Zeitgeist 2011 Conference Opening
September 26, 2011
>>Nikesh Arora: What is exciting is this year we have more C-level executives than we've
ever had at our conference. Which means the level of ADD will run very high.
[ Laughter ] >>Nikesh Arora: We're going to try to keep
things at a quick pace and keep you interested and keep things going.
A lot of people ask us, why do we do Zeitgeist. They can't understand why we bring so many
illustrious people from around the world into one room and don't spend as much time talking
about the great things that people at Google do.
We think it's way for interesting to get you all in the room and stimulate your brains,
our thinking, and learn from you as opposed to stand up here and tell you once a year
what we do. Hopefully, we tell you that through our products and various things around the
world. That's the reason we do this. This is the 12th time we've hosted this event.
This is Lorraine and my 12th Zeitgeist at Google. So we're getting quite good at this.
We do this once a year in Europe and once over here.
And every time, it's fascinating. When you think back over the last year, many of the
things that have happened in the last year I don't think many of us could have anticipated.
I was just standing at the corner and talking to some of my colleagues and saying, you know,
I have a long list of things people have said that happened in the last year, like the euro
being in trouble, the global economy being in different places, Greece, it's precarious
position, WikiLeaks, phone hacking, phone tapping. I was actually turning around and
saying, can you tell me three to five great things that happened in the last 12 months?
This is a mind exercise early in the morning. I'd like you to think about three or four
amazing things that happened in the last 12 months. Amazing and unequivocally amazing.
Because some people told me, well, Egypt. Well, it's amazing for many, but not for some.
I'm just curious. We all remember the things which are in trouble, Greece, the euro, WikiLeaks,
so forth. I'd like you to think about the amazing things that happened.
The last year's title for our conference was MindShift. We can see that we've been through
a mind shift. What is interesting is, if you look at what transpires, it's very often yesterday
paves the way for the future. If yesterday didn't exist, we wouldn't have tomorrow. Sounds
very normal, of course. But what I mean in that context is, Google
would not exist if people hadn't decided to put information on the Web. Once people decided
to put information on the Web, we found a way to search it. But then you have ubiquity
of broadband, and you have social networking. It's hard to socially network for people who
aren't connected to the Web. That paves the way for the next phase. Once you begin to
see things like social networking happening, you see a lot of companies that have sprung
up in the last 12 to 20 months which use that as a platform for the next thing.
Part of what we're hoping to stimulate today and the next few days is what is the next
thing, current evolution of businesses and technology that will allow us to prepare for
the next thing or will allow for the next thing to happen. Hopefully, we'll hear some
of those things throughout the course of the next day, day and a half.
Before we go ahead and introduce the first session, I have one quick announcement to
make. One of my colleagues, he is probably still up on the mountain. He does that two
or three times in the morning before we start. Is Dennis Woodside. Dennis, I want you to
stand up. I want to thank Dennis Woodside for his amazing leadership for America's business.
He is going to move on and do an interesting project for us at Google. I want to thank
him for all his hard work and his -- [ Applause ]
>>Nikesh Arora: And I also want to welcome Margo Georgiadis, who is still up the mountain,
who is going to take up his role. And, hopefully, you will be as nice to her as you have been
to Dennis and she will be a great partner to all of you.
My last thing for you guys is, whenever I go to a conference, I get caught up by the
proceedings, by the interesting speakers. And before I leave, I try and think about
the one thing I'm going to do different as a consequence of the day and a half that I
spent somewhere. I'm going to leave you with that. When you leave tomorrow, I'm going to
come back here and try and ask some of you, what do you think you're going to do different
as a consequence of a day and a half spent with us. If we can stimulate one new thought,
idea, we think our purpose will have been achieved.
Let me introduce and welcome one of my personal mentors at Google, someone who has been a
phenomenal leader, has been and continues to be, the chairman of Google, Dr. Eric Schmidt.
>>Eric Schmidt: Thanks, Nikesh. Thank you. [ Applause ]
>>Eric Schmidt: Thank you, Nikesh. It is a privilege to be here. And it's a privilege
to work with Lorraine and Nikesh, who are the finest executives does this sort of stuff
I have ever worked with. I think you'll see that over the next couple days.
