A photo of Craig Silverstein, Google's first hired employee, shared publicly by Silverstein on his Google+ profile page. Photo: Craig Silverstein/Google+
Google's first hired employee, Craig Silverstein, is leaving the tech giant where he's worked since its founding to sign on with the rising education start-up Khan Academy.
Silverstein - who was technically Google's third employee, after co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin - was instrumental in creating the search engine that has built Google into one of the world's leading tech companies. Google's search engine was the its first product and is still its most widely used.
Silverstein's departure was first reported as a rumour on Wednesday in an online newsletter produced by EdSurge, an education tech news site. On Thursday, the tech news site AllThingsD confirmed the departure.
How Google began according to a lecture Silverstein gave at the University of North Carolina in 2008:
Khan Academy, which has been profiled by Fairfax, is a non-profit start-up in Mountain View, California, (where Google is also based) that produces online videos, exercises and testing materials in a bid to educate students in math, science, humanities and finance in countries where educational resources aren't widely available.
Silverstein started working on Google's search engine when it was a research project at Stanford University led by Page and Brin, who were graduate students at the time. He officially joined Google when the company was founded in 1998 out of a Menlo Park garage.
He eventually left Standford, where (like Page and Brin) he was working on a doctorate in computer science, to work for Google. Page, Brin and Silverstein did not complete their doctorates.
Later, Silverstein served as Google's technology director. Recently he was mentoring younger Google employees, AllThingsD said.
"Silverstein worked side by side with the founders to establish Google's distinct culture and wrote his fair share of the nascent search engine's base code," the San Jose Mercury News reported in 2010. "As Google's first employee, his net worth has been estimated somewhere north of $US800 million."
In that article, Silverstein said that he felt a lot of Google's success was due to luck.
"I guess what I'm most proud of is successfully keeping the culture as well as we have, given all the success and growth that we've had," he told the Mercury News. "I'm proud of that. We haven't done perfectly, but we've done a lot better than I ever thought we would."
In an emailed statement, Google confirmed Silverstein's departure from the company.
"Craig's been with Google since the early days," the search giant said. "He was instrumental in the development of search and made numerous contributions to Google over the years. We wish him all the best at the Khan Academy and know that he will do great things to help them promote education around the world."
Shantanu Sinha, the president and chief operation officer of Khan Academy, said in an emailed statement that he was "thrilled" to have Craig Silverstein join the team.
"His deep technical knowledge and organisation-building experience will be extremely valuable to us as we grow as an organisation. We are excited that talented individuals like Craig believe so passionately in our mission and are willing to join us in our quest of providing a world-class education to anyone, anywhere."
LA Times
