page & brin
episode 28
Broadcast date: May 2018
The Moonshots Podcast examines a tech titan - Google. Discover how the dynamic duo of Larry Page and Sergy Brin have changed the world forever.
show outline
A - LEADERSHIP
A Company for Engineers - Entrepreneurs Learn from the Past - Paige
Intro Revolutionising Society
Schmidt on Larry’s Leadership
Sacca on Schmidt Giving Larry/Sergey Freedom to Think Different
B - INNOVATION
Moving Fast Forces Prioritization - Brin
Companies Aren’t Innovating - Page
Open vs Closed Data FB vs Google - Page
Build Great Things that Don’t Exist - Page
C - INSPIRATION
Don’t Miss the Future - Paige
The Dream of Google - Paige
Scientific Progress moves us to Future - Brin
TRANSCRIPT
Hello and welcome to the moonshots podcast. It's episode 28. I am your co-host Mike Parsons. And as always I'm joined by the man with the plan, Mr. Chad Owen. Hello, Brooklyn. Good morning, Sydney, how are things down under this one? The sun is shining and we can't get rid of the thing. It's just hot and sunny and we're in the fall.
It's, uh, it's full of energy. It's just a great way to wake up every morning. The only thing that makes it better, Chad is doing a show with you and Holy smoke. Are we going to do some future gazing today? Yeah. Yeah. I'm still riding the high of our, uh, Bucharest moonshots live show, but, uh, yeah, I'm real excited to dive into the co-founding team.
On today's show Larry Page and Sergey brin. Well, I should say alphabet now, not just good. I know. Do you think anyone is ever really going to adopt that in real life except why the wall street and the stock market, you just think of them as Google don't you? Yeah, but I think it goes to show that Google isn't just google.com.
Yes. So much more than that. And I think that's why it's a smart move on their part and whether it gets. Uh, into pop culture or not remains to be seen. All right. And can you, can you think of a duo, a founding duo in recent memory that have achieved the kind of success these guys have it? I mean, does anyone come to your mind that rivals their success?
Not for this long. No, maybe mean to still use it. Apple had a nice long run Warren buffet and Charlie monster. Charlie Munger. Yeah, I think they're, they've definitely outlasted and Larry and Sergey, but. They're not in the tech world, they're in the much more conservative role of investing. Right. Um, but yeah, I think, I think they're quite unique, their, their success, their success, Chad, I mean, it's staggering.
I mean, if you think Facebook, we talked about it on the Cheryl and Mark shows just the extent to which Facebook has achieved huge scale and success. I think. Uh, Larry and Sergei have built a company that is off the charts successful to think in the 15 years or so. They're at 70,000 employees, a market capitalization of.
$749 billion. And it, towards the end of last year, they had 80% plus share of all searches in the world. And they have got a lot of other things cooking in the Google X factory. Uh, I mean, it's, it's quite remarkable to think that, you know, they have the small little, a success with mobile phones. Don't they chat.
Yeah. Does an Android have something crazy? Ridiculous, like 70% of mobile mobile market share too. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's phenomenal. I mean, we all know about obviously the iPhone, but the truth behind the iPhone is it sells far less than, you know, Android phones, largely Samsung phones because, you know, I phones are so expensive.
The, the mid and lower end is completely, completely dominated by Android. And it's a very fascinating comparison between an open. System and a closed system. And I think Larry and Sergei they're open by design. And if you compare them to Facebook, they're much more open compared to Apple. They're way more open as a company, the way they collaborate.
But I think that's kind of led to, to a lot of their success. I mean, here is the stat. Android has 81.7% market share of mobile. I thought I was high balling. So do debts. That means there are two products I search and mobile, both 80% plus market share this, considering these are technology playgrounds of the future.
I mean, talk about a, forward-looking like making a big bet on the future. I mean, Google, is it? Yeah. Well, I think their dominance is precisely why they're pursuing so many futuristic things because their market share can only go down. So they're, they're getting out in front of all of the smaller companies looking to disrupt them and being like, Nope, we're going to invent the technology is the future.
Uh, ourselves. So we won't be disrupted from the outside. That's so true. And what is very exciting for our listeners today is that you're going to hear a lot about leadership innovation, and you're going to actually hear some of the mission and vision that underlines the company that Larry and Sergei has built.
And you're going to be able to learn how to move. Fast, how to think about the future. You're going to really discover some of the key things that they do to be successful. And if you're interested in the Sony show notes and any links to some of the things we mentioned, please go to moonshots.io where you'll find everything, uh, that you could possibly need around Google for, for show 28 of the moonshots podcast.
So, Chad, I feel like I just want to dive in, so where should we start? Yeah. So there's a really interesting clip from Barbara Walters who did a segment on Larry and Sergey. So I'll just turn it over to Barbara. As she introduces the two founders of Google. They met at Stanford and were immediately drawn to, we clicked on an interesting, glad for us to found each other, to be great to the a, of noxious.
Both their fathers are college professors, but the Google guys don't credit their success to drive odd veins. They say it was nursery school went to Montessori school. And I think it was part of that training of not following rules and orders and. Being self-motivated questioning what's going on in the world, doing things a little bit different.
It's so interesting that the Montessori schooling that they both had seemed to have had such a huge effect on how they design their company. They, they mentioned this a lot. Don't they. Yeah, shout out to, uh, my sister and, uh, Caroline who's, who's getting an early childhood education and special education degree and going to be teaching Montessori.
I was helping her tonight, print out her thesis for her, for her master's degree, but even, yeah, just learning from her and hearing from, from people like Larry and Sergey, it's an entirely different way of thinking of. Encouraging kids to learn. It's not teaching really. It's really just encouraging different modes of activities and way for kids to experience and learn from their surroundings.
And of course, an upbringing like that is going to create the kinds of, of mental models and ways of thinking for, you know, Larry and Sergey to come up with some of the ideas when they were first starting. Way back in 1998. So I guess that makes this year, the 20th anniversary. Yeah. And it's I tell you what learning is such an Epic theme in the success of the entrepreneurs and the innovators that we've been examining and learning from.