It's my pleasure to host this more than's session. I want to make a few comments and
then we have some pretty interesting conversations in the next hour or so.
I want to go back to 2005 when the first Zeitgeist happened. And I was looking back, and, of
course, using my favorite search engine and discovered that Alan Greenspan said that the
economy had strong underlying fundamentals, and that the housing bubble was better understood
as froth. Oh, well. [ Laughter ]
>>Eric Schmidt: Security analysts predicted that Afghanistan would be relatively stable
by the end of 2005 and that the Taliban were close to giving up. Hmm. Not a good prediction.
But my favorite prediction of all, Steve Ballmer told Stanford Business School that Google
was a one trick pony and that we would in five years, quote, Google might disappear.
Oh, sorry, Steve. [ Laughter ]
>>Eric Schmidt: I couldn't resist. How do we end up with these sorts of predictions?
And I think that one possible answer is because people don't know how to define how long the
future is. Interesting. I think we've got a problem here as a country,
as a society, and so forth. So, Nikesh, you were talking about how to
think about this conference. I'd like to have that be one of the questions, how long is
the future? If you're a politician in D.C., and I've spent
a lot of time there in the last month, -- [ Laughter ]
>>Eric Schmidt: -- the answer is, four years. Plus or minus. Or at least until you start
campaigning. But if you're a government worker, your future is a year or maybe a month, or
if the current continuing resolution doesn't get past, it's a day.
Why are you surprised that their definition of future is quite different from your future,
which I hope is your whole life and your children's life and your grandchildren's life and so
forth. For a corporation, it's typically the next quarter. I have become absolutely convinced
that we as a society have become dependent upon institutions that are inherently structured
to produce short-term thinking. That in fact that's one of the reasons why the debate that
we're seeing is occurring. And that through incumbency and through the incentives that
are generated, this is producing the kinds of outcomes. And by thinking only in the short
term, we come up with only simple solutions. Because the data says the opposite, that we're
entering a world of growing complexity, you know, if you think about it, 2 billion people
online. I was looking at this, there's now 295 exabytes, which is a very large number,
315 times -- I love these statistics -- 315 times more pieces of information than every
grain of sand on every beach on the Earth. This is a lot. Trust me. 600 new tweets per
second, growing quite rapidly. 40 hours of YouTube videos uploaded every minute. That's
phenomenal. We're at the point now where, in the next
few years, you can get a hard drive on the equivalent of an iPod, and on it, put 600
years of video watched at HD resolution. So you'll never watch it in your whole life.
So what happens is, we -- there's a sort of contradiction in my view between the way society's
preparing for the future, we're grasping sort of for simple answers in a complex world.
And when I think about the economy, health care, climate change, terrorism, which I think
are probably the hardest issues we all face, to me, these are to some degree a problem
of institutionalized failure of imagination. There are, in fact, clever new solutions to
a lot of these problems that are being discussed. But somehow, they don't seem to get into the
consciousness of the average citizen, voter, or politicians.
To me, the solution of most of the problems we face are based on innovation. I hope Google
is an example. I think many of you are examples of this kind of approach. And innovation isn't
just about change; it's about achieving smarter, more nuanced solutions, doing something hard
and interesting and so forth. And there are leaders, by the way, in every industry. We
have some of them today to talk about some of their insights in this regard.
But to me, it's about thinking about the greater scale of what we can do and also how we can
use technology to solve these problems, and creating sort of long-term adaptation to the
changes that are around them. That's when we get these sort of smart answers to these
complex questions. So to me, what we need to do is we need to
set out an agenda for innovation in our country and in the world as a whole. And, you know,
when I think about it, I think the most obvious one is to change the way education is done.
All of us have been the beneficiaries of strong educational systems in the United States and
elsewhere. We need to invest in training of a new generation of long-term thinkers and
encourage this -- innovative methods of teaching and so forth. This is why Google, by the way,
is promoting STEM education: Science, technology, engineering, and math. The President, many
other people in all the parties are very, very focused on trying to solve this problem.
When you can bring more analytical people into the working -- the working sort of space,
the world just gets better because of the complexity that we're all facing.
