Sergey Brin | 7 Super Tips

Oh, hey there. Should I make a joke? Like, Hey, I'm fake writing. No, you guys, I like it. Okay. Hey, it's number one, bestselling author and motivational speaker, Eric Qualman, most of you know me as Equalman. On today's seven super tip show. We have the founder of Google or one of them, Sergey Brin. If you sort of continue that trajectory, uh, you do see more and more people that have been freed up over the past couple hundred years to do work that is, you know, more kind of thinking about things or creating things, uh, you know, speaking aesthetics, uh, whether it is in an intellectual domain or purely artistic domain, uh, and I would hope to see that trend continue. Uh, and I would hope that the world would find, you know, an opportunity. Uh, this is where I think education becomes very important. Um, and I think broad education, but as you know, some of these jobs are displaced, giving people the opportunity to get educated from the point of view of having actually the education resources, uh, the, uh, financial wherewithal to be able to pursue that, like, you know, you don't want to be studying Shakespeare and going hungry or something like that. And, uh, and being somewhat open-minded, giving people a chance to develop different skills that aren't necessarily, you know, okay, we have 5,000 needs for this exact kind of thing today. Uh, because probably the thing that you want exactly 5,000 of today is a thing that also is more realistically automatable. Uh, so I think it's important for people to be able to have freedom to study financial opportunity to study, uh, and, and to get meaning, I think, in addition to, you know, work being an important way that we exchange money and whatnot. Uh, people find profound meaning in their day to day jobs. It's, uh, very rewarding when you work on something you think is going to make a big difference. And, uh, yeah, it's a little bit harder, but I think, uh, I think the passion that one might bring with it, uh, brings so much more energy to that, that you're more likely to succeed. When I became interested in data mining, for example, Rajiv, uh, helped to create a group, uh, that, uh, within the computer science department would regularly meet on the subject of data mining. And, uh, a lot of great work came out of that. I would say that, uh, even though Rajiv was not technically my advisor, almost all of the work that I did and including, uh, the work, uh, behind Google, uh, he played an equally important role. When I shifted, uh, because of Google to entrepreneurship and I left the world of academia, uh, I was afraid that I would lose touch with Rajiv. Uh, but of course he was there too. And in fact, uh, Rajiv was longtime advisor to us at Google. And whenever I would meet, uh, another entrepreneur, uh, in whatever setting, it was pretty likely that Rajiv had had a role with that person, giving them a critical insight, making key connection. Uh, he was just everywhere all the time. I think that the, all the people in this room can attest, uh, how wide an impact Rajiv made both in academia and in industry. Now, mathematicians, uh, have their Erdos number and, uh, actors have their Bacon number. I think here in technology, uh, and Silicon Valley, we have our Matwani number. Many of the people in this room, uh, including myself are very lucky. We have the Matwani number of one. Uh, he directly inspired us and he directly led us on paths through our lives. And because his door was always open, as I said before, uh, there are probably a thousand of us with Matwani number one. Now, if we in turn were to inspire, uh, each of us was to inspire another thousand people in the way that Rajiv inspired us, then there would be a million people who have the Matwani number two. And they in turn can inspire others to a circle of incredible size, like a redwood tree in a forest, uh, plants, uh, thousands of seedlings, uh, that then in turn, uh, they grow to form a grove around the original tree and they spur even more trees. Still Rajiv's legacy will live forever. Each of us has a little bit of Rajiv Matwani inside of us. It's a parting gift so that we can try to achieve the standards that he set. I plan to use that gift as best as I can. Every day I will try to help someone. Every day I will try to dream up something new. Every day I will try to teach someone and every day I will try to enjoy my life just a little bit more. What better day to start than today? There's really no magic secret to it. There's not like there's some formula which tells you if you're going to do this problem, then that problem, then the other problem, you'll magically achieve success. I mean, it comes down to some preference, some intuition and mostly truthfully comes down to luck. But but if you never try, you know you will not succeed. And by trying in areas that you think might be fruitful, then eventually you are likely to end up with a success. First of all, I'm very lucky to have been in Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley is very lucky to have. Been able