And Larry and Sergey are none different. They are big on learning, not only on how they learned when they were young, but they have this. A very strong view on how to create a learning company and the role of learning within the company. In fact, you know, it's really interesting, you know, page kind of establishes the idea that you need a learning company for engineers, and this sort of sets you up to avoid the pitfalls of becoming large.
And in fact, this next clip, Chad. This big, straight to this. So, so let's jump in and listen to Larry Page, talking about creating a company for engineers, creating a place where you can learn. You know, I mentioned how I wanted to make company kind of for engineers, like thinking about it that way. Um, I think also as an entrepreneur, I would start at Google, trying to make a company for entrepreneurs also is something I think we're striving for.
And. No, I think in the same way, maybe when I was working for the consultant company in DC, it wasn't really my inner calling. You, I think for most entrepreneurs working for companies is also not so great. Why, um, you know, I think it's a combination of companies generally trying to do the things they do well, plus the things that are adjacent, um, and not thinking creatively about, you know, what they might have learned from doing one of the things I've already done.
How that might translate into a new business. They're not ambitious enough. Um, I mean, I think it's maybe not that as much as seeing learning from your business. I love that final idea, learning from your business, uh, taking, taking all the experiments and iterations and what you're you're testing as an early entrepreneur, which I'm sure they did.
And instead of kind of pivoting wildly. Into the dark, actually taking a look back at what had worked and what hadn't worked in their business and really try and make that thing work. I would build on that too, because when I was feeling, when he was talking there is he, he's like basically that you take your learnings and, and the art of transforming them into a new business is, well, if we did this in search, At a meta level, this is what we did.
This is how we approached it. Is there new possibilities of taking that kind of approach into new markets? In fact, he actually calls out companies for first staying very close to their core business. So he talks about the adjacency, just going for the obvious, next thing you feel like with him, he's looking for something more spontaneous, more serendipitous, something that.
Hey, it might not be that close, but you can use the learnings and think creatively in a new place. And that's why they've got their internet in balloons. They've he's big on flying cars. Larry I'm in there doing so many different things. And they'll take a shot at something like Google glass and really give it a go.
And you feel like this learning and discovery that they are doing is not something that is just a post-mortem after a project, but it almost is the fire starter to something new. I I forget who has really championed this idea of the adjacent possible, but Larry's saying like, don't just do the adjacent possible.
It's like leap over the adjacent possible exactly to the next thing, you know, but don't leave the learnings from your previous company behind. So I'm sure that all of the learnings that Google has had. You know, from developing the Android platform is, you know, in the Chromebook in chromo S is in everything that they're doing going forward.
Um, right, right. And it was Stewart, it was Stuart Koufman, uh, who, who developed this idea of the adjacent possible theory. So we'll have a note, uh, a link to that in, in the show notes, because that looks really cool. Yeah, but it kind of, kind of building on kind of what you're saying, Mike, where it's more about creating the new and the, into the future while keep retaining your learnings.
Here's just kind of a, a summary clip. Just talking about how Google is mission in a way is to revolutionize society. Larry Page may not fit the image of the typical swashbuckling CEO, but his image and his persona almost belies his ambition, which is
he's a classic Silicon Valley tech founder, right? He's fish. He's got a bit of a grand he's a total introvert. And yet he runs a company of hand Sergei Brynn had co-founded the company as these kind of techies from Stanford. He was in many ways, the first kind of make the Pearl. Obviously,
if you look at the project,
it is incredibly Andrew.
He does everything except search against me to be fair. They make most of their money there, but they do self-driving cars. They have a nest.
Internet blast there's robots, there's drones, nano particle research, hovercrafts, or teleportation space elevators, all these things that have a really good chance of failing because they're so ambitious. That's the whole point. If they succeed, they stand a chance at revolutionizing society.
It's so true when you think about the, the, the breadth of what they do and revolutionizing society. But what I love about this guy with Larry Page, especially is the way he challenges our assumption on what a CEO should be. Not only is he super thoughtful, c'mon, let's say it. He's kind of geeky. But he's very softly spoken and reflective, but what underlies that is this enormous ambition.
And I love this style. I mean, it's, it's a content heavy approach. It's less bombastic compared to the, a lot of the CEOs of the eighties and nineties. And this is, this is somebody who's full of substance. Yeah, I love the imagery of the geek of that got the corner office. Yeah. Um, you know, it is kind of at this point, a caricature, but I think Larry and Sergey, you know, they were the beginning, uh, seed of that, of that caricature, you know, I'm sure people like Jeff Bezos, at least in, in the late nineties also occupied that.
Although Mike, you. Keep sharing this funny visual meme of, uh, bayzos in the nineties versus Bezos today. And it's like fat Pekin in front of his little office and then the, then the bad-ass and sunglasses and a vest with like his biceps, you know? So he's kind of busted that, that stereotype, but even just comparing Larry to.
To Bezos, you know, Larry is even more in the techie, geeky side of things yet his ambition is just as, or bigger, you know, than, than Bezos's even if it doesn't sound like it. The, yeah, the nice, the nice thing that we have to learn from here. And I think what's so important for our listeners. Is that okay?
You don't have to be the bombastic. No, at all. You can be the thoughtful leader, the reflective leader. And in fact, we've got a great clip here where Eric Schmidt, who had tenure, uh, actually as CEO. Uh, at Google, uh, for many years. So, so Larry and Sergey thought, Oh, they called it bringing in a grownup and he came along for, for several years and was the CEO and he's then went on to be the chairman for, for almost another decade.
Now what's interesting then. So, Uh, Eric Schmidt has this incredible insight into how Larry leads, and this is a massive opportunity for us to understand how we can be leaders too. And at the heart of how Larry leads is. Agitating in a positive way. Uh, and what we're going to hear now is how he does things that push everybody to the future to move fast and to do the right thing.
