Larry Page quotes:

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  • My job as a leader is to make sure everybody in the company has great opportunities, and that they feel they're having a meaningful impact and are contributing to the good of society. As a world, we're doing a better job of that. My goal is for Google to lead, not follow that.

  • I have always believed that technology should do the hard work - discovery, organization, communication - so users can do what makes them happiest: living and loving, not messing with annoying computers! That means making our products work together seamlessly.

  • If you ask an economist what's driven economic growth, it's been major advances in things that mattered - the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that.

  • We're at maybe 1% of what is possible. Despite the faster change, we're still moving slow relative to the opportunities we have. I think a lot of that is because of the negativity... Every story I read is Google vs someone else. That's boring. We should be focusing on building the things that don't exist.

  • Especially in technology, we need revolutionary change, not incremental change.

  • Google will fulfill its mission only when its search engine is AI-complete. You guys know what that means? That's artificial intelligence.

  • We can't have democracy if we're having to protect you and our users from the government over stuff we've never had a conversation about. We need to know what the parameters are, what kind of surveillance the government is going to do, and how and why.

  • It really matters whether people are working on generating clean energy or improving transportation or making the Internet work better and all those things. And small groups of people can have a really huge impact.

  • You know what it's like to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream? And you know that if you don't have a pencil and pad by the bed, it will be completely gone by the next morning. Sometimes it's important to wake up and stop dreaming. When a really great dream shows up, grab it.

  • If you're changing the world, you're working on important things. You're excited to get up in the morning.

  • I like going to Burning Man, for example. An environment where people can try new things. I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society. What's the effect on people, without having to deploy it to the whole world.

  • If your access to health care involves your leaving work and driving somewhere and parking and waiting for a long time, that's not going to promote healthiness.

  • I have over 2 million followers now on Google Plus.

  • I have a simple algorithm, which is, wherever you see paid researchers instead of grad students, that's not where you want to be doing research.

  • We have always wanted Google to be a company that is deserving of great love. But we recognize this is an ambitious goal because most large companies are not well-loved, or even seemingly set up with that in mind. We're lucky to have a very direct relationship with our users, which creates a strong incentive for us to do the right thing .

  • Lots of companies don't succeed over time. What do they fundamentally do wrong? They usually miss the future.

  • Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. The ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the Web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing. We're nowhere near doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we work on.

  • For me, privacy and security are really important. We think about it in terms of both: You can't have privacy without security.

  • I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. Since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition. In fact, there are so few people this crazy that I feel like I know them all by first name.

  • Many leaders of big organizations, I think, don't believe that change is possible. But if you look at history, things do change, and if your business is static, you're likely to have issues.

  • Most people think companies are basically evil. They get a bad rap. And I think that's somewhat correct.

  • Sergey and I founded Google because we're super optimisitc about the potential for technology to make the world a better place. Think about how many people are underserved by transportation today, like those with disabilities, and how self driving cars will transform their lives. Or the wasted time you sit in your car every day commuting to and from work. Or the deaths and injuries that could be avoided.

  • You don't need to have a 100-person company to develop that idea.

  • Big companies have always needed and cooperated in areas where it made sense.

  • It's very hard to fail completely, if you aim high enough.

  • One of our big goals in search is to make search that really understands exactly what you want, understands everything in the world. As computer scientists, we call that artificial intelligence.

  • If you say you want to automate cars and save people's lives, the skills you need for that aren't taught in any particular discipline. I know - I was interested in working on automating cars when I was a Ph.D. student in 1995.

  • As devices multiply and usage changes (many users coming online today may never use a desktop machine), it becomes more and more important to ensure that people can access all of their stuff anywhere.

  • Always deliver more than expected.

  • If you look at the people who have high impact, they have pretty general knowledge. They don't have a really narrowly focused education.

  • It is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. ... Since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition.

  • Basically, our goal is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful.

  • You're probably on the right track if you feel like a sidewalk worm during a rainstorm.

  • We want to build technology that everybody loves using, and that affects everyone. We want to create beautiful, intuitive services and technologies that are so incredibly useful that people use them twice a day. Like they use a toothbrush. There aren't that many things people use twice a day.

  • I really like using my Samsung (005930:KS) tablet. I previously used the Motorola Xoom for a while and liked that.

  • The ultimate search engine would basically understand everything in the world, and it would always give you the right thing. And we're a long, long ways from that.

  • 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.

  • Small groups of people can have a really huge impact.

  • You treat people with respect, they tend to return the favor to the company.

  • Part of our brand is that we're pretty understated in what we do. If you look at other technology companies, they might preannounce things, and it will be a couple years before they really happen, and they don't happen in the way they said they would.

  • It's quite complicated and sounds circular, but we've worked out a way of calculate a Web site's importance.

  • My grandfather was an autoworker, and I have a weapon he manufactured to protect himself from the company that he would carry to work. It's a big iron pipe with a hunk of lead on the head. I think about how far we've come as companies from those days, where workers had to protect themselves from the company.

  • Invention is not enough. Tesla invented the electric power we use, but he struggled to get it out to people. You have to combine both things: invention and innovation focus, plus the company that can commercialize things and get them to people.

  • We have a mantra: don't be evil, which is to do the best things we know how for our users, for our customers, for everyone. So I think if we were known for that, it would be a wonderful thing.

  • Computing is kind of a mess. Your computer doesn't know where you are. It doesn't know what you're doing. It doesn't know what you know.

  • Over time, our emerging high-usage products will likely generate significant new revenue streams for Google as well as for our partners, just as search does today.

