Nope, I'm not the original author -- that would be Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat (also often credited with inventing things like MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner, ...). I wrote version 2 (a complete rewrite, but largely following the original design) and open sourced it. I stopped working on Protobuf about 8 years ago. Many others who have been on the Protobuf team since can certainly call themselves "authors".