Larry Page (Google)

Chronicle: What technology do you use at work?

Page: I have a weird setup in my office. I have one computer with three monitors: one flat-screen monitor and two regular ones. I have my browser on one screen, my schedule on another and my e-mail on another. I can drag things to different screens. I also have a projector. So if I'm talking with everyone in my office, I can move stuff onto a big screen.

Chronicle: What technology do you like the best?

Page: The thing I'm most fond of is Lego Mindstorms. They're little Lego kits that have a computer built in. They're like robots with sensors. I've been doing some classified things with them.

Chronicle: What was your first computer?

Page: My dad was a computer science professor, so we had computers really early. The first computer we owned as a family was in 1978, the Exidy Sorcerer. It was popular in Europe but never in the U.S. It had 32K memory. My brother had to write the operating system.

Chronicle: What technology do you use at home?

Page: I use TiVo (the stop motion television system). I would refuse to have a TV until I had TiVo integrated with satellite. Basically, it allows you to watch the shows you are interested in. I record the high-tech shows and I launch Internet searches, so I look up Google. It also recommends programs to watch based on what you watch in the past. I like this show called "Junkyard Wars" where they have people compete. One day they have to build something from a junkyard like a vehicle that they have to drive around a course.

Fear is normal; Aim to try lots of things
You know it seems sort of obvious now that we should've done it, but at the time we were really scared and we were grad students like many of you students, and we were enjoying getting our PhDs, and we haven't quite finished yet as a result, although Stanford recently gave us a reinstatement form when we gave a speech there. But at the time we were really scared, like "oh we're not going to get our degrees, we're going to start this company, it'll be kind of lame, and our parents were all upset, and there are all sorts of issues, and so one of the things i'd been through as a student was some leadership training, and one of the things they had taught us was to not be afraid of failure, and instead to have the goal to fail a lot quickly, and then eventually you'll succeed, and I sort of took this to heart and they also had a slogan called "healthy disregard for the impossible" and they actually made you write down the sorts of things you would do that were kind of impossible but you thought you might really accomplish, and that really stuck with me with everything I've tried to do, and I think that it's very close that we wouldn't have started the company, and I think there are many of you in sort of similar situations, do you want to take a little bit more risk, do you want to try something out, and even if you don't succeed, and we actually tried many things that didn't work. Google happened to work pretty well, and there were many things that didn't but we don't worry about those, because we tried many things, so I would encourage you to take a little more risk in life, and I think if you do it often enough it'll really pay off.

Look for leverage
I wanted to make another point. I think leverage is really, really important. One of the things I was really lucky with was that my dad was a computer science professor, and we had a computer when I was really young, and somehow I sort of realized that you know, "oh the computer can do a lot of things, and i'm kind of lazy, and having the computer do things is good", and that really gives you leverage, and it was amazing when we started the company, even when we had about 3 employees we had several million people that used the search engine. And we accidentally published our phone number at some point on the website, and people started calling us, and we couldn't do our business because the phone just kept ringing, and we had to take down the phone number, but the computers were actually able to answer all those people. And I think for all of you there are many areas where there's leverage available in the world, where one or two people with a good idea and a lot of hard work can really make a difference, there's many many things like that, and it's good not to forget that, but it's good to look for those things.

Larry Page lives by the gospel of 10x. Most companies would be happy to improve a product by 10 percent. Not the CEO and cofounder of Google. The way Page sees it, a 10 percent improvement means that you’re basically doing the same thing as everybody else. You probably won’t fail spectacularly, but you are guaranteed not to succeed wildly.

That’s why Page expects his employees to create products and services that are 10 times better than the competition. That means he isn’t satisfied with discovering a couple of hidden efficiencies or tweaking code to achieve modest gains. Thousand-percent improvement requires rethinking problems entirely, exploring the edges of what’s technically possible, and having a lot more fun in the process.
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Wired: But you have to gradually improve your existing products too, right?

Page: Of course. But periodically, every n years, you should work on something new that you think is really amazing. The trick is coming up with those products. I could probably give you a list of 10 major things that are wrong with email. I try to maintain lists like that in my head.
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Wired: Now you have a separate division called Google X, dedicated to moon-shot projects like self-driving cars. Why did you decide you needed to set up an entire department for this?

