Larry Page's Speech at the 2005 University of Michigan Collect of Engineering Graduation

Anonimous transcript
Rough text transcript of Larry Page's speach. '??' means I couldn't hear it.
I typed this out /.444675, but don't blame me for stuff thats wrong, reply to it to correct it. Or Google anything you want to know from it ;-)
I have no idea about copyrights, but it's Larrys speech, and I would bet deaf people have the right to see it.

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Well thank you, it's a pleasure and honor to be here, And, I don't know... we're in trouble if "Details Magazine" is the most authorative source.

It's really kind of amazing to be here 10 years after I graduated, in 1995, from the electrical engineering and computer science department. [cheers] I have so much I want to say to you in a really short time, and we're going to go though it pretty quickly. Before I do that there is something I wish I was able to do at my graduation. You have tons and tons and tons of people here to supporting you. I'd like you all to get up and wave to your support, family, friends, and everybody.

I am deeply indebted to Michigan. Let try to give you a little of my history. One thing we didn't mention is my parents actually met here cleaning a car. So I really thought we should give them some thanks for that. ?? My dad actually said to me when I was deciding what school to go to "Well Ill pay for any school you want to go to as long as its Michigan" I have to admit this had a significant impact on where I ended up going. I'm also indebted to Michigan which was amazingly advanced in computation and this had been going on for a really long time. I remember using Zaptor? Which you guys probably don't know about, but in 1993 we had instant messaging, in the computer labs. Somebody would arrive, you'd know when they left, where they were. and you could instant message them, just like you do now on the internet, but that was in 1993, not today. In fact the main ?? speaker John ?? Brown, graduated in 1970, computer and communication sciences, which wasn't the normal kind of degree to have in 1970. In fact my dad graduated with his PhD in '65 also from that department having one of the first degrees like that to be awarded. I also learned from my father his electrical engineering assignments he would bring home he's 9 years older than me, and he went here as well, and I had learned how to do them all 9 years early. Its pretty helpful, made the classes a lot easier. I got great leadership training in ?? selling doughnuts apparently, that aparently still goes on here. One relaxing summer and I built an inkjet printer out of legos witch I recommend to everyone. If you have some extra time on your hands.

I also got a deep and relevant engineering education, just like all of you, and that's been very valuable in the time since I left Michigan. With good and lasting values, which I know a lot of you probably don't understand because your here, but its not true about everywhere people are nice and will talk to you and generally do the right things. Many of Goggles early employees came from Michigan too and I've really tried to give back to the university in anyway I can. I have been on the advisory board here and I'm sure I'll do other things in the future.

Now, I need to know a little more about you guys before I continue, so how many of you? I'll ask the graduates and the audience here, 'How many of you work, or will work, in Michigan?'

That's a pretty good number.

Alright, How about, 'Work or will work for a really big company?'

Uh huh, even more.

How about 'Work or will work for a start-up?'

Oh, that's a pretty good number.

Uh, 'Will go to grad school ?? ?'

Did I miss anybody else? Raise your hands.

OK well I thought that would cover most people.

How about, 'How many of you are Women?'

Yeah.

Alright, alright. How about 'Work or will work for Google?'

We got a couple in the audience too.

Help me out a bit. 'How many of you would consider working for ?? the ?? engineering ?? ?'

OK I think that's what I needed to take back with me.

Now I've touched a little on the stats since I go though the ??

Let me first give you a really quick history of Google. And I want the parents out there to pay particular attention.

