MEGAN SMITH: SO now we're going to start into the
lightning talks, and I have the honor of
introducing Susan Wojcicki.
Susan has been at Google since the start-- she's actually our
first landlord, and I hope she's going to tell you a
little bit about that.
But Susan is our senior vice president of advertising, and
she really runs all the products that make all of the
money that allow us to do all the amazing things that we're
able to do.
She's an extraordinary executive, an extraordinary
visionary, a strategic leader.
One of my favorites-- just a personal story-- my favorite
experiences are--
Susan is always like double and triple booked, and she
adds a lot of value, so we get her everywhere.
And often if you're in a meeting and there's a lot of
people debating ideas, and ideas are flying around, but
you can't really get moving, when Susan walks in the room,
it just changes.
Within five minutes, people are focused on a screen and
kind of narrowing in on where we're going to go.
She just knows how to lead, she knows how to see the
future, and she's an extraordinary leader of Google
and of our industry, and I welcome Susan
Wojcicki to the stage.
SUSAN WOJCICKI: So good evening, everyone.
It's really great to see such a wonderful turnout
for our talk here.
And since this is a developer conference, I thought I would
talk about a few key principles that we use when
we're developing Google products.
And I've been involved for a long time in a lot of
products, so I summarized this down to two.
But before I do that, I'm going to talk a little bit
about my personal story.
And since Megan talked about me being a landlord, I thought
I would start there.
So when people ask the question, well how did you
decide to join Google?
I sometimes have to say, well, my story's kind of unusual,
it's not really like everybody else's story.
Google actually--
I actually lived with the company,
Google, for five months.
And I don't think really anyone else can say that,
except for my husband.
And so what happened was I was renting rooms in my house, and
so, again, Larry had just gotten funded for their
company and they were looking for space, and I was looking
for renters, and we agreed on an amount, and they moved in.
And at first I didn't really think that much about it,
other than they were renters.
But then people would read about it, and then they would
ask me questions.
And I would say, oh yeah, I know them, they're actually
renting in my garage.
And so I started using the products, and you have
remember there were a lot of big competitors out there that
were much, much bigger than this little company of three
people, at the time.
So I started using the product and it was pretty good.
And I had this realization at one moment, because the site
actually went down.
The servers were still running at Stanford, and it was at
that moment that I couldn't reach Google, and that's when
I really realized how important it had become to me
in my life, and I realized the potential for the world, and
that's when I decided I really wanted to join Google and be a
part of that future.
So that's my story, in terms of why I joined Google.
So I joined, and I was there for one day, and Sergey comes
up to me and says, I have a mission for us.
It's to organize the world's information to make it
universally accessible and useful.
What do you think?
I said, well, I was in [INAUDIBLE].
So there are less than 20 of us here.
And you guys all just graduated from college.
So that's a pretty ambitious goal, right there.
But that brings me to my first point which is that do
something important, think big, and have a big goal of
how you can change the world.
And I was really pleased to see that Larry talked about
that this morning in his keynote, where he said that
there's so many things that haven't been done yet, it's
important to focus on the great things that haven't
happened yet.
And that's really a focus that we have in
our development process.
And a lot of times, doing big, ambitious things
sounds really hard.
In fact, they sound crazy, and they sound impossible.
But when you break them down into parts, a lot of times you
can realize they're actually doable.
And doing really hard, crazy things also has the advantage
that it's a lot less competitive, because there are
fewer people who want to do crazy things.
Like you.
So let me give a few stories.
So let me start with Street View.
So we have the beautiful imagery that comes from the
Bright Angel Trail in the Grand Canyon that we have been
working on.
In fact, here in the lobby you can actually see the camera
that has created it, and you can actually try on the
backpack, and walk around and see how we did it.
But when I first heard about Street View, it was just the
idea, which is let's create a way to take pictures of all
the streets in the whole world.
Right?
And I went, OK.
And then, you think about it, and these ideas sound crazy at
first, but then you start thinking, how
would you do that?
And you start thinking, well, you would have cars, and they
would have cameras, or you could have people, and they
would have cameras, and then you start talking, well, what
kind of cameras?
And then you find people who actually really want to do
that, and then you're on your way to making it happen.
So we just launched our 50th country with Street View, and
five million miles of Street View imagery.
So from a very simple idea, we have something that enables
people to see imagery from all over the world.
Which is amazing.
So going on to the next big idea, which we are still
working on, which are driverless cars.
Now, if you think about driverless cars, and you hear
about this idea, it also sounds like this giant idea,
is it really going to get done?
Are we actually going to be able to do this?
And if so, when?
And so, there are many, many benefits.
It's probably the most dangerous thing we all do, but
yet we have to do it, which is drive.
And you think about the benefits of saving lives, and
emissions, and it really could make a
difference in the world.
So my goal is to have the people at Google do this
before my kids start driving.
