Google has a 3rd co-founder!?

By Pachi | Nov 15, 2008

Until now we knew Larry Page and Sergey Brin as the (only) co-founders of Google. But few months back a man is claiming to be the third co-founder of Google.

Hubert Chang claims that as an NYU Ph.D student in 1997 he was introduced to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin by Stanford professor Rajeev Motwani. He claims that he came up with the pagerank concept, developed a part of Business Plan and even the company name - Google!

When asked why he wasnt mentioned on the original Pagerank paper? He says, he chose to pursue his Ph.D instead (Note: Larry and Sergey decided dropped out of college to start Google)

When Google was asked about this, they did not deny nor call him fake. Instead they replied -Though many people were involved with Google in its early days, it has been well-documented over the past decade that Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the company in September 1998.

Google truth, the truth of Google’s birth from googletruth

When starting a company, we take help from numerous people, but cannot call them all as co-founders. Even here, it may be the same case. But here(after seeing google’s reply) looks like Hubert Chang was involved.

Is something fishy here? We may never know. Having seen people who wont acknowledge their co-founders for stupid reasons like “inconvenience to mention”, I wont be surprised if what Hubert Chang says is true and Page/Sergy outright deny it!

Update: Techcrunch followed up on this, click here see the updates