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Fireside Chat With Google Co-Founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin - Khosla Ventures-2014
Fireside Chat With Google Co-Founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin - Khosla Ventures-2014
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VIDEO
https://www.khoslaventures.com/fireside-chat-with-google-co-founders-larry-page-and-sergey-brin 1/22
06/01/2021 Fireside chat with Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin | Khosla Ventures
Fireside chat
with Google co-
founders, Larry
Page and Sergey
Brin
VK But I had a hard time getting the management team to agree that
they should acquire Google.
LP I think he’s saying that they were having a hard time going to 1.6
billion, and we were having a hard time changing our number.
https://www.khoslaventures.com/fireside-chat-with-google-co-founders-larry-page-and-sergey-brin 3/22
06/01/2021 Fireside chat with Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin | Khosla Ventures
VK They felt that they didn’t need it. But I start here for one very simple
reason. There are many, many instances where things could have gone
either way. I’m really glad they didn’t acquire, because the world might
have been a very, very different place. Looking back in retrospect, I feel
like it would have been really, really sad if, in fact, Larry and Sergey had
sold the company and not pursued the vision and changed the world
the way they have.
VK It’s amazing when the business people take over, they get focused
on short-term revenue and lose the long-term vision. That’s a good
place to kick off on a different point. Most companies end up in failure,
and I’m not talking about just the start-ups. But if you look at the S&P
500, so many of the very large companies keep going out of business
at an increasing rate. People are surprised. What do companies need to
https://www.khoslaventures.com/fireside-chat-with-google-co-founders-larry-page-and-sergey-brin 4/22
06/01/2021 Fireside chat with Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin | Khosla Ventures
VK I’d love both of you to comment a little bit on where Google is. What
are the couple of things that become really, really critical for Google to
do in the next five to 15 years? What areas are going to be critical?
SB I think if there was a couple of areas that were critical, then that
would be too vulnerable a spot to be in, in a way. There are many, many
opportunities to broadly use technology to impact the world, and to
have a successful business. We try to invest, at least, in the places
https://www.khoslaventures.com/fireside-chat-with-google-co-founders-larry-page-and-sergey-brin 5/22
06/01/2021 Fireside chat with Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin | Khosla Ventures
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. From my perspective –
running Google X – that’s my job, is to invest in a number of
opportunities, each one of which may be a big bet. But I hope– well,
you have a portfolio too. But I hope, across that portfolio, some of them
pay off. 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. If that was successful in its own right, we
would 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.
VK Larry, any particular areas you think are critical to Google’s success
the next few years? Areas you don’t want to screw up?
https://www.khoslaventures.com/fireside-chat-with-google-co-founders-larry-page-and-sergey-brin 6/22
06/01/2021 Fireside chat with Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin | Khosla Ventures
should be able to skip the search results, and go directly to the answer.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work that well. It was kind of an obtuse naming
of the feature, but that was the same kind of idea. We feel like right
now, computers are still pretty bad. You’re just messing around. You’re
scrolling on your touchscreen phone, and trying to find stuff. You’re in a
car. It’s bouncy, and you can’t– it doesn’t really work. I think the actual
amount of knowledge you get out of your computer versus the amount
of time you spend with it is still pretty bad. So I think our job is to solve
that, and most of the things we’re doing make sense in that context.
VK Along those lines, one of the areas I know you’ve both been very
interested in is machine learning and AI, as it’s been called in the past.
In the past, it’s never quite reached its potential or speculated potential.
How far do you think it is as a technology, and how much of a role do
you think it plays going forward?
SB Look, this is our latest model, right here [gestures at Larry]. See, not
perfect yet. But doing pretty well. In the machine learning realm, we
have several kinds of efforts going on. There’s, for example, the brain
project, which is really machine learning focused. It takes input, such as
vision. In fact, we’ve been using it for the self-driving cars. It’s been
helpful there. It’s been helpful for a number of Google services. And
then, there’s more general intelligence, like the DeepMind acquisition
that – in theory – we hope will one day be fully reasoning AI. Obviously,
computer scientists have been promising that for decades and not at all
delivered. So I think it would be foolish of us to make prognoses about
that. But we do have lots of proof points that one can create intelligent
things in the world because– all of us around. Therefore, you should
presume that someday, we will be able to make machines that can
reason, think and do things better than we can.