So let's have a listen to Eric Schmidt on how Larry leads Google, but one of the things that he did after he became CEO in correcting all the messes that I handed to him, uh, were to where he wrote a very, very defined memo about. Innovation, how decisions are made and so forth. And it's, it's, uh, it's large companies are their own worst enemy because internally they know what they should do, but they don't do it.
And if I may say my, my business partner and close friend, Larry, what does he do all day? He's doing that. He's in there forcing the discussion, forcing the choice and forcing the resolution. I don't know how he does that in a company of 70, 50,000, 70,000 plus people. But I have seen this in the work that I'm doing, you know, I work with a lot of large companies and what they don't realize is.
They have the answers. They're just not acting on them. So it's fascinating for me to hear from, from Eric, how Larry is able to continue to move people towards that action. Yeah. And, and this, this, can you imagine how important that is when you have 70,000, uh, employees and, you know, you have to come with such a.
Sense of clarity and purpose, because there are so many things to distract you. Can you imagine the emails that guys like Larry and Sergei getting every day? And like, you've just got to like, have clarity about purpose and mission and drive things forward because there's a million things to, you know, brackets keep you busy.
But you know, the, the, the interesting thing at the heart of how they, um, look to the future. Is it really seems to me, my dad creating this very active fluid, uh, culture and environment for people, not only to think about the future, but to think creatively and to enter think differently. And, um, what's really interesting.
We've got one of our show favorites. Uh, Chris Saka, great investors. Before you go, before you go too far, Mike though, I, I don't want to gloss over this. This point of, of Google, of Larry forcing Google to have a bias towards action. That's true. That's, that's, that's very true. And we've got actually some clips coming up where actually Sergei speaks specifically to that, but why, tell me, why do you think this.
A bias towards action Madison much. Think about all the projects we've worked on together. Well, because no one else is doing it. It's, it's fascinating to me to see a company like Google that is, that still has this bias towards action because Eric is right. You know, uh, the corporate default is inertia.
Yeah. And if you can keep your company moving quickly with a bias towards action, that's when all of the crazy innovations are going to happen. And yes, there will be failures, but as, as the point was made, like failing is the point. And so it's really, it's really cool for me to see a company like Google, where like someone is in Google, X, they're kind of.
So the sole purpose of that business unit is just crazy 10 X moonshot ideas. Someone just thinks of something crazy and outlandish and they test it. They don't like sit and talk about it for six months and figure out how to bring it to market. They're just like, Hey, can we put a wifi router on a balloon and just send it up over mountain view and get wifi from it.
And they did that and found out, well, yeah, that works. So how can we do that? You know, for remote villages, um, or, you know, disaster areas and those sorts of things. And that's how the project loom was built. They just go and do it. And yes, having the money and resources and, and people they do, it makes that easier, but it would be very easy for, for Google to sit and rest on their laurels.
And it's encouraging to me to see that that's not the case. That's not. What's happening. Yeah. And, and, and this, this is not to be underestimated as a challenge within any organization. In fact, uh, another one of our show favorites, uh, Jeff Bezos talks about about the two pizza strategy. If you want to move fast, you have to have a team that can be fed by two pizzas, because if you need more than two pizzas, it's too big.
So it really does seem that that there's this pattern amongst all these great entrepreneurs they've identified that size kills. All right, because it creates this bureaucracy. And as a business gets big. One of the key things that I see is that the IM uh, you know, when you make a decision in a large company, the implications are huge and nobody wants to make a million dollar mistake.
So what happens is everyone reverts to an aversion of, of risk. And if you create that environment, you have zero innovation. You will not grow healthily for decades. If you don't take risks. And we keep seeing this, we even see now the likes of Facebook face challenges from unseen areas, such as regulation.
We see snap, they did some cool things, but their stock price. Hm. Are they really a, you know, a glasses company, there's a lot of challenges and headwinds out there that the only recipe you can have to fight against that and to succeed in that context is to be moving fast and thinking differently. And that's everything that they seem to do.
And I wanted to, to, to, to bring that clip in there that we mentioned earlier, let's have a listen to Chris Saka because he's another show. Favorite. And he's talking in this clip about, you know, what did they do at Google to create an environment where people have the freedom to think differently? So let's have a listen to Chris soccer talking about the founders and the CEO of Google.
What do you think about where Google is today and what do you think about, you know, the company under Larry Page versus the company under Eric Smith and the track? Larry's one of the smartest people ever, not just like alive, whatever. And I think he's been sent to us from the future. Like maybe he wanted better, you know, use that, um, some weird fortune telling machine and got teleported or something like that, but he knows what's going to happen ahead.
Um, And he was always the guy who was willing to take unreasonably large bets, just, just crazy shit. And, and it was funny. Like I always beautiful thing about Eric Schmidt at that company was that it wasn't that he was the adult supervision. I think that underestimates both him and, uh, Larry and Sergey.
What he was was he was the voice of reason that allowed Larry and Sergey to just go off the fucking deep end. Their ideas sometimes. And just think about the things that would otherwise be unthinkable. Like, you know, we'd be talking about net neutrality and Larry and surrogate for the academic exercise of it could actually be like, well, you know what, what if we just said, fuck that neutrality.
And we just ran fiber to everybody's home and that was it, you know? And now like, and it wasn't neutral. And you're like, uh, because you've just spent the whole last year of your life, like building arguments for why net neutrality makes sense. Right. It's the kind of thing a CEO of a company could never actually say in a brainstorm like that, but because Larry and Sergei, weren't ultimately responsible for the crazy shit they said in those meetings, because Eric was always going to bring us back to some rational point.
They were free to think of the shit that was just so off the charts, you know? And so they would just say like, well, fuck it. Let's just like, how much would it actually cost to ship one of these devices to every American, you know? And he'd be like, well, $3 billion. I'm like, well, we have a lot more than you.
$3 billion. So let's just do it instead of like, instead of like advertising and trying to convince people to do it, let's just put one in the mail to everybody, you know? And you're just like, my God, like just regular humans don't think like that.
