Rajeev Motwani

June 7: Rajeev Motwani, the Stanford University professor who advised the founders of Google in their college days, was found dead in his swimming pool in California on Friday.

The 47-year old, who lived in Palo Alto, California, was best known for mentoring Sergey Brin and Larry Page who established the Google search engine in the 1990s. He also advised the founders of PayPal, an online payment system.

“His body was found in the swimming pool in his backyard on Friday,” Dan Stober, director of media relations at Stanford University, told Bloomberg. The cause of death “is still unclear”, he said.

Brin paid a rich tribute to his “teacher and good friend” through a blog post, titled Remembering Rajeev.

“Officially, Rajeev was not my adviser, and yet he played just as big a role in my research, education, and professional development. No matter what was going on with my life or work, I could always stop by his office for an interesting conversation and a friendly smile,” Brin said in the rare update (his last blog post before today was in September 2008).

“Rajeev remained a friend and adviser as he has (been) with many people and start-ups since. Of all the faculty at Stanford, it is with Rajeev that I have stayed the closest and I will miss him dearly. Yet his legacy and personality lives on in the students, projects, and companies he has touched,” Brin’s post said.

“Today, whenever you use a piece of technology, there is a good chance a little bit of Rajeev Motwani is behind it,” the Google co-founder wrote.

Motwani was born in Jammu and Kashmir on March 26, 1962, and grew up in New Delhi. His father was in the Indian Army. The boy from St Columba’s School wanted to become a mathematician and went on to get his bachelor’s degree in computer science from IIT Kanpur in 1983.

Senior faculty members who had taught him recalled Motwani was an exceptionally bright student. “We expected a lot from him.... We could see a lot of potential when he was a student and he lived up to it,” said Harish Karnick, a professor.

“He did very well as a student at IIT and then in California,” said professor R.M.K. Sinha, one of Motwani’s teachers.

The Google mentor continued his association with the tech school. He was a member of the advisory board of the institute’s Research I Foundation, created by Infosys mentor N.R. Narayana Murthy to promote research. Motwani is survived by his wife, Asha Jadeja, two daughters — Naitri and Anya — and two brothers.

The news of his death has sent shock waves throughout the Silicon Valley and the technology world globally.

Ron Conway, a long-time friend, told a group of techies at a San Francisco event that Motwani had influenced hundreds of entrepreneurs and students but had never refused a meeting. “For those of you who didn’t know Rajeev, you might get the impression that he was your typical Silicon Valley insider — loud, brash, full of bravado.” But Rajeev, he said, was “soft-spoken and gentle”.

“He was self-confident but didn’t feel the need to prove anything. He didn’t speak to hear his own voice and he didn’t need to be the centre of attention.”

Dave Hornik of August Capital, where Motwani attended Monday meetings, said: “Rajeev just wanted to be helpful. And he was, to so many of us.”

Motwani was one of the co-authors of an influential early paper on the PageRank algorithm, which became the basis for Google’s search techniques. He co-authored another seminal search paper “What Can You Do With A Web In Your Pocket” with Brin, Page and Terry Winograd.

He also wrote two books — Randomized Algorithms and an undergraduate textbook published in 2001.

“Success never came in the way of Rajeev’s quest for knowledge and innate desire to help others. There wasn’t a start-up he didn’t love. Like his chosen specialisation of search, Rajeev was searching for the unknown. He was still active as a professor and was teaching a couple of classes as recently as the last semester,” wrote a close friend, Om Malik, on his blog.

Dan Gould, co-founder of Newroo, an Internet news aggregator, said: “He helped us improve our algorithms and ideas and introduced us to Ron Conway and to other folks which led to the acquisition of our start-up. I ran into him several times since and he was always both kind and brilliant. I had hoped to work with him on a future project. While that’s not to be, I imagine dozens of other computer scientists-turned-entrepreneurs can tell the same story.”