https://www.khoslaventures.com/fireside-chat-with-google-co-founders-larry-page-and-sergey-brin 7/22
06/01/2021 Fireside chat with Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin | Khosla Ventures
VK In this group, there are a bunch of people who are addressing the
beginnings of the machine-learning revolution. There are people
replacing farm workers, so you can weed plants and provide plant-by-
plant care. People who are doing machines to make hamburgers
automatically, all the way up the chain to people who are replacing law
clerks or even doctors, psychiatrists, ENT specialists, you name it. So
the whole span, from very simple work to very large work, is being
replaced in a way that is a little bit scary. I want to come back before we
finish to the social aspects of some of the technology changes. But I do
wonder if the vast majority of jobs that we know today, more than 50-
percent might be replaced by machines that can do that human
judgment piece better.
SB They did. They started that way. I don’t know if they’re actually
doing that. I don’t know. They keep hiring partners for whatever reason,
so I don’t know. It might not be working so well, the algorithm venture.
SB Maybe they just sit around and have parties. Maybe they are using
the algorithm. I don’t know what goes on in Google Ventures. But I do
think that a lot of the things that people do have been – over the past
century – replaced by machines and will continue to be.
https://www.khoslaventures.com/fireside-chat-with-google-co-founders-larry-page-and-sergey-brin 8/22
06/01/2021 Fireside chat with Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin | Khosla Ventures
https://www.khoslaventures.com/fireside-chat-with-google-co-founders-larry-page-and-sergey-brin 9/22
06/01/2021 Fireside chat with Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin | Khosla Ventures
unemployment. You just reduce work time. Everyone I’ve asked– I’ve
asked a lot of people about this. Maybe not you guys. But most people,
if I ask them, ‘Would you like an extra week of vacation?’ They raise
their hands, 100-percent of the people. ‘Two weeks vacation, or a four-
day work week?’ Everyone will raise their hand. Most people like
working, but they’d also like to have more time with their family or to
pursue their own interests. So that would be one way to deal with the
problem, is if you had a coordinated way to just reduce the workweek.
And then, if you add slightly less employment, you can adjust and
people will still have jobs.
SB I will quibble a little bit. I don’t think that in the near term, the need
for labor is going away. It gets shifted from one place to another, but
people always want more stuff or more entertainment or more creativity
or more something.
https://www.khoslaventures.com/fireside-chat-with-google-co-founders-larry-page-and-sergey-brin 10/22
06/01/2021 Fireside chat with Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin | Khosla Ventures
VK But they may be indicators that income distribution will get more
lop-sided over time.
SB I think ideally, one would try to tax more of the things that we don’t
want, and either subsidize or encourage the things that we do want.
The kinds of things people spend money on that are wasteful, you can
imagine having higher taxes on. Or things that are harmful, like carbon,
could be taxed at a higher rate. On the one hand, presumably it will
slow wasteful spending. But on the other hand, perhaps we could
encourage the kinds of investments that we want to be making.
https://www.khoslaventures.com/fireside-chat-with-google-co-founders-larry-page-and-sergey-brin 11/22
06/01/2021 Fireside chat with Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin | Khosla Ventures
https://www.khoslaventures.com/fireside-chat-with-google-co-founders-larry-page-and-sergey-brin 12/22
06/01/2021 Fireside chat with Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin | Khosla Ventures
SB Well, I’m very excited about the technology that we’re building, but
it’s still in its early stages. I think eventually, in the future, there might be
multiple partners or companies that we work with that– some of them
can be manufacturers and some might be service providers. This is all
pretty speculative. Right now, we’re working hard to just get the basics
so the technology working. But the ideal self-driven car is not one
that’s– we’ve experimented, where we convert the Lexuses and the
Priuses. But it’s also really nice to not have a steering wheel, not have
pedals; maybe the seats should face each other, things like that. I’m not
sure that the traditional car designs are ideal for self-driving.