Regular humans don't think like that. It's so true. Isn't it, Chad? Yeah, I think this, he mentioned the triumvirate and I think without a doubt, this is. Part of why Google achieved the scale that it did was because someone like Eric came in, not, not as the adult, but that third voice of reason to hear their crazy ideas.
And operationalize it and figure out, you know, at that point, Eric kind of stepped in as the entrepreneur for the two of them and was like, okay, how can I mitigate this risk here? And yet still try it. Yeah. And it really speaks to something that I think is an essential tool for any innovator, which is this formula for creating breakthrough products and services, which is called the 10 X formula.
And basically the, the idea that we're hearing about. From Google is that they tackle big problems, not small, not medium, really massive problems. And then what they do, and this is what their culture opens up is the possibility to take radical approaches, creative approaches, what they call thinking differently about the problem.
And when you tackle a huge problem. And you use a radical approach that is underlied by emerging technologies. This is when you get 10 X. This is when you get scale. This is when you get to products that just to remind you guys, 80% of the search market, Google 80% of the smartphone market, Google.
Billions and billions of dollars of value has been created. They have captured 750 plus billions of dollars in value in 20 years, by thinking differently by having these radically different approaches. Um, and again, I think. What I have learned in, you know, reading books and ups excerpts, like, you know, how Google works, works, et cetera, is how important it is in this founding team, in the leadership team to be configured in such a way where everyone is working and doubling down.
On their strengths and, um, it's, it's not quite so much about kind of mitigating weakness as much as it is really leaning into your strengths. One thing that comes to my mind, as you say that is, well, they've done that how well they incorporated Eric Schmidt. And if you think about it, Microsoft didn't do this nearly as well.
When Gates brought in BOMA, I mean, Bomer at the end. I mean, if you look at the differences Satya Nadella has made at Microsoft, then you know, you can see how well Larry and Sergei created this culture, not to think different. But to share each other's strengths into allow a third person into the co-founding team.
I mean, that is rare. Don't you think? I mean, can you think of anyone else that's, that's done something like that with such success because Microsoft certainly didn't do it. No, not at the stage that Google was at when Eric came on and the success they've had since I can't think of any, no. Wonderful. I mean, it just so much to live on.
They're all about learning from the past so that they can think differently in different categories. I mean, they're revolutionizing everything and Larry is holding them accountable. He's the agitator, the soft-spoken agitator. And there's this underlying freedom to think different. I mean, Well, I mean, we got a show right there, Chad.
I mean, that is a ton of stuff, but wait, wait, wait. But we have like seven or eight more. I know that's my whole point. Like, can you believe it? So coming up with how they get into the secret sauce of actually innovating, so a real deep dive into product design, product creation, and the other cool thing is we've got some great.
Thoughts on how they think about, uh, the, the future, but, you know, Pharaoh gay is not to be underestimated in this pit. Sure. Chad, he's also got some wisdom first as well. Doesn't he? Yeah. So strangely enough, it was harder to find clips with him versus Larry, but I had uncovered some really interesting talks.
He had given at X, uh, you know, the kind of in the innovation within the innovation inside of Google. And he has this really just. Great mantra about moving fast that I will just let him say, and then we can talk about afterwards. No, uh, engineers don't have enough time to do a proper design. You know, this gets shortchanged that's it gets changed.
I mean, there are, there are a hundred reasons not to go fast. Uh, but then the, and I'm really glad that we did. And, and I think I've seen that across the range of. Products and ultimately it forces you to make real trade offs about what actually is really important and things that you might've held very dear say, well, maybe that's not really the key thing.
And maybe what we can get in this next month is the really important essence of this thing we're trying to create. Hmm, moving fast. Chad, how many times do we see these secret sauce? Almost this constraint of pushing and things forward, like sprinting forth whilst, so a simple as a, as a force seems to unlock so much innovation.
I mean, we see it time and time again when we're, when we're rapid prototyping, don't we. Yeah. I think if I had to give, you know, a single piece of advice, it would, it would be to have that constraint of, of really short cycles where you're testing, learning, and iterating and, and it's disability to move to, to close the gap between when you test and learn, like, if you can keep the.
The Springs really quick, and the gaps between the sprints even shorter so that the learnings are still ripe. And then you can move quickly into the next iteration and iteration. After that, this has to be anyone who's out there thinking. Um, I want to do something very innovative. The how you do it is fast, moving fast, learning fast and making sure.
That you have that, that level of learning, but what surrogate gave to us then is that because you don't have enough time, that constraints forces you to make priorities because you can't do it all. And it's so simple, but it's so powerful. And I tell you one thing, Larry Page knows for sure that big companies forget how to do this.
Uh, the bureaucracy takes over the risk avoidance takes over. And I think that it's really, really, I mean, if there's one thing that they've kept going from small to big is moving fast. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And in the same way that one of the biggest things large corporations have to overcome is inertia. I think the other is having 15 priorities, right?
And we all know that if you have 15 priorities, it's the same as having none. And I love how segregate just lays it out in that you don't have time to have more than one priority when you're moving fast. So the priority remains the priority. And what you're working on is the most important thing. To work on.
And so I, I love how the speed forces the priority prioritization. It's not like, Oh, we're going to get our priorities straight. It's like, no, let's move fast. And that will force the priority. Exactly. Now, one of the great things that Larry Page did is he took time to understand, know why did these big companies fail and why aren't they innovating?
And he actually baked that into Google. So he's going to make sure they don't do. What most companies do, and this is why they are so contrary and why they're so successful. So let's listen now to Larry Page and how he discovered the thing that kills a lot of companies. Um, also companies generally don't innovate that much then I guess, as Google has gotten bigger, we're almost 400 people.
Now it's sort of noticed this as we get more and more people working on one thing it's harder and harder for them to be innovative, just because of the communications costs and the inertia and all those kinds of things. And most companies end up being marketing or sales driven and not engineering driven.
