Google co-founders Larry Page MS ’98 and Sergey Brin MS ’95 publicly supported Stanford’s bid for a New York City (NYC) applied science campus on Tuesday in an online video posted on a University tumblr site.

The announcement comes as Stanford is preparing to submit its formal proposal to the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) committee on Friday, the deadline for universities to respond to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s request for proposals to create an applied-sciences center for teaching and research.

“I think this is a pretty great opportunity for both the city as well as for Stanford University to broaden its horizon,” Brin said.

The video, titled “Stanford’s Tradition of Innovation,” lasts three and a half minutes, and does not mention the NYC campus until the last 30 seconds. During the rest of video, Page and Brin discuss starting Google at Stanford and the University’s reputation for being a launching ground for major technology companies.

“I think Stanford is a really unique place,” Page said in the video. “Looking at Hewlett-Packard, Sun-Microsystems, Cisco, Yahoo, Excite, it’s really bred an enormous number of very important companies in the technology world. And I don’t think it’s an accident. I think there’s a culture of entrepreneurship at Stanford on a scale I haven’t seen elsewhere.”

Brin then said while he “love[s] New York,” he feels “one of the things that it is missing is this top-notch university-industry symbiosis.”

“I don’t think I’ve seen this same kind of scale in research and commercialization, pretty much anywhere outside of Stanford,” he continued.

Last Tuesday, Cornell University announced a partnership with Technion-Israel Institute of Technology to submit a dual proposal for a NYC applied science campus, causing many in the media to peg Cornell’s bid as Stanford’s top rival.

NYCEDC expects to announce a decision by the end of the calendar year.

— Kurt Chirbas