His parents were migrant farmworkers who worked the harvests of California and Washington state before wintering in their small hometown in rural Mexico. Bismarck Lepe, now 29, remembers how at age 5 he helped out in the strawberry fields.

“I was good at planting,” he recalled. “I was very close to the ground.”

“He brags about that all the time,” muttered his 21-year-old brother Belsasar, known as Bel.

Today, Bismarck and Bel Lepe work marathon hours in the bright, clean quarters of their own Silicon Valley startup, with its own little fleet of electric-powered Razor scooters for zipping around Mountain View. Educated at Stanford University, seasoned at Google, these overachieving sons of the Latino laboring class are among the valley’s more demographically improbable entrepreneurs. They are two of the three founders of Ooyala, a fast-growing company that in less than two years has built an impressive list of customers — Warner Bros., TV Guide, Armani — with its infrastructure technology for the booming trend in online video.

Ooyala means “cradle” in the South Indian language of Telugu. The name reflects the founders’ ambition for the company to cradle innovation in delivering and syndicating video content while leveraging the interactive nature of the Web to enhance advertising revenue.

Silicon Valley prides itself as a meritocracy — a place where people are judged less by ancestry than by ability. It boasts companies founded by people from all over the world. But tech entrepreneurs of humble Mexican roots are a distinct rarity.

Bismarck, Ooyala’s chief executive, largely shrugs off the occasional ethnic stereotyping. At Google, a secretary once assumed he must be the “phone guy” she had summoned, not a manager involved in AdSense and YouTube.

The Lepe brothers and 28-year-old co-founder Sean Knapp all attribute their own drive to the industrious example of their parents. Knapp said he got a sense of the Lepe family work ethic when his partners’ parents, Casimiro and Aida, helped them move into Ooyala’s first office and later expand into its second. They knocked down walls, painted, installed the kitchen, assembled furniture. Knapp recalled with awe the sight of Casimiro, a man in his late 50s, hustling up stairs carrying a desk on his back: “He was like a mountain goat.”

”I love to work,” Casimiro said. “That’s what I teach my sons: The only way you can live better is to work hard.”

The Lepe family’s journey, as Bismarck puts it, “truly is the American dream.” Growing up in the village of Juchitlan, about 80 miles from Guadalajara, Casimiro Lepe was only 15 and had a sixth-grade education when his father died, thrusting him in the role of provider. At age 23, he began wooing a hometown girl from a prosperous family who was pursuing a college degree. Aida’s father didn’t approve of Casimiro, but the young man persisted, courting Aida for six years before prevailing with a poetic ultimatum: “Nos casamos o nos dejamos.” Either we marry or we part ways.

Born in Oxnard, Bismarck was a birthright American citizen, but lived much of his childhood in Juchitlan. His unusual first name, he explains, derives from some German ancestry on his mother’s side. He has happy memories of traveling with the Lepe clan from harvest to harvest as they picked lemons, peaches, nectarines, walnuts, strawberries and apples. Kindly farm owners and managers, he said, looked after him as his parents worked. At age 4, Bismarck had his first job: making peanut butter and honey sandwiches and delivering them to the crew.

When Bismarck was starting school, the Lepes decided to settle in Oxnard. Aida found office work and Casimiro toiled on local farms and delivered newspapers while attending community college to learn skills that have made him a maintenance man for an apartment company. The Lepe brothers say their parents’ hard work provided them with privileges not common to working class kids, including piano and karate lessons.

Bismarck’s entrepreneurial streak — inspired, he says, by episodes of “Dallas” and “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” — became evident in elementary school. He turned dimes into dollars, he said, by selling classmates pens and other items he purchased on visits to the downtown Los Angeles wholesale district.

At Oxnard High School, Bismarck excelled in academics and athletics, as a distance runner. It is a school, he said, that serves a community with a wide socioeconomic divide. About half of his freshman class failed to graduate. In his application to Stanford, Bismarck took care to include a childhood photo of himself clinging to his mother’s leg while she worked in an apple orchard. He started as a pre-med student; his parents hoped he would emulate Aida’s brother, a physician and hospital owner in Mexico.

Bel looked up to the brother who, he said, “was like the cool, live-in uncle” because of their age difference. Bel, too, excelled in academics and distance running.

Bismarck’s horizons widened at Stanford, where Knapp, a distance-running star on Stanford’s track team, became a friend. Bismarck’s interest in medicine waned as he took jobs at tech startups and pursued his own entrepreneurial ideas. Encounters with students who had attended exclusive prep schools such as Andover and Exeter gave him an idea: Perhaps Bel could attend such schools on scholarship.

So it was that Bel, at age 14, left Oxnard for the famed Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., commonly known as Andover, later transferring to the Thacher School in Ojai. Bel said he believes the Andover experience — literally attending class with the sons of presidents and kings — helped prepare him for the social adjustment of both Stanford and Google.

A computer wiz, Bel was only 18 when he started working at Google while carrying a full load at Stanford. Bismarck and Knapp were already working there.

As Bismarck tells it, the Ooyala story began one night in January 2007, when he was struck by an idea for enhancing the commercial potential of online video. Soon, he was pitching his idea to his brother and friend.

The decision to leave Google was toughest for Knapp: Unlike Bismarck, he was not yet vested in his stock options, and an early departure meant walking away from a hefty paycheck. Google executives, they say, urged them to pursue their project within the company and without the financial risk. But Ooyala’s founders said they wanted the risk and challenge of building their own company. To stay at Google, Knapp said, would be like living in your parents’ mansion: It might be nice, “but it’s still their mansion.”

While Bismarck focused on developing the business, Knapp and Bel concentrated on technology. By all signs, the risk is paying off. Approaching its second anniversary, Ooyala has expanded from the three founders to 42 full-time and three part-time employees, with more jobs to be filled. Ooyala’s founders say they still tend to work 14-hour days — and enjoy what they’re doing.

The Silicon Valley wing of the Lepe clan still maintains its ties to Mexico. One of Ooyala’s customers is Televisa, a Mexican broadcasting giant. And not long ago, Bismarck Lepe bought a large piece of farmland in Mexico. The farmworkers’ son is growing papaya.

Contact Scott Duke Harris at sdharris@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-2704.