- It's a huge treat to have Sundar Pichai,
CEO of Google here
and you know, I will give a little bit
of a preamble more than I normally do
and I think a lot of the team knows this,
but it's always worth reminding the team,
we wouldn't be here on many levels,
if it wasn't for Google.
Clearly, Khan Academy certainly got
it's first attention on YouTube.
I don't think I would have been able to do
what I did had YouTube not existed when it did.
Some of you all might not realize, but in 2005
we were on Java Servlet Webhosting
and that wasn't scaling.
(audience laughs)
And so in January, I was like
hey there's this thing called App Engine
and we went on there
and we have been ever since.
So even from a platform point of view,
but most importantly, in the early days,
when, you know, we were kind of not even clear
that we could become an organization.
Google and Google.org was one of the very first to step up
and allow us to become a real organization.
And ever since then, through Learn Storm
and even existing grants, continue to support this.
So first of all, just thank you.
- Oh, well there's are a lot of people are behind it.
I am glad we are part of something this great.
- Thank you.
So let's just start.
You know...
Well you're not new to the job as CEO of Google anymore,
it's been almost two years now.
A year and a half?
- Haven't counted, by something like that.
- So what's your view of the you know,
of the world, what you're hoping to do at Google?
- First of all, thanks for having me here.
You know, I have to confess,
there are times when I have to speak at things like this
and on topics which I don't know much about.
I may sneak into Khan Academy
and see a video here and there,
so I'm a user of the platform as well.
You know, from a Google standpoint, in some ways
I think we share a lot of, you know,
what your mission is as well.
Our stated mission is to bring information
and knowledge, you know, for everyone.
We take the for everyone part seriously.
And, you know, we are, we've been working on it for a while,
but we again have this renewed sense of excitement
within the company because of machine learning and AI.
We think over the next 10 years, we can, you know,
take a bunch of stuff we've been doing to a different level
and we are still in early days.
You know computers are just beginning to kinda
get better at things like speech recognition,
image recognition, that's what a lot of
the excitement is about, when we say
you know, we are making a lot
of progress in machine learning.
So using that thoughtfully across everything we do
and then taking things to the next level
is a big part of our focus.
Closely related to that is,
you know, building computing platforms for everyone too.
I think, you know I was personally very inspired
by the OLPC project at the time.
And I think that notion of being able to make
computing accessible to everyone is very near and dear
to a lot of us, particularly to me.
You know, I didn't have access to computing growing up
and you know, I literally, mainly got it
through the extent of my college
and so I have a very discreet sense of
how it changed what I was able to understand
and what I was able to get out of it.
So I think we're in the spot where it's very exciting to see
computing, which you know, historically worked for
a small percentage of the world.
Now is, that penetration is getting better and better.
You know, mobile use is at three billion users now
and I see signs we can scale it beyond that,
so we are big with platforms like Chrome, Android.
We've always cared about making computing more affordable
and reaching everyone.
I think there are others working on connectivity as well.
So the combination of all that,
I think we can get to a stage where,
pretty much, sometime within the next 10 years,
you know for most people in the world,
I think you'll be able to give them something
which with connectivity, you know
you have that access of everything in your hands.
And so, I think that's a pretty profound transformation.
And so, you know, broadly that excites us.
And it serves our mission well
and we will do well as a company too, meanwhile
as we go through this.
So a lot of it is, you know, actually viewing
these advances in machine and AI
as an opportunity to bring it in an equal way to everyone.
And I think that's largely what excites me.
- And yeah, it's incredible.
I mean, Google's one of the few organizations in the world
that are in the position to do this.
But on top of kind of all this, I would say,
deep technical work that you all are doing,
education I've heard is a big interest area for you.
Google has several initiatives in education,
some of which we've been interfacing with.
What's your view of Google's role in
education, either globally or in the U.S.?
- I think culturally we have always identified, you know,
pretty deeply with Khan Academy, with education in general.
And so we see this as a big area, where, you know
I think, you know I said our mission kind of, you know,
is complimentary to it and so we wanna play a
role to the extent we can.
We've been fortunate in the sense that, you know,
our products have gotten very popular
in educational institutions all the way from K through 12,
largely with google appls first
and you know we have done other things like classroom
and Chrome Books and so on.
We'll also do, you know, not for profit initiatives
in education as well, so we are investing more.
I think when I think about, you know, I think
education is obviously,
most of you here understand it better than me, but its
complex and you know we just think technology
can play an enabling part.
You know, I was talking with Sal about this a bit,
but when I look at approaching many problems
in the context of Google, we try to do things,
we try to iterate, we see what works, what doesn't work
and then we do these things that way.
That concept is hard to do in education, rightfully so,
because you know, you don't wanna get things wrong.
But I think it's important to
figure out how to innovate more
and in that context, I think technology can play a part.
And so play a part in hopefully helping people,
figure out what, you know, many things to try.
When things work, be able to do more of it, scale it more.
You know, how do you bring educators and children
all in a virtual cycle together
which is what you all are working on.
So for me, when I look at it,
it looks like a complex ecosystem.
So we wanna see where we can enable these things.
So from a standpoint of providing technology.
But a lot of people are interested in Google,
beyond just the products we build
or the technology we provide.
You know Google is so passionate,
they want to volunteer a lot in education.
For Google.org it's one of the important pillars
on which we invest.
So I think that's what makes it
a bigger thing for us.
- Yeah and you know here at Khan Academy,
you know you dabble in it a little bit,
you were just telling me your daughter uses it
through her school sometimes. - Yeah.
