Larry is truly amazing and no question about that. To me though, this comes as less surprise. His contributions can certainly be attributed to few not so well known facts.

1. Highly educated parents. His father has Ph.D. and is considered pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence ( source : wikipedia) 2. Mother : Comp. Science professor 3. His brother Carl Page Jr. sold company called eGroups to Yahoo!. So when you consider all this facts together, with kind of upbringing he had it less surprise that he followed the suit and created search engine. I bet this sort of environment must have played crucial role when he went for VC capital. If you have read crossing the chasm it talks about how a company with few hundered people can go mainstream. Larry leveraged all his background, upbringing and knowledge he had to create one of great software product.