ENTREPRENEURSHIP DEVELOPMENT

ASSIGNMENT ON MR. LAWRENCE E PAGE

SUBMITTED BY JOSHUA R MBA AVIATION

INTRODUCTION Lawrence E. Page is an American computer scientist and industrialist, who is known as the cofounder of Google, was born on the 26th of March, 1973 in Michigan, USA. He is the current Chief Executive Officer of Google. It was announced on January 21, 2011 through a blog post, his personal wealth is estimated to be $19.8 billion. Page was born in East Lansing, Michigan. Page always had a keen interest in computers while growing up and was encouraged by his father, Dr. Carl Victor Page, who is a computer science professor of Michigan State University.His father earned a Ph.D. in computer science in 1965 when the field was in its infancy or early stages, and is considered a "pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence." Both he and Page's mother were computer science professors at Michigan State University. Page is Jewish on his mother's side, and was raised without religion. Page attended the Okemos Montessori School (now called Montessori Radmoor) in Okemos, Michigan from 1975 to 1979, and graduated from East Lansing High School in 1991. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan with honors and a Masters degree in computer science from Stanford University. While at the University of Michigan, "Page created an inkjet printer made of Lego bricks" (actually a line plotter), served as the president of the HKN in Fall 1994, and was a member of the 1993 "Maize & Blue" University of Michigan Solar team. During an interview, Page recalled his childhood, noting that his house "was usually a mess, with computers and Popular Science magazines all over the place." His attraction to computers started when he was six years old when he got to "play with the stuff lying around." He became the "first kid in his elementary school to turn in an assignment from a word processor." His older brother also taught him to take things apart, and before long he was taking "everything in his house apart to see how it worked." He said that "from a very early age, I also realized I wanted to invent things. So I became really interested in technology and business. Probably from when I was 12, I knew I was going to start a company eventually." Larry Page graduated from the East Lansing High School and went on to earn a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering, with a focus on computer engineering at the University of Michigan. It was while studying his Ph.D. At the Stanford University that he met Sergey Brin. Larry Page and his businesspartnerSergey Brin changed the way most people use the Internet. The pair started the Google search engine while working on their Ph.D.s in Computer Science at the Stanford University, USA. They initially had no plans to start a business, but were simply doing research for their Ph.D. Google quickly went from a research project of two Stanford students to being one of the most visited websites on the Internet.

TRANSFORMATION OF A PROJECT TO COMPANY Page and Brin began work on a project called "The Anatomy of a Large-scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" or simply, The Anatomy of a Search Engine. Their challenge was to crawl the web efficiently and provide more relevant results than the search engines that were available at that time. The dramatic growth of the web presented problems in crawling the web, keeping the crawled information up to date, storing the indices efficiently, and handling many queries quickly. The Google project relied on the pageranktechnology that the pair developed.

After enrolling for a Ph.D. Program in computer science at Stanford University, Larry Page was in search of a dissertation theme and considered exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph. His supervisor Terry Winograd encouraged him to pursue this idea, which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got". Page then focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable information about that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind). In his research project, nicknamed "backrub", he was soon joined by Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. Student. John Battelle, co-founder of Wired magazine, wrote of Page that he had reasoned that the "entire Web was loosely based on the premise of citation after all, what is a link but a citation? If he could devise a method to count and qualify each backlink on the Web, as Page puts it 'the Web would become a more valuable place'." Battelle further described how Page and Brin began working together on the project: "At the time Page conceived of backrub, the Web comprised an estimated 10 million documents, with an untold number of links between them. The computing resources required to crawl such a beast were well beyond the usual bounds of a student project. Unaware of exactly what he was getting into, Page began building out his crawler. "The idea's complexity and scale lured Brin to the job. A polymath who had jumped from project to project without settling on a thesis topic, he found the premise behind backrub fascinating. "I talked to lots of research groups" around the school, Brin recalls, "and this was the most exciting project, both because it tackled the Web, which represents human knowledge, and because I liked Larry." Brin and Page originally met in March 1995, during a spring orientation of new computer Ph.D. Candidates. Brin, who had already been in the program for two years, was assigned to show some students, including Page, around campus, and they later became good friends. To convert the backlink data gathered by backrub's web crawler into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the pagerank algorithm, and realized that it could be used to build a search engine far superior to existing ones. It relied on a new kind of technology that analyzed the relevance of the back links that connected one Web page to another. In August 1996, the initial version of Google was made available, still on the Stanford University Web site.