marissa Mayer
Marissa Mayer was either the 20th or 21st employee (according to various sources) at Google, joining the young company in 1999. Notably, she was the first female engineer to work there. Her time at Google was productive; Mayer designed Google's home page search interface and worked with the company to patent several web-browsing innovations. During her time at Google, daily searches on the platform went from a few hundred thousand to more than a billion. Before leaving Google, Mayer was also involved with the development of Gmail, Chrome, Google Earth, Google Maps, and Street View.
Today, Mayer is perhaps best known for being the CEO of Yahoo. The once-dominant web company was already struggling against competitors (including Google) when she took the position in 2012, and despite trying to right the ship with original programming and other gambits, Yahoo was eventually sold in 2017 to Verizon for $4.48 billion. That sale, plus her time at Google, has helped Mayer grow her net worth to $760 million. Currently, Mayer is working at Sunshine, a startup she co-founded, which seeks to make social lives easier by automating mundane tasks like remembering birthdays and other life events.
Craig Silverstein
Not counting Google's co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Craig Silverstein was the company's very first employee. The software engineer wasn't a random hire, though — he was studying for his Ph.D. alongside Page and Brin at Stanford. In the company's earliest days, Silverstein helped build Google's original search engine. During his time at Google, Silverstein worked in several positions, including mentoring other engineers. However, search always remained his passion while at the company. In 2008, Silverstein said, "We need to make search as good as a human answering a search request [...] and we are very, very far from that." When he finally left the company in 2012, Silverstein was Google's director of technology.
Currently, Craig Silverstein is the dean of infrastructure at Khan Academy, a nonprofit educational institution. Along with his wife, Mary Obelnicki, Silverstein joined the Giving Pledge, a charitable organization founded by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett that encourages millionaires and billionaires to donate a majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes. As one of the very first Google employees, Silverstein has earned a net worth of $900 million, so he has plenty to give.