Sergey Brin (Google & Alphabet) - Google Origins and AI Futures
Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)
Stanford eCorner
4.5 • 740 Ratings
🗓️ 12 December 2025
⏱️ 70 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Recorded live at the capstone celebration of the Stanford School of Engineering Centennial, this ETL episode features Sergey Brin, the American computer scientist and entrepreneur who co-founded Google with Larry Page and revolutionized global information access. Brin remains an active co-founder and board member of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, and he has been involved in Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence efforts. In this conversation with Stanford President Jonathan Levin and School of Engineering Dean Jennifer Widom, Brin tells stories from his Stanford years, shares insights from throughout Google’s history, and gives advice for students and aspiring entrepreneurs – including his perspective on the AI landscape.
Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders and other Stanford eCorner content is produced by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP), the entrepreneurship center at the Stanford School of Engineering. STVP empowers aspiring entrepreneurs to become global citizens who create and scale responsible innovations.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome, everybody. This is the closing event of our centennial year. It's pretty exciting. I'm Jennifer Whittam. I'm the 10th Dean of Engineering. And you can do a little math there and figure out we deans like to stay around for a while here. It's been a great year. It's been a year of celebration, reflection, looking to the future. For those of you who haven't |
| 0:39.2 | heard about the history, we've had engineering at Stanford since the beginning of the university |
| 0:44.0 | 1891. We started with chemical engineering, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, |
| 0:50.0 | and mining and metallurgy. And it was in 1925, 100 years ago, when those four departments were |
| 0:57.0 | brought together to form a school. And those four departments are still with us today. One of them |
| 1:02.6 | has been renamed. It's now material science and engineering rather than metallurgy. And we have five |
| 1:08.2 | more departments and many, many interdisciplinary programs. We've had events |
| 1:14.0 | throughout the year to celebrate the centennial. They've been fantastic. We started with a panel |
| 1:20.1 | with the five deans of the 10 who are still with us. That panel was moderated by Jerry Yang, |
| 1:26.4 | who I think is here today, a great friend of the school. |
| 1:29.3 | Our second event was on May 15th. We had a big party out on the quad. We expected 2,000 people. We got 3,000 and we didn't run out of food. |
| 1:39.3 | We had a great showcase of projects and research. The next event was a fireside chat with |
| 1:47.0 | Jensen Wong and John Hennessy that was actually on this very stage around the end of May. |
| 1:52.0 | We partnered with Stanford football and had a school of engineering themed football game. |
| 1:59.0 | Nobody told me when I took the job as dean that one of my |
| 2:03.3 | jobs would be to drive a motorized couch on national TV with Andrew Luck as my passenger. |
| 2:10.9 | But I nailed it and that was great. We had on Reunion Weekend, a trivia contest on the history of the school. |
| 2:20.9 | The alums enjoyed it. And now this is our closing event. If we look back on the hundred years |
| 2:28.0 | of the School of Engineering, obviously the formation of Google was a shining moment. |
| 2:32.9 | Sergei Bryn, who you will soon meet, |
| 2:35.0 | met Larry Page when he visited to think about |
| 2:38.0 | coming to our PhD program. |
... |
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