I left Michigan and I drove to Stanford and I always thought they had made a mistake admitting me, I thought they were going to send me back on the bus once they figured out that it was really an accident. We ?? together a bunch of computers at Stanford and I convinced a couple people to help me out. Alan Sturnberg who graduated here from Michigan and did the ?? underground. We basically downloaded the whole web, and we weren't quite sure what we were going to do with it. It seemed like a good project at the time. We looked at the link structure, so which WebPages link to which other WebPages. We happened to have found a way of doing ranking which by looking at the links which pages are more important than others and its basically an igon fracture?? calculation. Your page is important if other people link to it, and that makes a lot of sense. It turned out to work pretty well. So then we decide, well given this ranking we could build a search engine, because at the time if you searched for university, for example, you wouldn't get the university of Michigan or in fact anything reasonable. You'd get pages that had university multiple times in the title, because that's how the ranking algorithms worked. I remember going to some people who worked at search engines and going, "well when you type university don't you think you should get something important? or at least that's interesting like universities", and he said, "Well no if you want university homepages you should type 'university homepage'.". That didn't seem quite right to me, so we went though and we figured out how to do this ranking, and it worked really well We did this research for many many years at Stanford. After awhile we found people sort of using it and thought, maybe we should start a company here, because nobody else would license the technology, we talked to all the other search engines. Now, for the parents out there, what would you think of this moment. Your son wants to ?? leave his PhD program in Stanford and hasn't graduated yet, would you let him go off and start a crazy company? Your supposed to nod. So maybe not, I guess its really important for people to take risks.

Let me just go though a bit of quick current Google stats. The leverage of computers is absolutely amazing. Google's really possible because of mores law. The increase in compute power basically doubles every 18 months, its an amazing amazing thing. In fact when we started the company we had three or four people and we had a couple of million people using our site. We actually accidentally put our phone number on our site, on the about page. People started calling us we couldn't do anything, the phone just kept ringing. We were able to operate our service using the power of computation and the power of our software. Which is an amazing amazing thing. Today we have 3500 people hundreds of millions of users a hundred languages, 1.2 billion in revenue per quarter and 369 million in ??, and we hire in 22 different countries, about 7 years after we started. That's been a huge amount of hard work, its probably 110% of my time for the last 10

[gap in audio]

How many ?? do you know? Well there you go. So, there's some other ?? words [inaudible].

Let me go though some of the surprises I've had in going though this process, there's a bunch of things that I didn't realize when I started. One is that, doing bigger things is easier than doing smaller things. I know that sounds really strange but it turns out, if you do something really big, you can get other people to help you, and you can get more people to help you. You get more of the kind of resources that you need. So its worth thinking about those big things to get done in the world. The example I'd give you is Google's mission, from the early days, even when we were just a couple of people, was to organize the worlds information. Make it universally accessible and useful. Now it wasn't just to be a search engine, now you've seen us do many other things since then.

[gap in audio]

If you keep that in mind that will help you, help improve the world. New ideas are worthwhile, and you can have really good ideas that can have a big impact.

Sergi and I would would hope ?? I think that was really important because he promised to question everything and learn independently and not always listen to the voice of authoritarisim. I encourage all of you to do that. That's also more fun. One of the biggest things that suppresses me is, there is a lot of money out there and resources for things, and there is very few people out there trying to do them. One of the things that amazes me is that very few people approached me that have good ideas, that have a team of people, even a small one, that have a little bit of traction and a good idea. Almost never happens, in California there's one street that has maybe 10 companies, with about 10 people each. They have a billion dollars in their pocket waiting to put it somewhere and its taking them much longer to find places to put it than they would like. That's a lot of money I mean you can do a lot of things with that kind of money. I'd encourage you, there's a lot of resources available, if your dedicated to working on the right thing, you have a small team, and your making some progress. It's not necessarily that hard to get into that state. All you need is a little support from your friends up here.

When I was 12 I wanted to be an inventor. Some point I came across the biography of Tessla who was of course the great electrical engineer. He invented power transmission, many other things we use today. He was an amazing amazing inventor, but he had trouble just supporting his research, and getting his inventions out into the world. I just read this story and I was just very saddened, like why did he have so much trouble? and I said I didn't want to be just an inventor I wanted to be someone who had enough resources to change the world by doing these things. I think that is what an engineer is, your a combination of a scientist, someone who can really bring that to practice, and really make things happen in the world. That's a wonderful thing. Now a lot of people think of engineering as a courier or a way to get money, but your really the people in the world that can make a huge change. You know, just like our computers and our millions of users, a couple of you can make something that everybody in the world can start using, improves upon their life, or has a huge impact. There's very few professions where that's true.

