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April 1998, Two Stanford undergraduates, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, presented an algorithm called PageRank at a conference in Australia. A month later, war broke out between Ethiopia and Eritrea, and thousands of ten-year-olds were killed in a two-year border conflict. The first event established Google’s dominance over the Internet. Second Timnit Gebru 15-year-old was put on the road to work in the future megacorp.
At the time, Gebru was living with his mother, an economist, in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa. His father, a doctor of electrical engineering, died when he was little. Gebrus liked to be in schools and cafes when he and his friends put together enough pocket money. But the war changed all that. Gebrur’s family was Eritrean, and some of his relatives were deported to Eritrea and ordered to fight back in the country.
Gebre’s mother had a visa to the United States, where Gebre’s older sister, an engineer like their father, lived for years. But when Gebru applied for a visa, he was denied. So he went to Ireland instead, meeting his sister who was temporarily at work, while his mother only went to America.
Arriving in Ireland could have saved Gebrus ’life, but it also shattered him. He called his mother and asked her to return to Ethiopia. “I don’t care if it’s safe or not. I can’t live here, ”he said. His new school, culture, as well as the weather were foreign. The rainy season in Addis Ababa is staccato, with heavy rain showers interspersed with sunshine. It rained continuously in Ireland for a week. As the challenges of new classes and bullying teens took on, greater concerns increased. “Will I reunite with my family? What happens if the procedure does not work? he remembers thinking. “I felt like I didn’t want to.”
The following year, Gebru was allowed to come to the United States as a refugee. He met his mother in Somerville, Massachusetts, Boston’s main white neighborhood, and enrolled at a local public high school.
Gebru found that some of his teachers could not or would not accept that the African refugee could be a high school student in mathematics and science. Other white Americans saw fit to believe that African immigrants worked harder than African Americans were lazy. The history class told an engaging story about the Civil Rights Movement that resolved American racial divisions, but that story was pure. “It seemed to me that that couldn’t be true, because I’m watching it at school,” Gebru says.
Piano lessons helped provide a space to breathe. Gebru also adapted to math, physics, and his family. She liked technical work, not only because of its beauty, but also because it was an area disconnected from personal politics or concerns about the war at home. This compartmentalization became part of the way Gebru navigated the world. “What I had under my control was being able to go to class and focus on the work,” he says.
Gebru’s attention paid off. He enrolled at Stanford in September 2001. Naturally, he chose the family’s electrical engineering, and soon began his career embodying the Silicon Valley archetype of immigrant trailers. Gebru built an experimental electronic piano key for a course in his sophomore year that helped him gain internships at Apple by making audio circuits for Mac computers and other products. The following year he joined the company full time while continuing his studies at Stanford.
At Apple, Gebru moved forward. Niel Warren, its director, in the delta-sigma modulators, in the analog-to-digital converter class, when he needed someone, volunteered for Gebru to research whether the technology would work on the iPhone. “He was fearless as an electrical engineer,” Warren says. He thought he liked the new video of his hardware, always ready to hug, and that he was determined even outside of work. In 2008, Gebru left one of his classes because he spent so much time with Barack Obama in Nevada and Colorado, where he knocked on many doors in his face.
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