Craig Silverstein was the first employee hired by Google's founders and created many of the original IT components to support Google's deployment and growth. Silverstein  joined the Google team while doing his Ph.D  in computer science at Stanford, where his  focus was on information retrieval and data mining. Silverstein contributed his expertise in compression algorithms to Google while it was still a research project at Stanford. His other academic pursuits include super-efficient versions of basic data structures such as hash tables as well as efficient clustering of large data sets using Scatter/Gather and latent semantic indexing as it relates to clustering, which he explored at Xerox PARC.

Silverstein graduated with honors with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Harvard College, from which he also received Phi Beta Kappa distinction, the Microsoft Technical Scholarship, and twice received the Derek Bok Award for Teaching Excellence.

Recently he left Google to join Khan Academy where he is focused on the infrastructure that supports Khan Academy, from its databases to its developer tools.

He spoke to Arun Saigal, an intern at Khan Academy, about his work and his reason to join Khan Academy.

What motivated you to join the Google team ?

I was interested in search (or "information retrieval" as it was called then) even before I knew about Google. When I saw a demonstration of it at Stanford and saw how much better it was than existing products, even commercial ones, I wanted to be part of it. This was all before Google was a company; I started working on it when it was still a grad student project.

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