So, let me just give another example quickly. They're singing. I call the technology trend, bandwagon and technology companies specifically get all really excited about various standards, like, you know, accidental or.net or CORBA or any of the things I have listed here. And in fact, they're kind of like plumbing.
If you had, for example, do you really care if you have copper plumbing in your house or plastic plumbing? Well, maybe once a little bit quieter, a little bit cheaper or so on. Maybe the water tastes better with copper, but there's pretty minor differences in much of the things that the technology industry really gets excited about.
Don't actually affect users very much. And in fact, um, you can ask, does this really affect programmers very much? Does anyone really care? People generally get excited about things that don't matter. I'll give you one other quick, quick example. If you're going to Fry's and you buy a flatbed scanner, you know, every month you go to fries, uh, it'll have like twice the resolution and they're up to about 2,400 dots per inch.
And if you've never played with one of these, it can actually image every drop of ink on your paper, you know, and you can see that the dots of ink around and things like that. And he could see every grain of grain and the fiber and the paper, and it's not tremendously useful. Um, and it turns out as a result, the scanners are really, really slow.
And in fact, if you had to challenge you to go to Fry's and find any scanner that says how long it takes to scan something. And the reason is if you, if it sat on the box, lots of people would buy it, right? Cause it'll say like three minutes to scan a page. And in fact, what people probably care about is the scan with reasonable quality quickly.
And actually, no one's built a product like that. There's probably, you know, a good market for a product like that marketed correctly. So I think a lot of things ended up being, you know, you end up focused on one very specific thing and not looking at what users want. I was, I was laughing there at the beginning of that clip.
Cause I'm not sure if you misspoke or not, but he said as we grow to 400 people, but he, so that gives you kind of the timeframe of where this came from. But I don't think I can say it better than him as to what the opposite of innovation is. The opposite of innovation is working on something that people don't care about.
And that's kind of the disease that he's talking about here. And he, uh, w w what I, what I really love about it is he's so clear in causation, big companies do this. So therefore, that, so we will do like, and it's the same as when you listen to Ilan and they make it. They're so insightful that almost the outcome and the, the, the, the, the, the deduction is so self-evident, but it's actually having the ability to see through the fog, to see through the grain, to see it more black and white.
And I find that if one of their practices that is so powerful in unlocking value, and you can really feel. That's at the heart of why they've been so successful is to truly embrace the forces that make big companies unsuccessful and to think differently, uh, to problems. And that's why they have two massive home runs in, in, in both mobile and search don't they.
Yeah. And an interesting thing that I'm taking away from this clip too, is Larry's walking into the neighborhood electronics store and he he's, he sees an innovation problem. So he's seeing, and he's looking for, and seeing these things everywhere. So it just goes to show us the importance of, you know, Keeping your eyes open and looking in watching for these kinds of things and what are the lessons that, that we can learn?
You know, that this theme of lifelong learning, I mean, I just thought it was fascinating. He like, he walks into electronics store and he sees the scanner with double the amount of scanning. And he's like, they're moving in the opposite direction of where they need to go. That's not what the consumers. One and end those use cases that Elan has.
So, so clearly Larry does too, because he's like, you want to print it prints fast and scans fast. You don't want to, you don't need a gazillion different, a gazillion, a bazillion DPI. You just need the thing fast and I'd be buying a printer like he described. Cause he's absolutely spot on, on the, on the use case here.
And again, you know, the use cases thinking differently, moving fast, learning a lot. This is just the start of what they do well and what they share with the likes of, of both Amazon and Tesla. But I think one of the more unique characteristics that they have is how open they are, particularly in comparison to the likes of Apple and even Facebook.
And this next clip. We've got the, the opportunity to listen to, to, to Larry speaking specifically on how they're different to Facebook. And we've got a lot to learn here because these are two different models, the open and the closed model, or some similar to that, of the bundled and the unbundled. This is really powerful thinking.
So let's have a listen now to Larry Page talking about open versus closed data. I think that it's, uh, it's something we take seriously, like people's social media. I think it's been unfortunate that Facebook has been pretty closed with their data. Uh, you know, and I think we would certainly, you know, we're in the business of searching data.
We don't generally turn it down. I went in software to us. So I think, you know, in general, I think we'd like to see content on the internet it's being made more open and so on. You know, we had a, we had an issue with them over contacts, uh, where they, you know, from user's perspective you say, Oh, it's a great time.
You know, I'm joining Facebook. I want my. Contacts and Google, we said, fine. You know, you can get them from Google. And, uh, the, the issue we had is that then Facebook said, no, Google, you can't do the reverse. And so we just said, well, users don't understand what they're doing. They're putting data in and they don't understand, they can't take it out.
And so we said, well, we'll only participate with people that have reciprocity and we're still we're waiting for them to offer reciprocity. Yes. Yeah. And do you think they might in the future? I mean, I hope so. I imagine they'll be forced to eventually, um, if, if, uh, you know, if, uh, if they don't choose to, but I think it's, I think the idea that, you know, you'd hold their users hostage kind of thing.
They have some reasons for it that don't make sense, but you know, they'd hold their users. They claim it's a privacy issue, but it's not really cause they, they do it with Yahoo. They just don't deal with us. But I think that, uh, you know, you don't want to be holding your users hostage. Hm, almost a four, 10, so four telling you that.
So, and this was, this was a number of years ago when he was talking to Charlie, the context here for our listeners. We pulled a clip from a couple of years ago, and right now Facebook is being grilled on regulation and we know regulation is coming. We know they didn't take care of data and privacy. Uh, you know, Marx and Cheryl are on their apology to it.
But here's the thing he's saying essentially Facebook is a walled garden is closed off. So they would not do reciprocity with Google to exchange data. So they'll say, Oh, Google, you can give us profile and contact information, but we won't give you the same back. And he was saying, that's not good for users.
And what he went on to discuss with Charlie Roseanne is he's like, well, look. We're not going to play ball with them. If they're not going to do tit for tat and you know what, in the end, they probably won't have a choice they're going to be forced to. So he was alluding to the fact of regulation is coming for them because they don't play fair.