So I have a personal OKR here.
But it's just an example of a really big idea that doesn't
sound possible that you can make have happen.
So let me move on to the second big principle that we
think about.
Now, when I'm working with teams and they are telling me
they're going to create some new product, or they have some
idea, and they want to staff it, and they want to build it,
I ask them, what is your insight?
Tell me something why you're doing something new, why
you've observed something in the world that's different,
and what's your insight that's going to make this product be
a big success?
And I found that if they can answer that, the product's
usually a success.
And if they can't, then it's often time to go back to the
drawing board.
And I think about the insights as because there's so much
technology, and the world that we live in is changing so
much, if we go around and we look really, really carefully
at how the world's changing, and we see new technology,
sometimes we can see glimpses of how the world will change
in the future.
And if we can see that glimpse, then we can build
around it, and we can plan for it, and we can build those
next generation solutions, we can build that future.
So I'm going to give a few examples, actually, of
insights that have been really important to me and my product
development, and that have guided me.
And again, a lot of times these are just one sentence,
but they're powerful because it's a nugget that you can use
to build your products.
So I was working on Google Video--
and as you can see, we have the YouTube logo here--
and when I was working on Google Video, we were working
with studios who had great content, and we were working
to bring this online.
But at the same time, after we had just gotten it online, and
users are starting to be able to see it, we had this other
video that became very, very popular.
In fact, it became--
the numbers were significantly larger than what we were
seeing from the studio in the studio deal we had done.
And it made me realize the power of
user-generated content.
So do you guys want to see that video?
Yes?
All right, let me show you a few, just 15 seconds of it.
But it was this video that really gave me that insight
and that inspiration.
What I love about that video is that the roommate is doing
his homework in the background the entire
time, and doesn't notice.
But this was an insight.
I realized, wow, this user-generated content, it can
be really, really powerful.
And today we all know that, because that's what the world
has become, user-generated content.
It has its place, it's very valuable.
There's also all kinds of other content that's produced
professionally that's really, really important to the
ecosystem, too.
But it was that video that really gave me the confidence
in thinking that we should acquire YouTube.
And I was a big advocate of it, and
Google spent $1.65 billion.
So sometimes you have one little insight, and from that
little insight, you make a really big decision.
So I want to talk about another insight that's near
and dear to my heart, which is ads.
I'm responsible for Google's ads business.
Now, we created an ad system when Google had not very many
people at the company--
I would say probably like 30 people at the company.
And we didn't really have enough people even to build a
search engine, let alone to try to build an ad system
where nobody knew anything about advertising, nothing.
None of us had ever worked in it.
But we had an insight, and that insight is something that
I still use today when I think about the ad
products that we build.
And the insight's very basic, but it's ads are information.
Now, if you think about ads being information, and you
think about them just being commercial information, then
the ads need to be relevant, and the ads need to be useful,
the ads need to be shown to the right person
at the right time.
Just like we think about that first search result.
And so that meant we had to build our own ad system.
That meant that if you typed in flowers, you had to see ads
about flowers.
That if you typed in the name of any book, all the ads had
to be about the book.
Not just for a bookstore, but for that actual book.
And so that's a principle that we use that caused us to build
an ad system.
And if I think about things today, sometimes I'll get
questions, like when we first went into display, people
would ask me how do you feel about image ads?
How do you feel about video ads?
Do you think an image ad could not be a good ad?
You think about that.
Well, an image is information.
Are images useful to you?
Yes, then an image ad can be useful provided it's served at
the right ad, at the right time, to the right user.
All of it, at the end of the day, is about serving right ad
and making it useful.
So that's an insight that we've used across our ad
business, from beginning till present.
And just going forward, moving really quickly to the present,
if you look at today, and you say, well, what do you see
about today?
What are things that you're focused on?
I would say, we have to be thinking a
lot more about location.
We have all these phones, the phones know where we are, how
do we make all the services that we have
super relevant to us?
So you think about all of you having traveled, probably come
from all different places, and staying in hotels, and looking
for places to eat.
Now, how many of you have actually gotten some kind of
offer related to where you are right now that would
be useful to you?
I'm looking, but I see a few people.
They are the brave souls who--
or the people who have special technology, or
have special insights.
But it's something that doesn't really happen yet, but
there's no reason it shouldn't and couldn't.
We should all be getting useful information based on
where we are right now.
And the reason we haven't, is just because those systems
haven't been built out yet.
This so it's just an example of an insight in the way we
should think about things in the future.
So just to sum up, those are my two insights, that's how we
think about building.
We think about doing things are really important, things
that haven't been done yet, things that will be used by
billions of people, and to think about insights, and what
the future will look like.
Get an insight into that future, and then build for
that future.
And by building for it, that will become the future.
So I'm very excited about the future of technology and how
it's changing our world.
I think there are so many opportunities for us and for
all of you, and I'm looking forward to that future.