I also think it's important that we invest in the arts and humanities. When I think about,
you know, Steve Jobs as sort of the perfect example of that ultimately, he proves that
nerds don't win; artists do. There's a reason why the merge of these two is the most interesting.
We also need to develop and celebrate database decision-making, the fact of the matter is
there's an awful lot of data that people are just ignoring. And, in fact, I think many
of us feel when we watch television and look at what's happening in the political discussions,
these are almost data-free discussions; right? [ Laughter ]
>>Eric Schmidt: You know, give me a fact, even if you're lying. Okay.
And the great thing about data is that we can check, as voters, as citizens, as people
who care. We can actually decide if it's true or not.
So in order to change the world, we have to actually understand. We have to start with
some facts. Where, really, are we. And now with modern technology, can really know this.
And we need to begin judging our decision-makers based on their ability to manipulate in a
positive sense the data and actually reason from it.
You know, I think the saying I would suggest is that in God we trust. But everybody else
has to bring data. Does this mean that I'm a technocrat or I'm
a stats whiz and so forth? Does that mean I'm somehow different? No, I think it means
that ultimately, this world will belong to an entrepreneur. If you think about Silicon
Valley, ultimately, it's about data-based decisions and taking informed risks. We invest,
for example, in self-driving cars, the Lunar X Prize, renewable energy, for which we're
all criticized. But in each of these, there's at least a small, but very interesting, possibility
of an enormous new business. Or at least a lot of fun. Right?
And hopefully both. And so when you think about your risk portfolio,
how you spend your time, you should really think about asking a broader time frame question.
We're taking a longer-term view, in my view, in Google, on the essential human problems.
And this is, of course, how venture capital works.
So, you know, if you think about, go back to 1998, Alta Vista ruled the world, but Andy
Bechtolsheim backed two very young and very bright students at Stanford. But he was prepared
to cut a check on almost no data, but on intuition that the space was going to be very large.
And so, ultimately, this model of investment and innovation and accepting failure is something
which we seem to always forget, but, in fact, is how we will confront and, in my view, overcome
the great problems that we all face, that everybody is so obsessed about right now.
If we're going to achieve greatness in the 21st century, and I believe we will, we're
going to have to start with some Silicon Valley thinking.
So this is a time for technology, if you think about it. The Internet accounts for 3.4% of
the GDP under the current measurements. That's less than agriculture. But that's a sort of
traditional way of measuring it. But it clearly understates the value of the ideas, the creative
-- what is known as the consumer surplus, the powerful source of new ideas and culture
and so forth. It's understated and clearly is driving much of the change we know.
Google, for example, we know, contributed more than $64 billion in economic activity
for small businesses, organizations in the United States, in 2010, to give you a sense
of the scale. So you sit there and think, well, you know,
we're a reasonable-sized company, 20-, 30,000 people, what have you. But the leverage in
terms of shopkeepers, manufacturers, artists, nonprofits, bloggers, and so forth, really
does touch all of the United States and, in fact, the global footprint is similar.
So from my perspective, the Web as a platform, a platform for openness and creativity, and
using it to try to harness this notion of a longer-time in innovation is sort of the
core challenge all before us. And it's okay in this particular platform to try and to
fail and try again. And somehow, we seem to be winning these days.
But what I like about it is that it is a platform for millions of different visions of innovation
being born every day. And that makes an incredibly intellectually interesting and fascinating
world that we all get a chance to participate in which I love so very much. But every clever
app and so forth is one that proves that change doesn't just come from big institutions or
small institutions. It comes from the innovation and imagination of all of us.
So to me, this is about this conference, my remarks, what we are going to do in just a
sec, is about making our society achieve very much its full potential. It is about making
a very big bet and the very best days lie ahead.
I think -- I want you all to have a wonderful time here. I think -- I love this place. And
I love what we are trying to do here. And I have -- I do have some advice and a request.
I want you to take the long view. I want you to judge what people say, your own reaction,
in a time frame that's longer than a day or a week or a month or however many years that
our current incumbencies are structuring it. I want you to look for a smart and complex
solution using some nuance and think about the future. To me, this all comes now and
it begins now and lasts forever. In this century, we have a chance to really shape it. So thank
you very much. [ Applause ]