And I mean, as you should appreciate, I mean, he saw the future before it happened. Yeah, well, I mean, he was in, he was in the data game at least six years before Mark Zuckerberg. Um, and he, so, so yeah, I think he just saw he writings on the wall and, and Google has already had some regulation in, in Europe and we have the.
The GDAP regulation coming in the privacy data, uh, laws in Europe, which is big. So there's a lot of, uh, response now from regulators in Europe and the U S we'll, we'll no doubt follow, but it is. It's not to say that that Google's immune to this, you know, I think certainly the attention that's being put onto Facebook now is going to cause everyone to take a look at all of the, the tech and data behemoths.
But I think. Certainly everyone else will be prepared or I hope they are. There's no reason they shouldn't be now if they aren't shame on them. But yeah, it was fascinating for me to hear Larry. So presciently call this in a way that if we don't move to more open data systems, that people are going to become suspicious.
And accusatory and, and, and force companies like Facebook to open their wallet. And you see the same difference in between Android and Apple, uh, closed and open. I think the one really interesting twist on this, Chad, is that. Ample, despite being very closed has no economic model, no business model in selling our data.
Now Facebook has it by far that's they live and breathe on selling out personal information. Google to a much lesser extent because they're, they're selling our intent. They don't have a social network. They're selling our intent through search, but it's fascinating to see the scale and implication of these different models and that one of the key ideas that underlines it all is open versus closed and our personal information.
And profiles as the product versus something that we're outright purchasing. Again, kind of the extreme of Facebook versus Apple, Apple, I'm going and buying an iPhone 10, but Facebook there's. And from my point of view, there's no transaction. When there's millions of advertisers, it's almost like where you get to research is the happy medium I've said, Hey.
You know, iPhone 10 and I've typed it in, or I've typed black, minimal t-shirt into Google bang. I've already raised my hand said I'm trying to find this. So Google's like, well, if we can help you either through organic or paid search, we're good. And that seems like a much fair trade off that that users understand.
I think what's been. So apparent is the consumer and customer implication of open versus closed. Is that in the ignorance? Yeah. That's where I was up to now. Yeah. Yeah, no idea that Facebook's model was built on exploiting this personal information, whereas. If, if the world announced that Google was sharing your search queries, you'd be like, well, yeah, of course, because how else would I see the ad?
Like you would have be of no surprise. So it was almost like Facebook got caught out, not sharing the whole truth, right. Not, you know, in that sense. And whereas Google is so open about it and it's, it's so explicit that. You don't run into those, those sorts of challenges. It really is for everyone listing open versus closed, as a concept with technology is critical as a concept to understand.
And, uh, when you understand some of these operating models, it's very similar to some of the stuff that Ilan talks about, where he's got his mental models, um, that he talks about and the way he sees the world, obviously open versus closed. I am particularly making things open, seems to be at the heart of how Google innovate.
Yeah. Aside from just again, a defaulting to more openness, they just leapfrog over everyone else and don't build things that don't exist. And I love this next quote from Larry, where he talks about how that idea is so core to what they're doing at Google. I think we're all here because we share a deep sense of optimism for about the potential of technology to improve people's lives and hand the world.
Part of that. And I'm amazed every day I come to work. The list of things that needs to be done is longer than the day before. And the opportunity of those things is bigger now than it was before. And because of that, I think we as Google and as an industry, all of you really only a 1% of what is possible and probably even less than that.
And despite the faster change we have in the industry, we're still moving slow relative to the opportunities that we have. And some of that I think is doing the negativity. You know, every story I read about Google, it's kind of us versus some other company or some stupid thing. And I just don't find that very interesting.
Uh, we should be building great things that don't exist. Right.
Yeah, great things that don't exist. Like let's build some of those such a powerful, simple thought, and you can see how dismissive he is, this fee dad. And this he's like, so he's on such a big emission. I feel he's somewhat Zuckerberg like here on a really big mission as with Musk and Bezos, they all share like these enormous dreams of the future.
Don't they. Yeah, I'm still skeptical of some of them. Uh, I think there there's some health to that skepticism, but, um, I think Larry and Sergei and Elan have lived into that more than maybe someone like Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. You know, I think, I think most of us have a long ways to go, uh, to be building those things that, that don't exist.
But I love his idea of, Hey, let's all just come together in the end. We're all working towards the same thing, building things that don't exist. And. We're getting in our own way. I think that's, what's nice and uplifting about this message is yes, there is healthy competition, but you know, he sees it from.
A world of abundance instead of a world of scarcity, he does, you know, what's so powerful right now. So I'm thinking about there's this absolute credit. They move fast. They, they move small. They build things that are open and they try and create things that don't exist. That's clearly the formula of innovation that they employ.
And as far as leadership, it's all coming back down to learning and agitating, giving creative freedom, to think different. So what two massive building blocks. Um, and what's really cool is the last few clips we have of the show. We've got some real fuel for this innovation and leadership. We've got some really big ideas on how they dream, what their vision is for the world and how they make.
W how they feed that innovation and leadership. They've got so much inspiration to give us. So we've got both Larry and surrogate coming up. I don't know. Where do we want to stop this? Chad, we got, we got some really killer ones close out on I'm. Yeah. I'm just going to jump right into this one. Uh, from Larry talking, building on this last quote about building things that don't exist, you know, if we don't, if we don't do that, we'll miss out.
So here's Larry talking about, you know, us not missing out on the future. What quality of mine as I leave this audience has enabled you to think about the future and at the same time, change the present. You know, I think the most important thing, and I look to lots of companies and why I thought they don't succeed over time.
Who've had a more rapid turnover of companies and they said, what did they fundamentally do wrong? Why those companies all do wrong? And they usually, it's just, they missed the future. And so I think. For me, I just tried to focus on that and say, what is that future really going to be? And how do we create it?
And how do we, because you know, our organization, our organization is really focused on that and drive that at a really high rate. And so that's been, curiosity has been looking at things people might not think about working on things that no one else is working on. Cause that's where the additionality really is and be willing to do that, to take that risk.