- Where do you see ways that we can work together?
How we can support each other's goals?
- It's been interesting to see, which you know,
from the first time I saw Khan Academy
to actually, you know, my daughter,
you know I see her sometimes come when she has homework,
but it's part of like, doing it on Khan Academy.
I would once in a while lean over
and make sure she was not just using YouTube generally.
(crowd laughs)
I would say that's a small thing.
It's pretty amazing to see that you know,
teachers are using it
and it's been great to see.
- So you too are upset when you're children
are hooked on YouTube.
- Sometimes. (crowd laughs)
- It's a sign that something's working.
- Yes (crowd laughs)
No it's amazing, the kind of stuff you learn on YouTube.
I almost miss it because,
they don't come to me with any questions.
So like you know they are, they kind of figure out,
they get their answers from YouTube and leave.
And later I'm like, oh you could have asked me, you know.
(crowd laughs)
Maybe I would have known the answer.
You know, in terms of us working together,
you know I do mean it when I say
we think of our OLS enablers,
you know, we part has been in many ecosystems
and you know, in that way that we approach it,
but I do think that our areas where we care about,
you know when I mention the for everyone part,
I think it's important, we think,
one of the things that attracted me to Google
and that Google Search worked globally, right?
And you know it's kind of like, if you had access
to computing and connectivity, and that's a big if,
but if you had access to computing and connectivity,
it actually really didn't matter
where you were accessing Google from.
You kinda got the same thing.
That equality of access I think is important.
So hopefully, you know, I'm interested in
you know, our last round of efforts,
you know we were excited about your efforts
to localize what you're doing more broadly.
I think that's important to us.
So getting these things to work, even in places like
Brazil, Indonesia, India and like how do you scale it up
I think is something we deeply care about
and feel actually we can play a part in that.
We wanna do that.
You know, the other part is, you know I think
given we are working on things like not just our products,
classroom, you know, connection via feedback
on how we can evolve, what we do better.
You know, better to make all this work more effectively
for teachers and students and for you all.
We are openly trading our products that way.
You were mentioning that you know you guys
are plugging into classroom and stuff.
That's, you know, encouraging for me to hear
and we're also in early days of setting up
teams internally at Google to do other things,
which have nothing to do with our products on education.
So hopefully we can align better
and make some of them more complimentary.
- Yeah and just a, you know,
unfortunately we could talk for hours,
but just kind of a, you know, an ending question,
what advice, you know, you've seen Google grow
from a relatively small stage
to now it's this thing that, you know
actually delivering on it's mission,
and we have a huge mission a free world class
education for anyone, anywhere and we'd like to think
we're already making a dent in that,
but we're serious about delivering.
What advice do you have to us,
you know as a relatively small team,
as we try to go and try to do that
over the next five or ten years.
- You know, you're doing this partly,
but I wouldn't underestimate
you know, the change you do at the tip of the tree,
how fast it can flow down.
You know, I think you've already, you know
the fact that you guys are approaching
a space like education and have shown that you can innovate
in the context of that space,
I think that thing is big thing.
You know, we take it for granted
being in technology companies,
like any time we face a problem,
we think we can break it, we fail by the way a lot,
but at least our attitude is that, you know
you can approach anything, however complex it is,
with an engineering mindset.
You know, you try and understand you know,
what are the various components of it,
how you can iterate and make things better.
It's kind of the default assumption a lot of us have.
But I think it doesn't always translate to, you know,
things like, you know, many, many outside things,
be it education or health care.
You know when I deal with this, you know I realize,
well we take this for granted
and like that's not how it works.
I don't mean it in a negative way.
There are good reasons why those systems are
the way they are and you know,
the cost of a mistake is exceptionally high
in something like health care and so on.
But I think figuring out how to,
you know innovate, you know it just like
I think an imperative
and I think, hopefully, you know
you continue pushing what you guys are doing already
and I think you've changed already the conversation
at least where all your name comes up
and so you know figuring out how to do that,
I think because for every one thing you do,
there is a multiplicative effect of how many other people
get excited by it.
So you know hundred people organization here
effectively over time, you're motivating thousands
and tens of thousands of people to change their approaches
and so on.
I think I've always been, you know,
the leveraged effect on top of a platform
is always very counterintuitive to see.
Like I can give thousands of examples,
but the fact that everybody starts using phones
and phones have GPS and location on them,
you know, you wouldn't assume it would change
transportation one day.
But you kinda then like see, you know,
ride sharing take off and things happen.
Like you know, none of the people who were working on phones
ever had any remote
sense that like people would use phones
and hence because of that how you get car changes, right?
And so anything you do at a platform level
has these nonlinear effects.
You know extraordinarily leveraged ways to change things.
And you know, I had a lot of experience
with this personally.
Early on when we were working on the web,
you know, few people working on browsers
made changes in the platform so that
you can asynchronously, you know,
what is later called as AJAX.
So that for example, if you were doing email,
just because you want to change something in the email
or what you're seeing, you didn't have to
reload the entire page.
And that small change led to things
like Google Maps.
You can drag and look at maps
and you know, how maybe YouTube works
and how literally everything became interactive on the web.
So anytime I think you work at a platform level
I think you end up impacting a lot more
over time than you think.
So I think trying to platformize what you do,
you know, so that others can take it, use it
over time, rethink it, you know
I think is very, very powerful.
So hopefully that's a way you impact
a lot of how education works as well.
- Awesome.
Well thank you so much for visiting
and let's do this again.
- All right, thank you guys.
(audience claps)