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Questions for Larry & Sergey:
Larry: Can you talk more about building the electric go-kart? How did you transition to a project like that? Did you get any help?
What were the 4 or 5 key decisions that Larry Page and Sergey Brin made in the early days of Google?
http://www.quora.com/Google/What-were-t ... -of-Google
1999 - Stern Magazine - Google's first appearance in the media (ages ~26-27)
http://www.kalemm.com/words/googles-first-steps/
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2000.10 - Larry Page and Sergey Brin interview with the Academy of Achievement [the Academy really did a brilliant job with this interview] (age 28)
http://achievement.org/autodoc/page/pag0int-1
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2014.07 - Larry Page and Sergey Brin with Vinod Khosla
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wdnp_7atZ0M
- This is an awesome, awesome talk. Larry & Sergey seem totally at ease and seem to be talking off-the-cuff.
- First 5 mins are a very interesting discussion of how Google almost got acquired in '97. Larry & Sergey wanted ~$1 million, but the search companies didn't want to pay that much money. I think the search companies counter-offered $350k. Larry says the main reason the deal didn't go through is because the companies clearly weren't interested in the technology, and so Larry couldn't see himself working at those companies.
6:09 - Larry: Most companies, I do think their leaders are pretty short-term focused. You know, I've given people the question, "Imagine you're running Exxon; what do you do? Say you want to do something good, with what's the most-valuable company on Earth, a lot of people think it's probably not doing good things, worried about the environment and so on." [He goes on to say that the problem is that the CEOs of these companies are only there for about 4 years, so it's hard for them to solve big problems. It's easier to solve a big problem in 20 years, but the CEOs don't have the power to stick around that long.]
7:28 - They're asked what they think are the biggest problems to be solved in the next 15 years. Sergey responds without giving any specific information, by saying that they have a lot of different bets, and they don't need all of them to pay off. He mentions the self-driving car as an example.
Sergey is then asked the same question and he sort of dodges it as well.
10:41 - Larry suggests that the future of search may not be to search for the question at all, but to just have it answered at the appropriate time. That was the original idea of the "I'm feeling lucky" button: skip the results and just go straight to the answer. He says that the computers are still pretty bad in terms of the amount of knowledge you get out of them vs. the time you spend on them.
11:50 - Vinod asks a follow-up question which seems to get at what he was trying to get Larry & Sergey to talk about with his last question: AI / Machine-Learning
14:30 - Vinod asks if 50% of human jobs may end up getting replaced by AI. Sergey jokingly responds that they're working on the VC AI (Vinod is a VC), and everyone laughs, but Larry says "It's kind of true, actually. Google Ventures started that way." Sergey says he doesn't actually know what goes on at Google Ventures.
15:20 - Larry points out the fact that 90% of people used to be farmers.
15:50 - Larry says he agrees with the book "Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think"
16:00 - Larry gives some very interesting thoughts on the future: He says he doesn't think it's that hard to meet people's needs, but people need to be given something to do to keep them occupied.
17:00 - Larry talks about how he was talking with Richard Branson about how to solve the employment problem in the UK, and Larry was thinking they could just reduce the workweek. But my q is, would that be unpaid time or paid time? Larry was painting it like it would be paid time off.
19:00 - Vinod alludes to the Oakland protests about Google employees driving up rents, and Larry says that that is a structural problem: the SF governments aren't building more housing, so rents just keep going up.