Larry Page

Age: 36

WHAT HE DOES
Larry Page is the president for products at Google, the Mountain View, California, search giant he founded with his Stanford University classmate Sergey Brin.

WHAT HE’S KNOWN FOR
If it weren’t for Page’s early dabbling in the structure of the internet, Google—now a global force—may never have been created. While a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford, he built a program with Brin called PageRank and followed that with a dissertation project on the mathematical properties of the Web. Brin, a math whiz, helped with the complex calculations involved. Ultimately, their research served as the foundation for the ranking technology behind Google.

Along with Brin, Page has since become one of the richest thirty somethings in the world. Like most billionaires, Page has a substantial ego and a willingness to attempt to defy the odds. But resilient self-regard and audacity have been essential to Page and Brin’s accomplishments and ambitions: They’ve become rulers of the internet and run a $1 billion philanthropic foundation, and they have plans to bring free wi-fi access to areas across the U.S. and take on Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and the media, advertising, and telecommunications industries.

WHERE HE’S FROM
Page didn’t fall very far from the family tree. His father was one of the first to teach computer science at Michigan State University, and his mother used her master’s degree in computer science to work as a database consultant. Page began playing with computers at the tender age of six and went on to study engineering as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan.

The entrepreneurial spirit is probably in his genes too. Page’s brother, Carl, was one of the founders of eGroups.com, a website for managing email lists, which Yahoo purchased for $432 million in 2000.

WHERE HE’S GOING
As the “products guy,” the soft-spoken and camera-shy Page is focused on streamlining Google’s wide array of offerings. The company has been criticized for launching what seems an endless collection of products that earn little revenue or languish in beta mode. In what may be a sign of things to come, the company shut the door on Google Answers, a fee-based question-and-answer system, in late 2006. Answers was Page’s idea, and its demise sent the message that any project is at risk of being cut. —Zubin Jelveh