  • ...It's important to distinguish between "worry versus harm" when it came to privacy online.

  • Always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting

  • Anything you can imagine probably is doable, you just have to imagine it and work on it.

  • As we transition from one screen to multiscreens, Google has enormous opportunities to innovate and drive ever higher monetization. Just like Search in 2000.

  • Being negative is not how we make progress, and the most important things are not zero sum,

  • Don't be evil- apparently people like it better than "Be good".

  • Every story I read about Google is about us vs some other company, or something else, and I really don't find that interesting. We should be building great things that don't exist. Being negative is not how we make progress.

  • Excellence matters, and technology advances so fast that the potential for improvement is tremendous. So, since becoming CEO again, I've pushed hard to increase our velocity, improve our execution, and focus on the big bets that will make a difference in the world.

  • Find the leverage in the world so you can be truly lazy.

  • For a lot of companies, it's useful for them to feel like they have an obvious competitor and to rally around that. I personally believe it's better to shoot higher. You don't want to be looking at your competitors. You want to be looking at what's possible and how to make the world better.

  • How exciting is it to come to work if the best you can do is trounce some other company that does roughly the same thing?

  • I feel like my job as CEO is always to be pushing people ahead.

  • I remember turning in my first assignment in elementary school using the computer and the teachers were kind of confused that I had printed it.

  • I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. I know that sounds completely nuts. But, since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition. There are so few people this crazy that I feel like I know them all by first name. They all travel as if they are pack dogs and stick to each other like glue. The best people want to work the big challenges.

  • If we are not trusted, we have no business.

  • If we were motivated by money, we would have sold the company a long time ago and ended up on a beach.

  • If you can run the company a bit more collaboratively, you get a better result, because you have more bandwidth and checking and balancing going on.

  • If your business is static, you're likely to have issues.

  • If you're not doing some things that are crazy, then you're doing the wrong things.

  • It is a tremendous responsibility for us to have all the eyes focused on what we do and give people exactly what they need when they ask for it.

  • Most of us carry at least one device, all the time, every day. In fact many of us would feel naked without our smartphone. It's hardly surprising mobile search queries - and mobile commerce - are growing dramatically across the world.

  • Optimism is important. You have to be a little silly about the goals you are going to set. There is a phrase I learned in college called, 'having a healthy disregard for the impossible.' That is a really good phrase. You should try to do things that most people would not do.

  • Our goal is long-term growth in revenue and absolute profit.. so we invest aggressively in future innovation while tightly managing our short-term costs.

  • Our mission is to organize the world's information. Clearly, the more information we have when we do a search, the better it's going to work.

  • Over time, it's becoming more and more understood by people that we're acting in their interests. And that's a very, very powerful thing for our brand.

  • People are starving in the world, not because we don't have enough food, but because we're not organized. And computers are part of that.

  • Serving our end users is at the heart of what we do and remains our number one priority.

  • Technology should do the hard work so people can do the things that make them the happiest in life.

  • Technology should do the hard work, so you can get on and live your life. We're only at one percent of what's possible, and we're moving slow relative to the opportunity we have.

  • The "Be good" concept also comes up when we design our products. We want them to have positive social effects.

  • The amazing thing is that we're part of people's daily lives, like brushing their teeth. It's just something they do throughout the day while working, buying things, deciding what to do after work and much more. Google has been accepted as part of people's lives.

  • The Star Trek computer doesn't seem that interesting. They ask it random questions, it thinks for a while. I think we can do better than that.

  • The ultimate search engine... would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.

  • The Web is a vast collection of completely uncontrolled heterogeneous documents.

  • There are basically no companies that have good slow decisions. There are only companies that have good fast decisions.

  • We are excited about Internet access in general. With better access to the Internet, people do more searches.

  • We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served - as shareholders and in all other ways - by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company.

  • We chose it because we deal with huge amounts of data. Besides, it sounds really cool.

  • We don't have as many managers as we should, but we would rather have too few than too many.

  • We have always believed that it's possible to make money without being evil.

  • We have always tried to concentrate on the long term, and to place bets on technology we believe will have a significant impact over time. It's hard to imagine now, but when we started Google most people thought search was a solved problem and that there was no money to be made apart from some banner advertising. We felt the exact opposite: that search quality was very poor, and that awesome user experiences would clearly make money.

  • We really care about our brand. We really want it to stand for high quality. We want people to be excited about it, for it to be fun.

  • We should be building great things that don't exist

  • We try to, when you come to Google, fulfill that need that you have as quickly as possible.

  • We understand the need to balance our short- and longer-term needs because our revenue is the engine that funds all our innovation. But over time, our emerging high-usage products will likely generate significant new revenue streams for Google as well as for our partners, just as search does today.

  • You can be serious without a suit

  • You can try to control people, or you can try to have a system that represents reality. I find that knowing what's really happening is more important than trying to control people.

  • You have to combine both things: invention and innovation focus, plus the company that can commercialize things and get them to people.

  • You may think using Google's great, but I still think it's terrible.

  • You need to get one thing done well, or else you don't have permission to do anything else.

  • You need to invent things and you need to get them to people. You need to commercialize those inventions. Obviously, the best way we've come up with doing that is through companies.

  • You never lose a dream, it just incubates as a hobby.

  • The moments that we have with friends and family, the chances that we have to make a big difference in the world or even to make a small difference to the ones we love, all those wonderful chances that life gives us, life also takes away. It can happen fast and a whole lot sooner than you think.

  • Almost everyone who has had an idea that's somewhat revolutionary or wildly successful was first told they're insane.

  • We should be focusing on building things that do not exist.

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