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Eric Schmidt (Google)
- Nathan Wailes
1997.07.03 interview with charlie rose (while CEO of Novell)
- it's interesting seeing the difference in the way he acts in this video and in his later Google years; in the later interviews he's much more reserved.
- starting at around 4:30 they're discussing the next 10 years of the internet; pretty interesting
- at around 6:00 schmidt uses an anecdote to show how important recognition / status is to people and how the internet can offer it.
2005 - CNN Money - The 70 Percent Solution (interview with Schmidt)
The other one is a formula he uses to stay on track while innovating: Spend 70 percent of your time on the core business, 20 percent on related projects, and 10 percent on unrelated new businesses. Business 2.0 talked to Schmidt to find out how he and his colleagues live by those rules.
Does Google have some kind of grand strategic plan for the new products it creates? Virtually everything new seems to come from the 20 percent of their time engineers here are expected to spend on side projects. They certainly don't come out of the management team.
But you decide which arrows you put the wood behind, so to speak. Right? Yes, but we do that once there's sufficient critical mass, which is if there's a small set of engineers and a product manager who are excited about something.
What do you do with your 20 percent time? Well, 20 percent time applies to the technical staff. It does not apply to sales or management. Here's how it works for management: We spend 70 percent of our time on core search and ads. We spend 20 percent on adjacent businesses, ones related to the core businesses in some interesting way. Examples of that would be Google News, Google Earth, and Google Local. And then 10 percent of our time should be on things that are truly new. An example there would be the Wi-Fi initiative--which I haven't kept up with myself. God knows what they've done in the last week. I've been too busy on core search and ads.
How do you enforce that 70/20/10 rule? For a while we put the projects in different rooms.That way, if we were in one room too long, we knew we were not spending our time correctly. It was sort of a stupid device, but it worked quite well. Now we have people who actually manage this, so I know how I spend my time, and I do spend it 70/20/10.
Larry and Sergey are now operating under 70/20/10 too. They might spend their 70 percent time differently. Sergey, for example, has been looking at new ways of doing search quality, a new math around that. Larry has been pushing for some very new ad models. That would count in the 70 percent.
2010.09.24 interview with charlie rose
- at the beginning he states google's main goal as using computers to help humans at the things they're not very good at, and using humans to help computers at the things computers are not very good at: "augmented humanity"
- at around 7:30 he invokes moore's law when discussing smartphones, which suggests he thinks moore's law is still in effect
- at around 9:00 he says the biggest current development in search is the shift from "syntax" to "semantics", which basically just means that search companies will begin to try to understand what you're really asking when you do a search rather than just searching for a bunch of words. he talks about having a personal assistant or "buddy", which is exactly what i have said i would want.
- agh, at 14:15 eric seemed about to say something really interesting about what people would do with google TV when charlie interrupted him.
- ~22:50 he says Microsoft and others were funding think tanks to spread bad information in order to stir up trouble for Google in Washington (with the justice dept)
- ~23:50 he says a key way to avoid being charged with anticompetitive behavior is to give users the option to take all of their data somewhere else.
- ~26:20 - he's optimistic about growth in the US economy; he thinks the deleveraging takes "5 to 7" years (starting when?) but that once we're through that problem things are going to be great. i'm inclined to agree but idk how long it's going to take to get through it.
2010.10.15 - Eric Schmidt at MIT Media Lab
2011.11.09 short clip from charlie rose's "green room"
- discusses career advice: basically, get out there and meet people because serendipity won't happen if you're sitting in your room.
- mentions having just finished reading "The Icarus Syndrome"
2014.10.07 - Medium - China, the Troika, and Don’t Be Evil (Interview with Schmidt)
2014.11.09 - NYT - Review of 'How Google Works' by author of The Everything Store (re: Amazon)
- I checked out the book while at the Stanford bookstore and I came to the same conclusion. It looks like it was almost entirely ghostwritten with a heavy reliance on existing public information. It would have been more interesting if the ghostwriter had just interviewed Schmidt on the different topics covered and had published those interviews.
- Nevertheless there seemed to be some useful information in there.