It's easy for the world to get sidetracked. In fact I don't know what the dean director was going to say but something very similar, that all of you are going into positions of public service, positions running companies, of positions running universities, governments, whatever you want, because I think there is very very little representation of engineering in those places, I'm probably one of the few executives, even in silicone valley, whose really a technologist and an engineer at heart, there's a very very small number of people. We hired Eric Schmitt? whose our CEO. We spent like a year and a half to find him. He's one of the only people we interviewed who had a PhD in computer science. He probably was the only such person who'd been CEO of a large public company. We thought that was important. We wanted Google to be an engineering company, not a business or sales firm. I really encourage you to think about that. If you want to change the world, a good way of doing it is to be in a position of authority, positions of leadership and they're waiting for you.

I do want the parents up there to encourage the kids to take a little bit more risk. I think you should give your kids a little credit, and not just for graduating from Michigan engineering, which is the greatest engineering school in the world. [applause] But also, you should give them a little credit as in credit cards, all of these kids are going to make a lot of money, you don't have to worry. There going to have a fine income you should encourage them to take some rest, you should encourage them to travel well their still young, and use up a little bit of that credit card. Let me just talk a little bit more about risk. I almost didn't start Google because I was worried about risk, you know me leaving the PhD program. That was really pretty much all that was in my head. I could leave it, they wouldn't take me back, its not a big deal, its not like I would be out of a job, ?? , I would have a fine life if even if Google hadn't worked out. At Google we really try to encourage innovation and risk taking. That's not something that necessarily happens by itself, especially in companies. One of the things we give all of our people time, 20% time we call it. That's time basically where you do whatever you want, what you think is the best thing to work on, so its free of all management discretion, you can work on whatever you want, almost all the products that dean director mentioned have been started by individuals in their own time, and that's where we get all that innovation, gmail, maps, all these things. Also we keep the teams really small, initially it might be just yourself, most of our teams are just a couple of people. Once it becomes successful, it starts getting many many many more people, but you know, innovation happens in small groups, much like your used to doing in your projects. We also have 70-20-10 we call it, 70% of the company focus on our main areas of revenue, which is search, and advertising, 20% on related things, and 10% on sort of anything goes. Now every once and awhile we check to make sure a ?? of people aren't ??, then it turns out they are, that gives us a nice sort of compromise between, exploiting our current business but making sure we're devoting enough resources, to really generating new ones.

I know some of will ?? going to business school. I know what its like in business school and I wanted to give you a plug. I think you don't really need to go to business school. You have a pretty rigorous education, much of this covers rocket science, but it does help us to have interests in business. [cheers] Yeah. Rocket Science. I'll talk about that in a minute. You basically just need the interest and read a lot of books. I read a whole bookshelf full of business books, and that's basically what I needed.

Technology companies really have an engineering technology advantage, most of them acknowledge that. I think that's one reason Google's been successful. Now, also many of the amazing insights that happen in business, actually come from people who aren't really in the business. I just want to give you two quick examples. One is the guy who started Bank of America, geovine. He actually started Bank of America because he was in a board meeting, he was a successful business man in another business. He was added to the board of a bank and got so upset with the way they were running the bank, that he stormed out, one day, of the board meeting, and he started his own bank, and is was really just out of, you know, just all anger that he did it. He thought that he should loan money to poor people. That turned out to work really well, he was really good at it, and he he basically helped san Francisco rebuild quickly after the earthquake. He started this whole huge institution which is now Bank of America. What's amazing to me, 20 years later, something like that Mohammad Unus in Bangladesh has done almost the same thing, and he's given out over 2 billion dollars now, $160 at a time to poor people. and been very successful, the money gets returned its a functioning business, he makes money, and its a very simple idea, just have banks for poor people. They need banking services too, they need loans, they need households, they need lots of things. Both have been very successful doing that. You all can do that, its not a really deep business strategy. Some of the biggest things are really like that.

As we started hiring business people, one of our early engineers started writing around our whiteboards, 'Don't be evil.' You know, just write it from time to time it would appear on a white board in the company. It was like I said when we had more business people than engineers, we started to get more people, that would turn out to be a really important thing, and it really caught on in the company. It's been something that's been really good. I would characterize Hugh and Watson, engineers, as the being very much the good part of the world. You should think of yourselves that way.