LP I’ve been thinking about this change quite a bit over the years. I
think it sounds stupid if you have this big company, and you can only
do five things. I think it’s also not very good for the employees. Because
then, you have 30,000 employees and they’re all doing the same thing,
which isn’t very exciting for them. So I think, ideally, the company would
scale the number of things it does with the number of people in a linear
fashion. As far as I can tell, that never happens. It’s logarithmic with the
https://www.khoslaventures.com/fireside-chat-with-google-co-founders-larry-page-and-sergey-brin 13/22
06/01/2021 Fireside chat with Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin | Khosla Ventures
number of people, if that. I would always have this debate actually, with
Steve Jobs. He’d be like, ‘You guys are doing too much stuff.’ And I’d
be like, ‘Yeah that’s true.’ And he was right, in some sense. But I think
the answer to that – which I only came to recently, as we were talking
about this stuff – is that if you’re doing things that are highly interrelated,
then there is some complexity limits. It’s all going to escalate to the
CEO, because you have things that are interrelated. At some point, they
have to get integrated. A lot of our Internet stuff is like that. The user
experience needs to make sense. It needs to feel like you’re using
Google, not that you’re using something else. So I think there is a limit
on how much we can do there, and we have to think carefully about it.
Everything about the automated cars is like– Sergey can do that, and I
don’t have to talk to him. I like talking to him. But I don’t really have to
talk to him about that, because there’s almost zero impact on the rest of
our business. Although it does use some great engineers who we have
on mapping and other things. Naturally, they move to that project, but
that’s a scalable process. I don’t have to talk to those engineers. They
just move magically. So I do think companies usually try to do very
adjacent things. They figure, “We’re going to know exactly how to do
something that’s very similar to what we already do.” The problem with
that is that causes a management burden. Whereas, if you did
something a little less related, you can actually handle more things.
LP Balloons.
https://www.khoslaventures.com/fireside-chat-with-google-co-founders-larry-page-and-sergey-brin 14/22
06/01/2021 Fireside chat with Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin | Khosla Ventures
LP I was just going to say, for startups, maybe. You need to get one
thing done well, or else you don’t have permission to do anything else.
But for big companies, I think it’s a little different.
SB I don’t wear them. Well, I don’t wear contacts, so I don’t have the
need to measure my glucose. But they should be coming along pretty
well. I’m very excited about that. Generally, health is just so heavily
regulated. It’s just a painful business to be in. It’s just not necessarily
how I want to spend my time. Even though we do have some health
projects, and we’ll be doing that to a certain extent. But I think the
regulatory burden in the U.S. is so high that think it would dissuade a lot
of entrepreneurs.
https://www.khoslaventures.com/fireside-chat-with-google-co-founders-larry-page-and-sergey-brin 15/22
06/01/2021 Fireside chat with Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin | Khosla Ventures
VK In the first week, Kaiser believes they saved three suicides, because
the app alerted the nurse that the patient was in a suicidal state. That’s
just the big outcome. But that feels like a software business, mostly.
Delivered mostly through mobile, and it’s more needed in the least
regulated areas – India, Africa, places like that. Go ahead.
LP I was going to say, in the U.S., I think diabetes and heart disease are
both about 3 or $400 billion dollars a year in expense. That’s of the 1.3
trillion, so that’s a pretty big chunk. So definitely, just making a dent in
those would be a big deal for people.
https://www.khoslaventures.com/fireside-chat-with-google-co-founders-larry-page-and-sergey-brin 16/22
06/01/2021 Fireside chat with Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin | Khosla Ventures
VK In fact, most people may not know this, but the first mobile app got
approved as a pharmaceutical because it’s directly competitive with
metformin, which is the principle drug for blood sugar reduction. So it
has the same effect, and the FDA approved it. Of course, with the funny
caveat that it has to be refilled every three months, and it’s priced at
$182 a month.
VK I’m going to have one question for you, Larry. You lost your voice
last year. You’ve talked a little bit about what you’ve learned from that.
SB Where do I start?
LP No.
https://www.khoslaventures.com/fireside-chat-with-google-co-founders-larry-page-and-sergey-brin 17/22
06/01/2021 Fireside chat with Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin | Khosla Ventures
LP Not fundamentally.
LP The other thing, we know enough that when we’re disagreeing– you
make a lot of calls that aren’t obvious. So if you’re disagreeing, it’s
probably that it’s not obvious what to do.
