Larry Page and Sergey Brin interview on Starting Google (2000)

at Google our mission is to make the world's information accessible and useful and that means all the world's information which now in our index numbers over a billion documents and it's an incredible resource I mean in history you have never had access to just you know pretty much all the world's information in seconds and we have that now and to make it really useful you have to have a good way of finding whatever it is that you want and that that's precisely what we work on at Google and my my hope is to provide instant access to any information anybody ever wants in future certainly and anyone can say oh I want to build you know a car that's gonna cost $5 and go 500 miles an hour no that would be great I was fortunate to be at Stanford and I was really interested in data mining which means analyzing large amounts of data discovering patterns and trends and at the same time Larry joined Stanford in 95 and he started downloading the web which is it turns out to be the most interesting data you can possibly mine and our joint effort just looking at the data out of out of curiosity we found that we had technology to do a better job of search and from that initial technology we got really interested in the problem and we realized how impactful having great search can be and so we built technology upon technology after that to bring Google to where it is today and we continue to develop lots of technology for tomorrow well it's actually a great argument for research because we didn't start out to do a search engine at all in late 1995 I started collecting the links on the web because my advisor and I decided that would be a good thing to do and we didn't know exactly what I was going to do with it but it seemed like no one was really looking at the links on the web you know which pages link to which pages in computer scientists a lot of big graphs and this is like you know right now has like 5 billion edges and you know 2 billion notes so it's a it's a huge graph and I figured I could get a dissertation and do something fun and perhaps practical at the same time which is really what motivates me and so anyway I started off by reversing the links and then I wanted to find you know basically say you know who links to the Stanford homepage and there's 10,000 people who linked to Stanford and then the question is which ones do you shell so you can only show ten you know and we ended up with this way of ranking links based on the links and then we were like wow this is really good you know it ranks things like you know in the order you'd expect to see them you know the Stanford would be first you can take universities and just rank them and they come out in the order you'd expect and so we thought this is really interesting you know this thing really works we should use it for search so I started building a search engine and Sergey also came on very early I'm probably a nightly 95 or early 96 and start was really interested in the data mining part and you know basically we thought oh we should be able to make a better search engine this way search engines didn't really understand notion of you know which pages were more important if you type Stanford you get sort of random pages that mentioned Stanford this obviously wasn't going to work it obviously wasn't going to scale artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google so we had the ultimate search engine it would understand everything on the web it would understand you know exactly what you wanted and it will give you the right thing and that's obviously artificial intelligence you know be able to answer any question basically because almost everything is on the web right and so we're nowhere near doing that now however we can get incrementally closer to that and that's basically what we work on and that's tremendously interesting from an intellectual standpoint right you know we have all this data if you print it out our index that would be 70 miles high now we have all this computation we have about 6,000 computers so we have a lot of resources available that we have enough to space store like 100 copies of the whole web so you have really interesting sort of confluence of a lot of different things right a lot of computation a lot of data that didn't used to be available and you know from an engineering scientific standpoint building things to you know make use of this is really interesting intellectual exercise so I expected to be doing that for a while I think and I do have a lot of other interests as well I'm really interested in transportation and and sustainable energy and you know sort of for fun I invent things on the side but I don't really have time to follow up on them I think the age is a real issue I mean it's it's certainly a handicap in the sense of being able to manage people entire people and all these kinds of things maybe you know more so than it should be and certainly I think I mean the things that you know I'm missing are you know more things that you acquire at a time like you know if you manage people for 20 years or something like that you know you pick up things so certainly lack experience there and that's an issue but I sort of make up for that I think in terms of understanding where things are going to go having vision about the future and really understanding you know the industry I'm in and what the company does and also sort of a unique position of starting a company and working on it for three years before starting the company and then working on it pretty hard so you know whatever 24 hours a day and so I understand a lot of the aspects pretty well so it's kind of a I guess that provides that compensates a little bit for lack of skills in other areas one is on playing a service that's going to serve millions of people when we were at Stanford we had you know ten thousand people using our service or about ten thousand searches per day I should say and now we serve over 50 million searches per day and that's scaling of infrastructure that that's pretty challenging on a more personal level I think I'm now the president of Google and we have about 170 people now and I think managing managing people and being emotionally sensitive and all the skills you learn in terms of communication and keeping people motivated I think you know that's been a challenge and I've enjoyed learning that but that's that's an important and a hard thing to learn I think I was really lucky to have an environment when I was growing up my dad was a professor happened to be a professor of computer science and you know we had computers sort of lying around the house from a really early age like I think I was the first kid in my elementary school to turn in a word processed document so um and I just enjoyed using the stuff so it was sort of lying around and got to play with it and an older brother who was interested in as well so I think I had kind of a unique environment that most people didn't have because you know my dad was going spend you know all has available income I'm buying computer or whatever really is like 1978 when I was six and so I don't think there's many people my age I've had that experience for anyone in general and from very early age also I realized I wanted to invent things and so I became really interested in technology and also then soon after in business because I figured that inventing things wasn't any good you really had to get them out into the world and have people use them right to have any effect so probably from when I was 12 I knew I was gonna start a company eventually I just sort of kept having ideas I mean there's a lot of we had a lot of magazines lying around our house is kind of messy so you kind of read stuff all the time and you know I'd read like popular science or I know things like that and I just got interested in in stuff I guess and in technology and how devices work and I my brother taught me how to take things apart and I took apart everything in the house and so I just became interested in for whatever reason and so I had lots of ideas about you know what what things could be