You look at Andrew and I have felt guilty about working on Android when it was starting, it was a little startup we bought it. Wasn't really, while we were really working on, I felt guilty about spending time on that. That was stupid. That was the future. Right? That was a good thing. Yeah, that's so funny that he, I love the candor that he admits that he kind of felt guilty about working on Android.
You know, the world's biggest operating system for mobile phones. Can you believe that? Yeah, but it was necessary and that was how he didn't miss. Miss the future. That was, you know, one of those, one of those bets where they bought that company, thinking that, well, maybe one day we can turn this into the future operating system that runs 81% of the world's phones.
Um, and it paid off, but this survivorship bias is not telling us the story of all of the failures that Google has bought and put on the shelf. Um, and you know, in terms of companies or things that they've tried and had to put back on the shelf, um, But yeah, I think any leader of a company that doesn't have this attitude is going to lose in the long run if they don't, if they don't understand that there are things in people that are happening around and underneath and beside them that will eventually overtake them.
Yeah, they're, they're going to get God. Yeah, that feels like one of the big meta themes. As we've moved from an industrial era to an era of technology of data of software, it feels like the rapid speed of change is something that big companies are having enormous challenges with. Um, you know, and. What they might call digitization is really just a first step in a whole series of changes going right up to cultural redefinition of these companies.
But what's, what's particularly powerful about founders is that they often, you know, have like these visions of, you know, shooting for the future. But they have these aha moments when the problem crystallizes when, when Brandon was standing there and there were no flights is a classic one. Uh, when Ilan, as a kid would draw and read about spaceships and rockets, you know, all of the things that you see, they have the clarity of these moments to grab the idea.
In this next clip that we've got is actually Larry talking about the essence of where Google came from its origins story. And, uh, let's have a listen to him. Let's have a listen to Larry Page talking about the dream of Google. I want to talk about dreams for a second. And in my case, literally a dream.
When I was in college, I was sure that I'd been admitted by a clerical air Raleigh computer. And because of that, I had an irrational fear. I'd be sent home on the bus. The surrogate is here, knows this is true, but it turns out because of that anxiety, I woke up literally with a dream and it was kind of a strain stream.
No one, like, I think I could download the entire web under small computers that were lying around. And that would probably seem pretty crazy to most people, but I stayed up a couple hours in the middle of the night doing some math. And it seemed actually pretty plausible while assuming actually I didn't keep any of the white pages and only a couple of links and then sort of figured out given all that data.
I thought I would take a couple of weeks and I told my advisor that, and he just sort of laughed to me. And of course it took them a year or two, but at the end of that, we had a way to rank my business and no thoughts to search at all and eventually search enter the picture. And, you know, the rest of that became
I don't want the end of that in the applause to get lost is the message he leaves us with is to encourage us to follow our dreams and, you know, That was a radical, audacious idea that is at the heart of their, you know, strategic success that they had this big, big dream. Let's just download the whole web and organize all the information on the planet.
Let's just do it. Yeah. Which sounds so ridiculous. But then actually they go about doing, and we see it time again, you know, Elon wants to colonize Mars. You know, baseless wants to create the most customer centric company in the planet now. And in history like these dreams, which do sound audacious, end up leading to so much opportunity, so much potential.
And I really believe in this idea, Chad, that if you dream big, if you go for something really massive, it doesn't really matter. Exactly on the course, but it's the fact that you had such big ambition, such a dream to solve a big problem, that things will always work out. There's always little pivots. You can do serendipitous opportunities.
And if the problem is big enough, there will be enough people that care about getting that problem solved that they'll either want to join your company, invest in your company or be customers of your company. But when you solve little things, People don't have enough time or attention to really care.
And I think this is a great lesson in building companies around big ideas, not small ones. Yeah. My favorite contrast to this, I, as you're speaking, this came to mind, there's this great show on HBO. I'm sure many of our listeners are familiar with Silicon Valley. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it.
It makes fun of all of the people in archetypes, uh, leaders that we've been talking about on the podcast, but in the most recent season, the main characters, you know, they're building essentially a company that's building a new internet loosely kind of based around blockchain and decentralization, et cetera.
And he's trying to hire. And everyone's hiring the best coders and he finds out that it's a pizza app company and he's just like pizza app. Are you kidding me? I thought we like moved past this. And so yeah, this, this is like the opposite of spending all your time and resources building a pizza app.
Right? Cause like that is not a big, hairy, audacious goal. How to order a pizza better and fast. And that's so hilarious. I mean, what a great show if for any of our listeners that haven't checked out Silicon Valley, uh, it's an HBO show. It's fantastic. It's a laugh. It's so, so hysterical. Chad and I probably have to confess, we've had a lot of experiences in Silicon Valley where we probably, some of these get a little close to home.
We've met some great, right. Um, But it's great. It's a great laugh. And um, most importantly, you know, they have big dreams, Larry and Sergey, but I think one of the things that adds spice to having these dreams is that they have a very powerful worldview of the role of technology being. The path of the future.
And again, that's rooted in learning from the past and reflection and informs this going forward point of view. And actually it's really cool that we get to play our last clip for you now, which is actually from Sergey Brin. And let's have a listen to him now talking about scientific and technology-based progress and what it means for the future.
I'd say, if you look back, uh, you know, look back 300 years, years, and, uh, what we see in the world today. Yeah. I mean, there have definitely been substantive political changes and so forth, but the bulk of what would shock a person from then coming to the world now is the technology that's evolved from all the scientific discoveries that we have experienced.
And, uh, and so fundamentally. It's the scientific progress that determines the future more than anything else. And if you let that go, then you're basically saying I don't want to participate in the course of the future. Hm is idea of opting out of the future by, by not working towards scientific progress.
Again is really interesting. Like how is a pizza app advancing science and technology? It's not, but figuring out how to deliver data faster and cheaper to places all around the globe or in Elan's case, you know how to get people to Mars. Uh, better, faster, cheaper, safer. Those are the things that are going to be remembered for 300 years.
