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Sergey mentioned how he didn't have too many friends when he was at Stanford and liked athletic classes the most.
Lesson: focus on your work, unless hanging out with your friends is entertaining enough to be worth the future income/happiness you may be giving up.
The Story of Sergey Brin (excerpt from The Google Story)
http://www.momentmag.com/Exclusive/2007 ... ature.html
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1995 - Sergey Brin's Stanford Webpage
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/
- he was using Python to create a movie-recommendation program like Netflix
2003.12.20 - UMD - Sergey Brin Commencement Speech
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20oV_pwSJVM
2:28 - In '96 the first name of Google was "BackRub". In '98 they renamed(?) it to Google.
- Sergey is really funny. He spends a few minutes joking about other speeches people have given (he quotes one from George W., one from Hillary). He then spends a few minutes talking about the possibilities of the future. He seems to very clearly allude to being able to do Google searches from some kind of hand-held device, although it's not clear he sees that it will be in the form of a smartphone.
2008 Interview with Sergey Brin (Israeli Media)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIx5F0vbjB4
- he comes off as very guarded, esp. about his Jewishness
- I don't remember hearing much of interest
- he blatantly dodges a question about the amount of information Google can collect about an individual
2009.05 TechCrunch interview with Sergey
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=fv ... 3EtNkXBluc
- this video's nice b/c you get to see what Sergey's like when he doesn't have his guard up.
2013.02 Sergey Brin @ Solve For X
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyKoq-ihao0
2:35 - he tells a story of how, when he was at Stanford around '92-'93, he put effort into trying to figure out how to order pizza through the internet by having web forms send faxes to pizza places, but the experiment failed because restaurants wouldn't check their fax machines. He says that if the idea HAD worked then he may not have gone on to work on the Google idea.
6:10 - he makes a very important point, which is that the difficulty of solving a problem isn't necessarily directly proportional to the impact that solving that problem will have on the world. In other words, solving a really important problem for the world (Google) may not be much harder than solving a minor problem (ordering pizza through the internet).
...I've come to recognize that the challenge of a problem or the importance isn't that related to how likely you are to achieve it.[...] [Going after an ambitious goal] is a little bit harder, but you bring so much passion that you're more likely to succeed. [Larry Page has said the same thing in a speech given to the Academy of Achievement]
- 7:30 - he says that it's important to be able to tell quickly if an idea is going to work or not. it's important to fail QUICKLY if you're going to fail. He gives the example of a tokamak(sp?), which required "decades and tens of billions of dollars" but ultimately failed, as an example of what you don't want to do.
- he says that he tried to completely redo the google glass every month, and that iteration made a huge difference.
- he says that there are always going to seem to be a hundred reasons to NOT move fast and iterate, but it's still often worth it.