Oh hey there
Should I make a joke like "Hey, I'm fake writing"?
No... you guys... I like it ok
Hey it's #1 Best-Selling author and motivational speaker Erik Qualman
Most of you know me as Equalman on today's 7 Super Tip show we have the
founder of Google or one of them Sergey Brin
if you sort of continue that
trajectory you do see more and more people that have been freed up over the
past couple hundred years to do work that is you know more kind of thinking
about things or creating things you know seeking aesthetics whether it is in an
intellectual domain or a purely artistic domain and I would hope to see that
trend continue and I would hope that the world would find you know an opportunity
this was where I think education becomes very important and I think broad
education but as you know some of these jobs are displaced giving people the
opportunity to get educated from the point of view of having actually the
education resources the financial wherewithal to be able to pursue that
like you know you don't want to be you know studying Shakespeare and going
hungry or something like that and and being somewhat open minded giving people
a chance to develop different skills that aren't necessarily you know okay we
have 5,000 needs for this exact kind of thing today because probably the thing
that you want exactly 5,000 of today is the thing that also is more
realistically automatable so I think it's important for people to be able to
have freedom to study financial opportunity to study and and to get
meaning I think in addition to you know work being an important way that you
know we exchanged money and whatnot people find profound meaning in their
day to day jobs
It's very rewarding when you work on
something you think is going to make a big difference and yeah it's a little
bit harder but I think I think the passion that one might bring with it
brings so much more energy to that that you're more likely to succeed
When I became interested in data mining for example Rajeev helped to create a group
that within the computer science department would regularly meet on the
subject of data mining and a lot of great work came out of that I would say
that even though Rajeev was not technically my advisor almost all of the
work that I did and including the work behind Google he played an equally
important role when I shifted because of Google to entrepreneurship and I left
the world of academia I was afraid that I would lose touch with Rajeev but of
course he was there too and in fact Rajiv was longtime advisor to us at
Google and whenever I would meet another entrepreneur in whatever setting it was
pretty likely that Dhiraj Eve had had a role with that person giving them a
critical insight making key connection he was just everywhere all the time I
think that the all the people in this room can attest how wide an impact Rajiv
made both in academia and in industry now mathematicians have their Erdos
number and actors have their bacon number I think here in technology and
Silicon Valley we have our milani number many of the people in this room
including myself are very lucky we have the Milani number of one he directly
inspired us and he directly led us on paths
and because his door was always open as I said before there are probably a
thousand of us with more twenty number one now if we in turn were to inspire
each of us was to inspire another thousand people in the way that Rajeev
inspired us then there would be a million people who have the Mitanni
number two and they in turn can inspire others to a circle of incredible size
like a redwood tree in a forest plants thousands of seedlings that then in turn
they grow to form a Grove around the original tree and they spur even more
trees stove Rajiv's legacy will live forever each of us has a little bit of
achieve milani inside of us it's a parting gift so that we can try to
achieve the standards that he set I plan to use that gift as best as I can every
day I will try to help someone every day I will try to dream up something new
every day I will try to teach someone and every day I will try to enjoy my
life just a little bit more what better day to start than today
There's really no magic secret to it it's not like there's some formula which tells you if
you're going to do this problem than that problems on the other problem
you'll magically achieve success I mean i comes down to some preference some
intuition and mostly truthfully comes down to luck but but if you never try
you know you will not succeed and by trying in areas that you think might be
fruitful then eventually you are likely to end up with a success
First of all I'm very lucky to have been in Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley is
very lucky to have been able to benefit from you know the semiconductor boom and
then software and now Internet and mobile I mean I think it's there's a
huge amount of luck there but the luck also comes from taking many shots you
know so many failures you know if I told you all the dumb things that I did you
know we'd have to have much longer session and and the success is you know
they often are chance I mean I mentioned the Google brain work that they were
just off in the corner is like okay fine just you know do your thing
are you know verily which is our subsidiary that does a wide range of
healthcare innovation now I really started with this glucose sensing
contact lens project and that was another one where I said well Baba can
Brian noticed we were working on it you know and they wanted to put a
computer in a contact lens and I was like you know what that sounds crazy but
you know you go do your crazy thing you know you can only have a couple people
who are con it and not gonna give you a lot of resources but you know sure if
you put a computer in contact lens good for you and yet here they are you know a
few years later and they're you know running you know they're doing serious
studies now they have a big partnership one of artists and Alcon and they are
you know hopefully going to bring those to market alongside with a bunch of
other projects that that has spawned and I didn't know anything about that and I
never would have predicted or guessed that I think we're just lucky to have
the environment that tolerates you know making lots of risky bets and tolerating
the failures that inevitably result
The other thing that we've really found over time at Google watching it other
companies watching many of you is the importance of the development cycle and
how you really need to be able to turn quickly through things and because you
know obviously you're going to have failures you're going to have the wrong
idea but it's important to fail quickly you know it was great that that fax
didn't go through it failed quickly and I think that when you if you demand a
really long development cycle like let's consider that tokamak that we saw
earlier today you know having decades and tens of billions of dollars is not a
good way to fail quickly I mean it's and you know hoping to get a
lot of learnings along the way it's just much less likely to work out
so as my notes said and we discussed this so with with glass we adopted this
philosophy we were going to develop a completely new version of the hardware
and software every single month and we sustained that or close to it for like
seven versions it slowed now over time is unfortunately as we're approaching
something though that's going to ship but I think that iteration made a huge
difference and we learned so much with every single variant and it's just there
are a hundred reasons why you should not go that fast you know takes a long time
to get your tools made and in fact the tooling is a big deal so I'm glad
somebody's working on that you know Engineers don't have enough time to do a
proper design you know this gets shortchanged that gets changed I mean
there are there are a hundred reasons not to go fast but in the end I'm really
glad that we did and and I think I've seen that across the range of products
and ultimately forces you to make real trade-offs about what actually is really
important you know and things that you might have held very dear say well maybe
that's not really the key thing and maybe what we can get in this next
month is the really important essence of this thing we're trying to create
I think there if there were a couple areas that were critical and you know we that
would be too vulnerable spot to be in a way I mean there are many many
opportunities to broadly use technology to impact the world and to have a
successful business and we try to invest in in at least in the places where we
see good fit to our company but that could be many many bets and only a few
of them need to pay off I guess my perspective running Google
acts that's you know kind of my job is to to invest in a number of
opportunities each one of which may be a big bet but I hope well I guess you have
a portfolio too but I hope across that portfolio some of them pay off and some
of them are connected to our existing business and some not so much if you
look at the self-driving cars for example I hope that that could really
transform transportation around the world and reduce the need for individual
car ownership the need for parking road congestion so forth so you know if that
was successful and sewn right that'd be super happy it's obviously still a big
bet it's got many technical and policy risks but if you are willing to make a
number of bets like that you got to hope that's on the more payoff
Those are 7 SuperTtips from Google co-founder Sergey Brin my hope is they help unlock
and unleash your inner superpower fun facts about Sergey Brin he was born in
Moscow but he attended fellow Big Ten-er he attended the University of Maryland
in College Park
Motion creates emotion which creates energy... momentum tends to stay
Can I just pick it up there?