Not, not so many of these other hyped products and services. It simply won't they're they're not contributing to the it in the same way, uh, of the open versus closed. And I think if your organization is biased towards this idea of scientific and technological progress, you'll just be sticking around.
Well, if you look in the, in, in a lifetime also, uh, we have in one generation witnessed the advent of the microprocessor. The PC, the internet, the smartphone, and it ain't finished. Cause we've got a little thing called blockchain. We've got AI. I mean, we have so much coming towards us and I think what is really special about what we've discovered about these guys is they're all about learning from the past and putting that to good use.
For the future and doing so in a pretty open way. And, um, with a bias towards action, I have to say, Chad, I think this is one of the most complete lessons we've had in just one single show about how to go for moonshots, how to go for something that's 10 times better. I think this is seriously impressive.
The scope and breadth of what we've learned from, from both Larry and Sergei. Yeah. And it's just kind of clicking for me too, like why these things like AI and blockchain and others are so hot right now is because these companies are betting on that being the future of science and technology. Like it may not.
B, you know, one thing that overtakes everything, but certainly at least one of these is going to become, you know, the technology of the early 21st century. And all of these companies want to hope to be a part of it because you know, they're gonna make money off of it. But it's, it's so fascinating that that creates this virtuous cycle of more and more companies working on these new scientific discoveries, which.
As Sergei saying like that is what advances your science now, a new thing that comes into play when you become this successful in this large, very similar to what happens to Warren buffet is that when you're the size of Google, when they make a push for something. They can almost make a dream come true because they can make their Mark just like Warren buffet invest.
Now in a company it's such a green light to the investment community. That, that, that stock will always go up because once it's public knowledge that he invested away, we go similar to this Google. Have such scale that we've discussed that when they say, Hey, we're making a bet on AR or VR or artificial intelligence that makes a market right there.
That's like 80% of the smartphones and 80% of search. That's a lot. That's a nice playground, isn't it? And so I, I really enjoyed, for some reason, I think that we're going to hear a lot of the same things in these shows, Mike, but I am always surprised. And I think what surprised me most was how Larry and Sergey his particular arrangement and leadership style enabled them to move fast and keep the momentum going.
To execute on these big dreams that they have. So they're like way up in the clouds, but also super tactical in getting these things done. Yeah. So that, that was really interesting to me to, to learn that about them and hear that from them. You would probably argue that. Musk has a little bit of that. Uh, he's he's always pushing to go fast and you certainly know that Jess actually is at Amazon is snooping around getting customer emails and actually following up on complaints.
I love how we're on a first name basis with all of these again, but what a great way to inspire us to think about the future and then hearing from Larry and Sergey and in. Aspect to them where future thinkers to, uh, Chad, we've got a ton of fun things coming up. We've got another guest coming on. What are you looking forward to in the next couple of shows Patagonia with our guests, Mr.
Pat, Hanlan really looking forward to the guest shows that we have coming up for you. The listeners were kind of taking it, had a gurney meticulous brand. This is the brand that goes out and says, don't buy any of our jackets. We'll send a truck to your city. I can just get it mended or fixed. So you don't need to waste money and buy a new one.
I mean, this is the kind of stuff Patagonia do very cool brand. Yeah, well it's yeah. So we're, we're taking a dive into some brands, uh, for a little while here, learning from some leaders that have created some amazing brands. Uh, in addition to Patagonia we're of course, going to take a look at Nike kind of resurrecting, a show topic that we had put on the back burner.
Um, Getting to Martha Stewart, who's built a huge media and product, uh, business. She is up for a ride as a self-made like ridiculous. Yeah. And, uh, and then I think we'll wrap up this kind of brand focus with one, two, maybe three shows on the biggest brand of them all at least at the moment, Apple. Yeah. So we're going to do Steve jobs.
He's co-founder Steve was NIAC and there, I mean, talk about mid-season transfer. They brought in the former CEO of Burberry, Angela Ahrendts to come and head up their retail operation. And boy, have we got some goodies for you, the listeners, and if you want to follow any of these, just jump on to moonshots.
Uh, dot IO, where you can get all the goodies from us. You can get the archives of the show, the show notes, all sorts of links to goodies. Uh, wow. I'm I am I'm pumped after the Google show. Uh I've I definitely, the reinforcing of this open system was a big one for me. Chatter. I feel ready to go out there, move fast, break some things and think about the future.
Yeah, I just wanted to say thank you to all the listeners that have given us iTunes reviews. Mike, I don't know if you've hopped on. On iTunes, but, uh, we've got some beautiful five-star reviews. Know if you're listening to this show and want to help others find us, please hop on to iTunes and leave us a review.
Leave an honest review. You don't have to give us five stars, but we'll take a few think, right? Okay. Yeah, there was, uh, you know, those reviews help us, uh, get visibility. And, um, yeah, as Mike said, you know, we're always eager to learn from you what you would like us to investigate research and find to bring onto the show.
So you can. Contact us from moonshots.io. Absolutely. And Chad, I want to thank you. This was so much fun to do Google. I cannot wait to have Pat on the show. He's a long-term friend of both of ours going back many, many years and talking about one of the greatest brands on the planet. Patagonia. So, uh, from Sydney, Thank you.
Chad, are you going to, uh, chill out a little bit in Brooklyn? I know the Mrs is on a, on a work trip. Are you going to do a Netflix session? I mean, w w what's the plan? Uh, unfortunately, you know, when the wife's away, the husband just gets more work done. So I feel like. It's, uh, it's going to be one of those, uh, those, okay, well, listen, enjoy.
I'm going to launch into my day. I've got coffee with a great, uh, designer later today. So I'm really looking forward to that. And then I got 1,000,001 calls with Europe later. So, um, I'm, I'm ready for a big day. Now. I'm going to be future thinking. So thank you to you, Chad. Thank you to our listeners. This was episode 28 of the moonshots podcast.
We'll catch you later here on moonshots.