Rajeev Motwani (March 26, 1962 – June 5, 2009) was a professor of Computer Science at Stanford University whose research focused on theoretical computer science. He was an early advisor and supporter of companies including Google and PayPal, and a special advisor to Sequoia Capital. He was a winner of the Gödel Prize in 2001.
To Shivanand Kanavi, a Mumbai-based business writer who interviewed Motwani in 2004 for his book From Sand to Silicon: The Amazing Story of Digital Technology, the Stanford savant explained the birth of Google. ”Sergey Brin and Larry Page were running a search engine out of Stanford,” he recalled. ”These 21- year-olds would come in and make demands on me — we need more disk space because we are crawling the Web and its getting bigger, we need to buy more disk… I’d give them more money and they’d go buy more disks.