to benefit from the semiconductor boom and then software and now Internet and mobile. I mean, I think it's. There's a huge amount of luck there, but the luck also comes from taking many shots, you know, so many failures. You know, if I told you all the dumb things that I did, you know, we'd have to have much longer session. And and the success is, you know, they often are chance. I mean, I mentioned the Google brain work that they were just off in the corner. It's like, OK, fine, do your thing are, you know, verily, which is our subsidiary that does a wide range of health care innovation. Now, I really started with this glucose sensing contact lens project. And that was another one where I said, well, Bobak and Brian Otis were working on it, you know, and they wanted to put a computer in a contact lens. And I was like, you know what? That sounds crazy. But. You know, you go do your crazy thing, you know, you can only have a couple of people work on it. I'm not going to give you a lot of resources, but, you know, sure, if you put a computer in contact lens, good for you. And yet here they are, you know, a few years later and they're, you know, running, you know, they're doing serious studies now, they have a big partnership with the artists and Alcon and they are hopefully going to bring those to market alongside with a bunch of other projects that that has spawned. And I didn't know anything about that. And I never would have predicted or guessed that. I think we're just lucky to have the environment that tolerate. You know, making lots of risky bets and tolerating the failures that inevitably result. The other thing that we've really found over time at Google, watching at other companies, watching many of you, is the importance of the development cycle and how you really need to be able to turn quickly through things. And because, you know, obviously you're going to have failures, you're going to have the wrong idea, but it's important to fail quickly. You know, it was great that that fax didn't go through, it failed quickly. And I think that when you if you demand a really long development cycle, let's consider the tokamak that we saw earlier today, you know, having decades and tens of billions of dollars is not a good way to fail quickly. I mean, it's and, you know, hoping to get a lot of learnings along the way. It's just much less likely to work out. So as we know, we discussed this. So with Glass, we adopted this philosophy. We were going to develop a completely new version of the hardware and software every single month. And we sustained that or close to it for like seven versions. It's slowed now over time, unfortunately, as we're approaching something that's going to ship. But I think that iteration made a huge difference. And we learned so much with every single variant. And it's just there are a hundred reasons why you should not go that fast. You know, it takes a long time to get your tools made. And in fact, the tooling is a big deal. So I'm glad somebody's working on that. You know, engineers don't have enough time to do a proper design. You know, this gets shortchanged, that gets shortchanged. I mean, there are a hundred reasons not to go fast. But in the end, I'm really glad that we did. And and I think I've seen that across the range of products and ultimately forces you to make real tradeoffs about what actually is really important, you know, and things that you might have 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. I think there were a couple areas that were critical and, you know, that would be too vulnerable a spot to be in a way. I mean, there are many, many opportunities to broadly use technology to impact the world and to have a successful business. And we try to invest in at least in the places where we see a good fit to our company. But that could be many, many bets and only a few of them need to pay off. I guess from my perspective, running Google X, that's kind of my job is to to invest in a number of opportunities, each one of which may be a big bet. But I hope, well, I guess you have a portfolio, too, but I hope across that portfolio, some of them pay off and some of them are connected to our existing business and some not so much. If you look at the self-driving cars, for example, I hope that that could really transform transportation around the world and reduce the need for individual car ownership, the need for parking, road congestion and so forth. So, you know, if that was successful in its own right, I'd be super happy. It's obviously still a big bet. It's got many technical and policy risks. But. If you are willing to make a number of bets like that, you've got to hope that some of them will pay off. Those are seven super tips from Google co-founder Sergey Brin. And my hope is they help unlock and unleash your inner superpower. Fun facts about Sergey Brin. He was born in Moscow, but he attended fellow big tenor. He attended the University of Maryland in College Park. Motion creates emotion, which creates energy. Momentum tends to stay. Can I just pick it up there?