Larry Page: As son of the Michigan State University computer science professor Dr. Carl Victor Page, Larry’s love for computers began at the early age of six. To follow his passion, Page studied at the University of Michigan to receive his Bachelor of Science in computer engineering. He also holds a master’s degree in computer science from Stanford University. During his search for a dissertation theme, he focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page. Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford PhD student, soon joined Page's research project. In 1996, the first version of Google was made available to Internet users. Two years later, Brin and Page incorporated Google, Inc.
Reed Hastings: After teaching high school math in Swaziland for two years as part of his work in the Peace Corps, Reed Hastings returned to Stanford University to graduate with a master’s degree in computer science. The first part of his career consisted mostly of problem solving. After inventing a tool for a debugging software and founding a company that produces products to troubleshoot software, Hastings finally co-founded Netflix in 1997 to offer flat rate movie rental-by-mail to customers in the US. And the rest is history.
Marissa Mayer: With the intention of becoming a pediatric neurosurgeon, Marissa Mayer took pre-med classes at Stanford University. She later switched her major to symbolic systems, a major combining philosophy, cognitive psychology, linguistics, and computer science. Mayer graduated with a Bachelor of Science in symbolic systems in 1998 and an M.S. in computer science in 1999 for which she specialized in artificial intelligence. That same year, she joined Google as its 20th employee and was the company’s very first female engineer. Thirteen years later, she was appointed president and CEO of Yahoo!