Google Co-Founder Gets Married

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Google co-founder Sergey Brin and long-time sweetheart Anne Wojcicki, a biotech entrepreneur, exchanged vows recently in the Bahamas, guests confirmed to the San Jose Mercury News, in a ceremony so hush-hush that word didn’t leak out for more than a week.

Even the date remains secret: All sources would say was that it occurred sometime between May 4 and May 6.

The ceremony combined the unconventional and traditional. The bride and groom and other members of the wedding party wore swimsuits, the better to get to an offshore sandbar while other guests rode a boat. The bride wore white and the groom black, but otherwise the attire was not coordinated. About 60 guests attended, one of whom described the scene as "beautifully colorful."

In accordance with their Jewish heritage, the couple, both of whom are 33, were wed under the traditional canopy, the chuppah, and Brin stomped on a glass symbolizing their connection to the faith. The ritual was performed by two friends, neither of whom are rabbis.

Most guests reached by the San Jose Mercury News spoke on the condition of anonymity or declined comment. Brin’s 83-year-old grandmother Maya, speaking in a heavy Russian accent in a telephone interview, said the wedding was "very, very" nice before referring questions to Brin’s parents. Michael Brin, a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland and father of the groom, declined comment. Brin’s mother works as a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

The media’s interest created a dilemma for the bride’s mother, who declined comment even though Esther Wojcicki, a former newspaper reporter, is a much honored journalism teacher at Palo Alto High School in California. Wojcicki is pronounced woe-JIT-ski, although she is widely known as "Woj."

The father of the bride, Stanford physics professor Stan Wojcicki, evidently was low key with colleagues. When a caller on Tuesday left a cryptic message of congratulations for the professor, his assistant, Judy Meo, assumed something exciting happened in Wojcicki’s neutrino research work.

"I just knew he was in the Bahamas for his daughter’s wedding," Meo said later. "He kept it very quiet." Including, she said, the identity of the groom, who with a net worth estimated at more than $16.6 billion ranks as one of America’s richest men.

The secrecy surrounding the ceremony was extensive. Wedding guests who boarded the jetliner owned by Brin and Google co-founder Larry Page on May 4 were not told the destination, for instance.

Silicon Valley cognescenti, however, have known about the Wojcicki-Brin relationship for some time. It is a kind of only-in-Silicon Valley romance _ a tale of two brainy entrepreneurial spirits that involves a garage.

Said garage was part of a rented Menlo Park, Calif., house that Susan Wojcicki, then a recent UCLA business school grad, sublet to Brin and business partner Larry Page in 1998, after they had left a Stanford graduate program to launch Google. They knew Susan through Brin’s girlfriend at the time, and later, Susan introduced Brin to her sister Anne.

The arrangement worked out well. Susan is now a Google vice president of product management. (And Brin’s ex-girlfriend is still said to be a friend.)

Earlier this year, Anne launched a biotech startup called 23andMe, a personal genetics research business based in Mountain View, Calif. The third Wojcicki sister, Janet, is an assistant professor in the pediatrics department at UC San Francisco Medical School.

Brin, who was 6 when his family emigrated from Russia, has been described as personable and witty. He is also credited with coining the Google moral code: "Don’t be evil." Anne has been described as "down to earth" and "fun-loving." Shots of the couple posted on Flickr by Web guru Esther Dyson show them clowning with the likes of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann.

They plan to live in Palo Alto, one wedding guest said, and Wojcicki is expected to keep her name. People who care about such things note that they share the astrological sign of Leo.

In a 2001 interview for the Women.com Web site, Brin’s mother Eugenia indicated another priority. She was quoted as saying she hoped Sergey would find a wife who could match his wit _ preferably Jewish: "I hope he would keep that in mind."

"Well," a guest said, "he certainly did."

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San Jose Mercury News Staff writer S.L. Wykes contributed to this story.