I will make an Eight Years post later, but this was too cool of an article to pass up posting on.
How do you get married if you’re one of the world’s richest tech nerds? Answer: you avoid the paparazzi and fly somewhere nice and tropical:
Google co-founder Sergey Brin and long-time sweetheart Anne Wojcicki, a biotech entrepreneur, exchanged vows recently in the Bahamas, guests confirmed to the 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 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.
Awesome. And how did these two star-crossed (and unbelievably rich) lovers meet? He was trying to sublet an apartment from her older sister (who was then a friend of his girlfriend!)!
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 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.)
And, I thought I might as well add that Benjamin tenOever, the postdoctoral fellow that I have worked with for the past two years, is getting married tomorrow (May 18, 2007) in Harvard’s Fogg Museum to his lovely bride Loveena (who has a last name that is so incredibly long and hard for me to pronounce that I won’t even try to butcher her last name). I want to wish the two of them a very happy wedding, a very wonderful honeymoon (in the fabulous land of prostitutes and transsexuals, Thailand), and a very delightful time together [I posted on the cute story of his engagement back in June].