My job as a leader is to make sure everybody in the company has great opportunities, and that they feel they’re having a meaningful impact and are contributing to the good of society. As a world, we’re doing a better job of that. My goal is for Google to lead, not follow that.
One of our big goals in search is to make search that really understands exactly what you want, understands everything in the world. As computer scientists, we call that artificial intelligence.
The moments that we have with friends and family, the chances that we have to make a big difference in the world or even to make a small difference to the ones we love, all those wonderful chances that life gives us, life also takes away. It can happen fast and a whole lot sooner than you think.
I have a simple algorithm, which is, wherever you see paid researchers instead of grad students, that’s not where you want to be doing research.
You treat people with respect, they tend to return the favor to the company.
You’re going to have some very amazing capabilities in the economy. When we have computers that can do more and more jobs, it’s going to change how we think about work. There’s no way around that. You can’t wish it away.
The amazing thing is that we’re part of people’s daily lives, like brushing their teeth. It’s just something they do throughout the day while working, buying things, deciding what to do after work and much more. Google has been accepted as part of people’s lives.
If you ask an economist what’s driven economic growth, it’s been major advances in things that mattered – the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that.
Computing is kind of a mess. Your computer doesn’t know where you are. It doesn’t know what you’re doing. It doesn’t know what you know.
How exciting is it to come to work if the best you can do is trounce some other company that does roughly the same thing?
We are excited about Internet access in general. With better access to the Internet, people do more searches.
As we transition from one screen to multiscreens, Google has enormous opportunities to innovate and drive ever higher monetization. Just like Search in 2000.
Big companies have always needed and cooperated in areas where it made sense.
Our mission is to organize the world’s information. Clearly, the more information we have when we do a search, the better it’s going to work.
The Star Trek computer doesn’t seem that interesting. They ask it random questions, it thinks for a while. I think we can do better than that.
You need to invent things and you need to get them to people. You need to commercialize those inventions. Obviously, the best way we’ve come up with doing that is through companies.
We have a mantra: don’t be evil, which is to do the best things we know how for our users, for our customers, for everyone. So I think if we were known for that, it would be a wonderful thing.
If you can run the company a bit more collaboratively, you get a better result, because you have more bandwidth and checking and balancing going on.
We chose it because we deal with huge amounts of data. Besides, it sounds really cool.
I remember turning in my first assignment in elementary school using the computer and the teachers were kind of confused that I had printed it.