built and you know how to build them and all these kinds of things I'd like an electric go-kart at a pretty early age so every but all the computer magazines and things like that and I was sort of interested in you know how these things really work and anything having to do with you know the mechanics behind things you know the use of mechanics with electronics or you know I wanted to build to build things actually in college I built a inkjet printer out of Legos because I wanted to be able to print really big images I figured you know you could print really big posters really cheaply using ink cartridges so I reverse engineered the cartridge and I built all the electronics and mechanics to drive it and just sort of I mean just sort of fun projects I like to be able to do those kinds of things I certainly like to think I'm young but these days by Silicon Valley standards I'm getting to be over the hill and if you look at Napster for example the founders like 20 but anyway I I was really interested in computers ever since I got one when I was in elementary school and eventually I went on to to join the ph.d program computer science at Stanford and those purely you know the interest of what can you do with all the world's information now that it's online that interest spawned Google and that was together with Larry Page who's my co-founder and partner I think as a kid I was I always had kind of scientific curiosity I was always interested in mathematics and I was I always enjoyed doing math problems and in fact my undergrad I had a degree in both math and computer science and I think eventually I was really inspired by computers because of the amazing power that they they give you I mean today's pcs do a billion operations per second I mean it's almost inconceivable and I think that was the most inspiring thing to me how you could leverage that to actually produce something that was you know that was useful beyond videogames and things like that I remember in middle school a friend of mine a very good friend who still in touch with he had my Macintosh one of the early ones and together he and I would just sit and play around and program we had little programs for artificial intelligence we'd have you know program talk back to you we had we wrote a program to simulate gravity I remember we rolled program to do what's called OCR now optical character recognition and it was just for fun and purely out of intellectual curiosity and I think that's probably the first time that I really experienced that I remember really enjoying fineman's books he had several kind of autobiographical books and I read them and it's just um it seemed like a very great life he led he was pretty aside from making really big contributions in his own field he's pretty broad-minded I remember he had a an excerpt where he was explaining how he really wanted to be a Michelangelo which is you know artist and scientist so I found that pretty inspiring and I think that least having a fulfilling life I'm beyond that just within the computer field there certainly kind of a lot of the classical books which you know I still find impressive like Snow Crash by Neal Steffensen that you know that really ten years ahead of the time kind of anticipated what's going to happen and I find that been really interesting as a child I I was you know I had to accent I came to the u.s. at the age of six and saw his teeth and stuff in elementary school and I don't think I was I don't regard myself as you know being really popular going through school but I that was never that important to me and I always had friends I think if anything I've I know I feel like I've gotten a gift by being in the States rather than going up in Russia and I know the hard times that my parents went through there and I'm very thankful that that I was brought to the States and I think it just makes me appreciate my life much more I think it definitely helps when I mean just to be really focused on what you're doing you can only maintain I mean you can only work so many hours and you know try to have some balance in my life and so on I think I mean I think a lot of people go through this in school you know they work really hard you sort of you can do that part of your life but you know you can't do that indefinitely you know you put some point you want to have a family you want to have more time to do other things so it's also I mean I'd say that's an advantage to is being young you know you don't have as many other responsibilities as well I think I'm really lucky being in the Bay Area you know there's a lot of people a lot of my friends have started companies that have been quite successful or at different stages and so you know I'll go up to San Francisco and I'll hang outs with my friends and we'll talk about their company or you know all sorts of different things and it's fun but it's also it's also work in some sense right so I think in the valley in Silicon Valley there's a mix you know things there's really a mix of recreation and work a lot of times I don't know it's kind of strange for me I went back to Michigan and I gots like you know there's like you know all these faculty wanted to meet with me and it was just very strange you know going from a student to that I think we're really cool especially we're really lucky that everybody's our product basically we're starting to be everybody and so it's just you know no matter of sort of who you talk to they're like all these great Google today it was great you know I found exactly what I needed and you know people are just um somehow they've done a really good job people are really happy with our company we've provide a pretty good service and so that sort of transfers on to how people interact with me as well which is really nice I think in terms of being remembered the I think I want to make the world a better place I mean I think that's pretty generic answer but in several ways one is through Google the company and in terms of giving people access to information and you know I'm sure I'll do other endeavors to in terms of technologies and businesses I think the second is just through philanthropy and I want to make sure that that I while I don't have actually a significant amount of wealth beyond that on paper right now I hope that I do have the opportunity to direct resources to the right places and I think that's the most important thing to me I don't think my personal life my quality of life is really going to improve that much more with more money there's a lot of interesting systems people have designed that basically you know a really small amount of rails that run along sidewalks and they route you exactly where you want to go and some of these things are actually quite practical so as side interests have kind of followed this stuff actually when I was in Michigan I tried to get them to build a monorail between central and North Campus because only a two mile trip and they have you know like 40 full-size diesel buses that run back and forth this two miles so it's like sort of a prime candidate for transportation I think Stanford's early I mean there's really really smart people around and it's really it's really a fun place to be and actually some people some people like from other startups have gone back once things sort of calm down so it does happen I think for me there's things I want to work on that are very speculative and Stanford is a great place to do things like that you know like ice didn't start out building a search engine right I just said oh the links on the web are probably interesting you know I know we tried doing something with that and you know was pretty lucky that that was a useful thing to do so I think if you're doing something you're not sure is going to work at all you know a company probably isn't the right place to be doing it and you know having you know incredibly bright people around to work with is a really nice thing so I could see going back for that purpose

Channel: Manufacturing Intellect

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Length: 18min 46sec (1126 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 27 2017