SB Let’s see. Whoever has the mic, ask the question. Eric? Yeah.
LP No.
SB When we toured Excite, this was one of the things about it. They
toured us around. It was actually– I think it was Terabella or something.
https://www.khoslaventures.com/fireside-chat-with-google-co-founders-larry-page-and-sergey-brin 18/22
06/01/2021 Fireside chat with Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin | Khosla Ventures
LP That’s a really big topic, which I don’t know very much about. But I
do worry that when I look at the government– our interactions with
governments around things we get interested in – spectrum or
whatever – that it becomes pretty illogical. The reasons aren’t that the
people aren’t good, and they’re trying to do good things. Most people
you talk to in government are there for the right reasons. They’re not
there for the pay typically. They’re there because they want to make the
world better. But I think the set of rules that we have– one thing that I
would observe is that the complexity of government increases over
time. So, just looking at all our democracies around the world, n
modern regulation and in law, we have increases without bounds. I was
trying to reduce the complexity in Google. I was thinking, “We’re getting
to be a bigger company. Let’s take our rules and regulations. Let’s
make sure they stay at 50 pages, so people can actually read it.” But
the problem that I discovered about that was that by reference, we
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06/01/2021 Fireside chat with Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin | Khosla Ventures
include the entire law and regulation of the entire world, because we’re
a multinational company. We operate everywhere. Our employees, what
they do affects everything. In some sense, we’d have to read the
hundred million pages of law and regulation that are out there. It’s
probably something like that. I don’t know how much it is, but it’s very
big and getting bigger. One thing I propose is that– I was talking to
some government leaders. I said—actually to the President of South
Korea. It was great. I said, “Hey, why don’t you just limit your laws and
regulations to some set of pages? And when you add a page, you have
to take one away.” She actually wrote this down. She’s great.
LP No, it’s only one sentence. But I do think that– otherwise, I think the
government’s likely to collapse under its own weight, despite people
being good and well-meaning, just because of that one issue of
complexity increasing. I just don’t think it’s reasonable. When we went
public, laws were from 60 years ago. If you took a random law
professor, locked them in a room, told them to rewrite those rules,
you’d have something much better come out. But we’re not doing that.
VK Larry, we—
SB How do you know that? You don’t know about the dungeons, filled
with law professors. That’s the other Google X project I have.
VK We’ve got to finish up. But there’s one question I want you to just to
grasp, because a lot of founders deal with this. You started off as CEO,
got Eric as CEO for a while, took back over. Can you just speak to how
the experience was retrospectively? Was it the good way to do it? A
https://www.khoslaventures.com/fireside-chat-with-google-co-founders-larry-page-and-sergey-brin 20/22
06/01/2021 Fireside chat with Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin | Khosla Ventures
bad way to do it? How would you have done it different, or would you
do it the same? It’s something everybody here struggles with– or a lot of
people struggle with.
LP I think it turned out pretty well, so that’s really good. Eric’s a great
leader, and I think we learned a tremendous amount from him. I think
we ran pretty effectively also as a team for a long time on those things. I
think these are very personal decisions, and there’s probably no right
answer. If you have a really long time period, obviously, you can
probably learn the things you need to know about management or not.
Like I said, it’s a personal decision. I think running a company – a start-
up – is a really big commitment. It takes a lot out of you, out of your life
to do well, I think. I’m sure the same is true for companies as they get
bigger. So I’m not sure that’s for everyone. Some people are good at
starting things, not good at finishing things. And I think organizations
have trouble recognizing that, too, and those are difficult transitions for
people. In general, if you have a project or company and it can have
stable leadership over 20 years, that’s better than not.
VK Well, thank you. It’s been a treat to have both of you here. Really
appreciate the time to have you two drive here. In Sergey’s case, to
kite-board here. He didn’t quite make it.
https://www.khoslaventures.com/fireside-chat-with-google-co-founders-larry-page-and-sergey-brin 21/22
06/01/2021 Fireside chat with Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin | Khosla Ventures
https://www.khoslaventures.com/fireside-chat-with-google-co-founders-larry-page-and-sergey-brin 22/22