IITian who mentored Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page — the man who saw Google before the world did

IITian Who Mentored Google Founders

• Rajeev Motwani mentored Google founders Brin and Page at Stanford
• Motwani co-developed PageRank, the algorithm behind Google Search
• He shaped tech via research, teaching, and early investments.

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In the autumn of 1995, a young man with a thick mop of hair and an insatiable curiosity walked into a computer science lecture at Stanford University. His name was Sergey Brin. He was there to take a course from Professor Rajeev Motwani, an Indian academic whose reputation preceded him. Motwani was young, energetic and spoke about algorithms not as dry formulas, but as living puzzles waiting to be solved.

What Sergey didn’t know was that this professor, fresh from IIT Kanpur and Berkeley, would become the center for an entire generation of Silicon Valley’s future.

Rajeev Motwani saw patterns where others saw chaos. It was a gift that defined his career, but more importantly, it defined how he mentored. He didn't just teach students to code; he taught them to see around corners.

By 1996, Sergey Brin had teamed up with another PhD student, Larry Page. They had a wild idea: to make sense of the exploding, disorganized World Wide Web by ranking pages based on their connections—treating every link on the web like a vote of confidence. It was elegant, ambitious and utterly impractical by the standards of the day.

Most professors would have patted them on the head and told them to focus on their dissertations. Rajeev Motwani pulled up a chair.

There is a moment in every innovator's life when an idea is so fragile, so nascent, that it could dissolve with a single skeptical glance. For Brin and Page, that moment came in 1997. They had the kernel of something—they called it "Backrub" at first, a name that made people snicker—but they lacked the theoretical framework to prove it could scale.

Motwani didn't just encourage them. He got his hands dirty.

Working late into the night, with whiteboards covered in scribbles and empty coffee cups forming small cities on his desk, Motwani helped them formalize the math behind what would become PageRank. He co-authored papers with them: "Dynamic itemset counting" in 1997, and then the bombshell in 1998—"The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web."

The paper was a quiet earthquake. It described a way to bring democracy to information, letting the web's own structure determine what was important. Today, when you search for anything, you are touching the work of those late nights.

But here's what the history books often miss: Motwani didn't need to be there. He was already a tenured professor with a Gödel Prize on his shelf for his work on the PCP theorem—a piece of theoretical computer science so profound that it underpins how we verify everything from software correctness to secure online transactions. He was a giant in his field. He could have focused on his own research, published his own papers, and ignored these two scruffy PhD students with their "Backrub" project.

He chose to stay.

Years later, after Backrub became Google, after the company took over the world, Sergey Brin would remember those days. When Motwani died tragically in 2009 at just 47, Brin didn't issue a press release. He spoke from the heart: "He was a brilliant computer scientist, and a teacher and good friend. His legacy and personality live on in the students, projects and companies he has touched."

That was the thing about Rajeev Motwani. His legacy wasn't just in the 231 papers he published, or the 110,000 citations, or the companies he advised (including a little startup called PayPal that he backed early). It was in the people who passed through his orbit and were changed.

In 2000, Motwani and his wife Asha started Dot Edu Ventures, a fund that invested in early-stage tech companies. But the name mattered more than the money. It was a signal: this was about education, about the university as a crucible for ideas. He wasn't trying to get rich. He was trying to make sure the next Sergey and Larry had someone to pull up a chair.

When he returned to IIT Kanpur as a mentor and board member, he carried that same philosophy. The boy who graduated from those halls in 1983, one of the first computer science students, had come full circle. But he never acted like a man returning in triumph. He acted like someone who still had more to give.

Rajeev Motwani died on June 5, 2009. He was found in the pool at his home in Atherton, California. The world lost him too soon.

Every time you search Google, you're using a fragment of his mind. Every time you make a secure online transaction, you're leaning on his work. Every time a drug company designs a new medicine using computational methods, there's a chance they're building on his ideas.