These are the CEOs we need more of.

Because of discrimination against Jews, Michael Brin and his wife, a mathematician working as a civil engineer, left in 1979 with their young son Sergey. Michael Brin got a job at the University of Maryland mathematics department where he still teaches, and thought his son might follow in his footsteps, as he had followed his father before him.

"I left because of myself and because of his (Sergey's) future. I didn't want him to be in the same situation as I was," Michael Brin said by telephone. "Did we expect him to become, what's it called—Time Magazine calls him a 'titan of industry'? No, I had no idea. I expected him to get his Ph.D and to become somebody, maybe a professor."

Sergey is now on leave from Stanford University where he was trying to get a doctoral degree. Instead, he set up Google, the world's No. 1 Internet search engine that is widely expected to announce this week that it plans to go public.