MEGAN SMITH: Sergei and Larry are both here.
And I've had the opportunity to work at Google
for almost 10 years.
And sometimes I say that there it's like they went to the
future and came back to tell us about it.
They're amazing people.
And one of my favorite things that they do is not only
creating a platform on which any kind of entrepreneurial
talent can just flourish and work together and think about
the what of what we do, our focus and big picture, and
moonshot thinking and just the product side.
But the other part that is really significant in
innovation is how we work together.
So much attention to details that most
people don't think about.
It might be like our campus, it feels like a university
campus because that's a fun environment to be in.
So many different things about how.
How we treat each other, how we interact and stuff and I've
just great respect for that vision to think about that.
And I just want to thank them and Astro and I have been so
incredibly supported by them to do this kind of work and
all the work that we've been able to do over this time.
ASTRO TELLER: I just, likewise, so many people, so
many companies say that they believe in innovation and they
believe in audaciousness, but saying that is useless.
What it takes is actually supporting people when they're
audacious, when they take risks and
particularly, when they fail.
You guys have both been really extraordinary.
Thank you very much.
MEGAN SMITH: And keeping the courage.
Sergei.
SERGEI BRIN: First, thank you all for coming here.
I always forget after a year how inspiring having such a
collection of people together is.
But being here again, has been very inspiring to me.
I wanted to relay a story about why it's so exciting to
have a group of people with such large ambitions working
on really important problems, and how it doesn't always come
naturally to people to do this.
I think this group is very special.
I think there are many other people out there who can be
inspired by that, and I think refocus a lot of the world's
energy on some of the largest challenges that we face.
But I want to start back, just about nearly 20 years ago now,
when I was just a student, a grad student at Stanford.
Ann, you knew me back then.
I see her in the audience now.
And I've recounted the story only once.
I don't think many people know it, but it relates to the fax
machine and how a single fax kind of allowed Google to be
born-- or the failure of a single fax.
So back after I started at Stanford, early on, obviously,
the web was a big deal.
So it was sort of '93, '94, and it was
exciting for everybody.
And one of the early things my friends and I at Stanford did
was decide, oh, the web is great.
What we really need is to be able to order pizza online
using the web.
And now, that obviously seems, yeah, of
course, you can do that.
No problem.
There are hundreds of websites where you can order food
online and it shows up.
But it was a big deal back then.
It seemed great.
We were grad students.
We were hungry from time to time.
So we sat down.
We wrote a little script to generate a little web server.
It was much easier back then than it is today actually.
You can have like a 20 line Perl script, but these days, a
little bit of a web program is beyond me, I'm afraid.
And what it would do is you would fill out what you wanted
to order, and it would fax that order to the pizza joint.
Because back then, obviously, very few people were online,
like pizza places didn't have email or something like that.
But we found it did have listings for fax machines, and
back then there was the internet fax service.
I can't remember exactly what it was called or how it
worked, but there was this trick with DNS, and you would
route the digits of the number and magically, that fax would
show up there.
So we went ahead with the first test, and we decided we
would order ourselves a pizza.
And we fired up the web server, checked off the boxes
of the toppings.
I'd manually entered the menu before, hit OK.
That fired off the script, sent it to this
internet fax service.
Presumably, that got delivered to the restaurant, and then we
waited and got hungrier and hungrier.
After a couple of hours, I broke down and I called the
pizza place.
I faxed you an order, are you going to deliver it?
And then the guy said, oh, let me go check the fax machine.
And it was then that I realized that this just
wouldn't work, because the restaurants that even had
faxes wouldn't look at them.
And therefore, that idea failed.
And then I went on to work with Larry on data mining, and
then sort of the link structure of the web, and
eventually, Google was born.
But I mean, it's very lucky for me actually.
I mean, back then, it was quite possible that that fax
would have gotten picked up.
And say, this is a great idea, and I would have put a lot of
energy into another way to order a pizza.
And it's kind of the randomness of life, the path
that takes.
But now I've come to recognize that really the challenge of a
problem or the importance isn't that related to how
likely you are to achieve it.
And the fact, even when you go after a more ambitious goal,
even if you fail to achieve that one, all the side effects
that come along the way, can be that much more rewarding
and significant in their own right.
And so I feel lucky that I fell into doing something that
I feel really matters, getting people information around the
world about anything.
I wish there was a way to convey that to
the world at large.
Obviously, all of you already have this religion, but 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 the
passion that one might bring with it brings so much more
energy to that that you're more likely to succeed.
Anyway, I want to leave you with that.
I want to share one other thought, and I think the notes
summarized it nicely.
The other thing that we've really found, over time, at
Google, by watching other companies, watching many of
you, is the importance of the development cycle, and how you
really need to be able to churn quickly through things.
Because obviously, you're going to have failures.
You're going to have the wrong idea, but it's important to
fail quickly.
It was great that that fax didn't go through.
It failed quickly.
And I think that if you demand a really long development
cycle, let's consider that tokamak that
we saw earlier today.
Having decades and tens of billions of dollars is not a
good way to fail quickly.
And hoping to get a lot of learnings along the way, it's
just much less likely to work out.
So as [INAUDIBLE]
said-- and we discussed this--
with Glass, we adopted a philosophy we we're going to
develop a completely new version of the hardware and
software every single month.
And we sustained that, or close to
it, for seven versions.
It's slowed now over time, unfortunately, as we're
approaching something that's going to ship.
But I think that iteration made a huge difference.
And we learned so much with every single variant.
There are a hundred reasons why you
should not go that fast.
It takes a long time to get your tools made.
In fact, the tooling is a big deal.
So I'm glad somebody's working on that.
Engineers don't have enough time to do a proper design.
This gets shortchanged.
That gets shortchanged.
There are a hundred reasons not to go fast.
But in the end, I'm really glad that we did.
And I think I've seen that across a range of products.
And ultimately, it forces you to make real trade-offs about
what actually is really important.
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.
So anyhow, with that, I just want to wish all of you luck
with your various projects.
And it's amazing to see the passion that all of you have.
And I'm really excited to see it flourish and all these
ideas come to reality.
Thank you.