Page: I think we need to be doing breakthrough, non-incremental things across our whole business. But right now Google X does things that can be done more independently.

You know, we always have these debates: We have all this money, we have all these people, why aren’t we doing more stuff? You may say that Apple only does a very, very small number of things, and that’s working pretty well for them. But I find that unsatisfying. I feel like there are all these opportunities in the world to use technology to make people’s lives better. At Google we’re attacking maybe 0.1 percent of that space. And all the tech companies combined are only at like 1 percent. That means there’s 99 percent virgin territory. Investors always worry, “Oh, you guys are going to spend too much money on these crazy things.” But those are now the things they’re most excited about—YouTube, Chrome, Android. If you’re not doing some things that are crazy, then you’re doing the wrong things.

“There are all these opportunities to make people’s lives better. Tech companies are attacking 1 percent of them. That leaves 99 percent virgin territory.”

Wired: On the other hand, as the canard goes, the pioneers take the most arrows. Look at the experience of Xerox PARC, where fantastic innovations didn’t seem to help the corporation itself.

Page: PARC had a tremendous research organization and they invented many of the tools of modern computing. But they weren’t focused on commercialization. You need both. Take one company I admire, Tesla. They’ve not only made a really innovative car, but they’re probably spending 99 percent of their effort figuring out how to actually get it out to people. When I was growing up, I wanted to be an inventor. Then I realized that there’s a lot of sad stories about inventors like Nikola Tesla, amazing people who didn’t have much impact, because they never turned their inventions into businesses.

Wired: Why don’t we see more people with that kind of ambition?

Page: It’s not easy coming up with moon shots. And we’re not teaching people how to identify those difficult projects. Where would I go to school to learn what kind of technological programs I should work on? You’d probably need a pretty broad technical education and some knowledge about organization and entrepreneurship. There’s no degree for that. Our system trains people in specialized ways, but not to pick the right projects to make a broad technological impact. [Nathan: This is EXACTLY what I've been spending my time doing, and I've noticed that you wouldn't get that kind of knowledge with a traditional degree!]

Wired: I know that you and Google cofounder Sergey Brin have been thinking about some of these challenges for a long time. In an interview I did with you both back in 2002, you virtually wrote me out the specs to Google Glass.

Page: Why didn’t we do it then? We’d have had a lot more time to get it done! It’s like autonomous cars. I wanted to do them when I was at Stanford. That was over 14 years ago. The only thing that changed was we got the guts to actually do it.

Wired: Google X’s moon shots aside, what’s taking your time at Google?

Page: A great deal of my effort is spent making sure that we have a great user experience across our core products. Whether you’re in Chrome or Search or Gmail, it’s just Google, with one consistent look and feel. It’s not a good user experience if there are 50 different ways to share something. That requires integration.
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Wired: But have you done a good enough job explaining your intentions? Take Book Search. Providing a way to search through the world’s books seemed to you to be an unalloyed good. But you ran into a backlash and chronic litigation.

Page: It’s certainly not pleasant. But show me a company that failed because of litigation. I just don’t see it. Companies fail because they do the wrong things or they aren’t ambitious, not because of litigation or competition.
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Wired: Did you envision that kind of success when you bought Andy Rubin’s small company in 2005?

Page: We have a good ability to see what’s possible and not be impeded by the status quo. At the time we bought Android, it was pretty obvious that the existing mobile operating systems were terrible. You couldn’t write software for them. Compare that to what we have now. So I don’t think that betting on Android was that big a stretch. You just had to have the conviction to make a long-term investment and to believe that things could be a lot better.
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Wired: How do you maintain the Google culture—including the mandate to think big—within such a huge company?

Page: We’re a medium-size company in terms of employee count. We have tens of thousands of employees. There are organizations out there that have millions of employees. That’s a factor of a hundred, basically. So imagine what we could do if we had a hundred times as many employees.

