Larry Page
The stories of each individual behind Google are no less inspiring - Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt or Sundar Pichai. Google's story started with a search engine and now the relentless search for better solutions continues to be at the core of everything it does. Here are some of the principles that I believe Google follows:
- Focus on the user
- Be open and share everything.
- Build a monopoly and stay away from competition
- Think big but start small
- Never fail to fail
- Spark with imagination, fuel with data
- Be a platform
- Have a mission that matters
Larry Page came out in open during his TED talk about his vocal chord paralysis and he mentioned how important it is to be open which is what google tries to be. Despite all the criticisms, hatred and fear of being a monopoly, sellers of data/privacy and what not, I believe their vision for a better world and their ability run a monopoly are trademarks to learn from them. It is also interesting, how Page and Brin who were on the verge of selling Google to focus on their PhD, eventually managed to build an empire. Page's personal growth of letting Schmidt take up the role of CEO when necessary and then later taking it up by himself to define the roadmap is nothing short of a masterstroke move.
Sundar Pichai in one of his talks said, "We want to always work on ambitious things and by definition, we won't succeed in everything we do. It's impossible to be very ambitious and not fail. When we write our company objectives, if we meet 70% of our objectives, we consider that as a success. If we meet 100% of our objectives, we always think we didn't write them ambitiously enough. I think that's fine. To me, what's much more important is, are we continuing to innovate? Are we at the forefront of applying computer science to solve problems for our users consistent with our mission? I think we do that, and we have to do that every year, and in the future too." Such profound words.
Alphabet, the parent company now covers everything from Artificial Intelligence to Life Sciences, Autonomous cars to Information technology, Moon rovers to Internet providing balloons. The company looks at everything 10x, tries to reach the limits of impossible to define what's possible and of course, continues to fail and learn.