Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s move out of retirement and back to the trenches at Google has coincided with the company finding its mojo in the AI race, and a Distinguished Scientist at the company has described how Brin used to add value among employees.
Peyman Milanfar, a distinguished scientist at Google, recently shared insights on X about what makes Brin’s leadership style particularly effective, emphasizing a surprisingly simple but often overlooked principle: showing up.
“What Sergey does that’s so valuable is, he shows up,” Milanfar wrote, recalling his time at Google X, the company’s moonshot factory. According to Milanfar, Brin would regularly visit employees at their desks for hour-long conversations about their work. While Brin certainly had technical opinions to share, Milanfar noted that the real impact came from something more fundamental—demonstrating genuine interest in what teams were building.
“What mattered most was that he showed interest. That’s what made the work feel important,” Milanfar explained.
The Google co-founder’s hands-on approach extended beyond office conversations. Milanfar described how each team at Google X had a soccer squad that would train on a pitch across the street from their offices. Brin would frequently join these sessions, spending half the time playing with each team. He maintained one strict rule during these games: no headers. While the directive was amusing to hear, Milanfar saw it as evidence of Brin’s genuine concern for employee wellbeing.
“It showed he was looking out for us—he didn’t want to see us get hurt,” Milanfar wrote.
For Milanfar, Brin’s approach offers a crucial lesson that many tech leaders either fail to understand or simply choose not to practice. “You have to show up. Let your team know you’re walking the path with them,” he emphasized. “When you do, they won’t just go faster and farther; they’ll do it with more heart.” Milanfar also shared a picture of Brin in a bear costume at a Google office event.
Sergey Brin had all but retired a few years ago. But a chance comment by an OpenAI employee at a party — they told him that he was a computer scientist, and AI was causing the greatest transformation ever to computer science — got him back to the company he’d founded. What he discovered worried him — Google employees weren’t able to use Google’s own Gemini to vibe code, along with other things. Brin spoke with Google CEO Sundar Pichai and removed some bureaucratic layers. “I think Sergey is definitely spending time with the Gemini team in a pretty hardcore way, setting and coding and spending time with the engineers,” Pichai had said in May this year. “And that gives the energy to the team which I think it’s unparalleled, right? Like to have a founder sitting there looking at loss curves, giving feedback on model architectures, how can we improve post-training, etc. I think it’s a rare place to be,” he had added.
And this hands on approach seems to have helped. From languishing in the AI race with products like Bard and flubbed image generation features, Google is now the undisputed leader in the space. It has the best model in Gemini 3, it has the best image generation model in Nano Banana Pro, and it has the best video models in Veo 3. And this turnaround, at least in part, is likely due to Sergey Brin getting back to Google, rolling up his sleeves, and getting back to work.