Wired: You hold a weekly TGIF meeting, where any employee can ask you or other top executives a question, either in person or electronically. How can you keep that kind of intimacy as you grow?

Page: Anything is scalable. We do need to be more cognizant of time zones, because we’ve got a lot of people in different places. Short of building a giant space mirror that causes the whole Earth to light up at the same time, there’s not much we can do about that. So we’re moving that TGIF meeting to Thursday, so that people in Asia can get it during their work week. That process still works pretty well at our size, and I’m sure it will work fine up to a million people as well.

Q: [Basically, "what single quality do you most attribute your success to?"]

A: You know, I think the most important thing--You know, I looked at lots of companies, and why I thought they...don't succeed over time. We've had a more rapid turnover of companies. And I said, "What did they fundamentally do wrong? What did those companies all do wrong?", and they usually--it's just they miss the future. And so I think, for me, I just try to focus on that and say, "What is that future really going to be and how do we create it? And how do we cause our organization, to really focus on that and drive that at a really high rate?" And so that's been curiosity, it's been looking at things people might not think about, working on things that no one else is working on--because that's where the additionality really is--and be willing to do that, to take that risk. Look at Android. I felt guilty about working on Android when it was starting. It was a little startup we bought. It wasn't really what we were really working on. And I felt guilty about spending time on that. That was stupid. That was the future, right? That was a good thing to be working on.

Page estimates that only about 50 investors are chasing the real breakthrough technologies that have the potential to make a material difference to the lives of most people on earth. If there is something holding these big ideas back, it is not a shortage of money or even the barrier of insurmountable technical hurdles. When breakthroughs of the type he has in mind are pursued, it is “not really being driven by any fundamental technical advance. It’s just being driven by people working on it and being ambitious,” he says. Not enough institutions – particularly governments – are thinking expansively enough about these issues: “We’re probably underinvested as a world in that.”
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“A really smart group of committed people with $50m can make a lot of progress on some of these problems. But not enough of that’s happening,” he says.
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Rapid improvements in artificial intelligence, for instance, will make computers and robots adept at most jobs. Given the chance to give up work, nine out of 10 people “wouldn’t want to be doing what they’re doing today”.
What of people who might regret losing their work? Once jobs have been rendered obsolete by technology, there is no point wasting time hankering after them, says Page. “The idea that everyone should slavishly work so they do something inefficiently so they keep their job – that just doesn’t make any sense to me. That can’t be the right answer.”
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New technologies will make businesses not 10 per cent, but 10 times more efficient, he says. Provided that flows through into lower prices: “I think the things you want to live a comfortable life could get much, much, much cheaper.”
Collapsing house prices could be another part of this equation. Even more than technology, he puts this down to policy changes needed to make land more readily available for construction. Rather than exceeding $1m, there’s no reason why the median home in Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley, shouldn’t cost $50,000, he says.
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When it comes to discussing policy, Page, like many technocrats, quickly sounds frustrated by the intractability of issues that are not susceptible to the kind of rigour he brings to his technological inquiries. “I do think there’s a tremendous amount of angst about these things and we’ve got to turn it round,” he says, though he has few concrete ideas about how to do that. “As a society, it’s very difficult to do something differently, and I don’t think that’s good." "Some of the most fundamental questions which people are not thinking about, there’s the question of how do we organise people, how do we motivate people,” he says. “It’s a really interesting problem, how do we organise our democracies?"
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Page relates a frequent debate that he says he had with Steve Jobs, the boss of Apple, who died three years ago: “He would always tell me, You’re doing too much stuff. I’d be like, You’re not doing enough stuff.”
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“The biggest companies are all within an order of magnitude of the same size, certainly in market cap,” says Page, who has a palpable sense of the limits against which his company is already pushing. “You say we’re going to take over all these important things, but there’s no example of a company doing that.”
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There is no model for the kind of company Google wants to become, says Page. But if there’s a single person who represents many of the qualities he thinks will be needed for the task ahead, then it’s famed investor Warren Buffett. Sounding not at all like the idealistic young technologist who once spoke of brain implants that would answer questions by the power of thought, he says: “One thing we’re doing is providing long-term, patient capital.”