Last weekend I was in Atlanta, I was at something called the FIRST competition started in 19?? there was 25,000 people there, in the Georgia dome basically building robots, to compete with each other. I don't know if you have all seen that but its an amazing amazing thing, and I encourage all of you to participate in it. His goal is to market engineering, get more kids in high school interested in engineering, many of these kids are from other cities and other places, its just an amazing thing. I would also like you all to focus on that. How can we get engineering better marketed make it more sexy for the world, get more people working in it. Both Women and many other people because we need everybody's skill and talents to make the world better.

There's a couple more things that Ill beat up. Let me just talk a little about the future because that's really fun. I think its amazing the things that are likely to happen, even that you can sort of see happening now. I'll spin you a couple of examples, one of them is carbon nano tubes, who would have ever thought that you could build the worlds strongest material out of carbon? Which is like everywhere. Well its an amazing amazing thing. You can build totally crazy things ??. You might be able to go into orbit and I got interested in this I joined the board of the X-Prize which is something that sponsored Burt Rutan's Space Ship One, which won the $10 million prize recently. They're trying to foster competition to get people into space. I have a good friend who really wants to go to Mars, and so he decided he should build a rocket company. In fact he has been pretty successful about it. I just sent him an email I asked him for some stats, and like two hours he sent me back a reply, so what is the theoretical cost of getting a pound of something into space, using a rocket? what's the lower ??, well its basically the fuel, that powers the rocket into orbit. It turns out that the space shuttle costs about 10 to 20,000 dollars per pound it carries up. What do you think the theoretical limit is? the lower limit? its actually about $10 to $20 per pound, you can move something into orbit. you think about that, for you or your body that's probably the cost of an expensive airplane ticket, right? just in fuel, basic fuel cost. Do you think someday we might figure out how to get close to that? I think we could. That would change things a lot and might get us to Mars or the other things.

Dean director mentioned our library project. We have been working on that project probably almost, 9 yeas now. The hard part was really trying to get people to believe that it was possible. It hasn't been so much in doing the work so much as getting everything digitized that's and so on, that's a big deal and will take many more years.

I like to when I ?? talk to university presidents and we had the ?? Marisa Coleman out to Google recently and asked her well why don't you make Michigan bigger? She kind of looked at me funny, which is usually what university presidents do when you ask them this question. I do think that if you think that universities are a good thing as I certainly did coming out of Michigan. How do we get them to be bigger? How do we get them to be more? How do we get everybody to go though an experience like Michigan, not just in the U.S. but everywhere in the world. That's a big job. Can you build better cities can you have better construction technology. A better quality of life for people. China is building something like 9 and a half ?? size cities for the next 15 years or something, just think about that. They are doing it much the way we did it in the past, there is probably huge opportunity there. Finally I mentioned a little bit about micro credit. That I believe eliminating poverty is really something we could do. Bono Is actually much more eloquent than I am on this. So ill read you two quotes from him. "Africa is not a cause it is an emergency." He also says that. "?? grand U.S.A. could use some polishing." I say that as a huge fan. He's saying basically, imagine how the world would think of America if we were able to eliminate poverty, or how did they handle it, and that's probably something's that's probably obtainable.

My ?? advice to you, have confidence, fail often, have a healthy disregard for the impossible. You have a huge opportunity to use engineering, technology and businesses skill to improve the world. You should do things that matter, and you should have fun, because otherwise you wont succeed, and you should travel, and I suggest China, Africa and India there's lots of amazing things there.

Finally let me just leave you with two things. Our mission at Google is really to build the ultimate search engine. That means that it would understand everything in the world, it would understand exactly what you wanted when you type the query, and it will give you back exactly what you want. In computer science we like to call that artificial intelligence. That you can type any query into Google and it will always give you the right answer, it will be smart and so obliviously that's not the easiest thing in the world to do, but as we get closer and closer to that. we have real improvements in quality and make Google better anyway so its a great ??.

Finally you are now Michigan engineers, save your world by building your dreams.