5 ms·

Secrets of success from Google co-founder Larry Page

129 points by popat 18y ago

Encosia 18y ago
Seems more like a Google press release than anything sincere. Maybe trying to regain their preferred status among the top talent looking for work during these tumultuous times?
- hernan7 18y ago
  It sounds like quotes from old interviews.
  - daveambrose 18y ago
    He mentions that they "just launched Gmail". Guessing 2004? Not sure why it's appearing 5 years later though.
    - sqs 18y ago
      Yeah, but then he says they launched with 30,000,000 Web pages indexed two years ago. This appears to be a bunch of quotes compiled from different interviews over a span of many years.
- dmoney 18y ago
  Maybe trying to regain their preferred status among the top talent looking for work Have they lost it? Whom have they lost it to?
  - orib 18y ago
    At least on this site, it sounds like any startup would be preferred to any established company including google. Although that really does seem to be mostly the tone of this site.
aston 18y ago
What's the original source on this?
- indigoviolet 18y ago
  http://specials.rediff.com/money/2009/jan/05slide11-want-to-succeed-like-googles-larry-page.htm http://specials.rediff.com/money/2009/jan/05slide11-want-to-...
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
jorgeortiz85 18y ago
# Part of our brand is that we're pretty understated in what we do. If you look at other technology companies, they might preannounce things, and it will be a couple years before they really happen, and they don't happen in the way they said they would. I miss this aspect of Google. Android and OpenSocial were announced months before they had an actual product.
- prospero 18y ago
  Android and OpenSocial were platforms, and needed to attract developers to realize their full potential. Google leverages user data to improve their searches (and most of their other products), but there's not really a network effect in play: more users do not necessarily create a better user experience. But with platforms, there's a real question of the chicken and the egg, and you have no choice but to drum up as much excitement you can, the earlier the better. Without the artificial momentum, it might not go anywhere.
medianama 18y ago
# I would rather have people think we're confused than let our competitors know what we're going to do.
alaskamiller 18y ago
I feel a bit more secure and confidant than I did 5 minutes ago.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
jimbokun 18y ago
"# We spent a lot of time getting our offices right. We think it's important to have a high density of people. People are packed together everywhere. We all share offices. We like this set of buildings because it's more like a densely packed university campus than a typical suburban office park." I work at Carnegie Mellon, and Google Pittsburgh is literally right next to the building I work in. I visited a friend there, and there really isn't much distinction between their office layout and the way the rest of the campus looks (except they have better food). Googlers attend and give talks on campus and in their offices all the time, right alongside the faculty and students. So, yes, I would say they have succeeded in recreating the grad school environment, assuming their offices are anything like the Pittsburgh one.
Harkins 18y ago
# The 'be good' concept also comes up when we design our products. ... We will make it possible for you to get your e-mail out of Gmail if you ever want to. I'd like to see this applied to Google Analytics, which is nice but has no way to export any data. I'd also like a way to delete all the junk Google has on me like logs of my searches. I guess I'd believe that "be good" was some kind of important principle to Google if they acted any different than any other company: use personal data for customer lock-in and to reuse/resell/mine elsewhere; give a small escape hatch to only those few services people complain loudest about.
- dcurtis 18y ago
  You can export data from Google Analytics pretty easily to CSV or excel.
  - Harkins 18y ago
    No. You can export reports, but you can't export the hit data itself. If there's a report with the columns ip address, session id, timestamp, url visited, referer, etc. I'll be happily proved wrong. http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=57161 http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
Jasber 18y ago
I'm all for making reading easier on us by condensing it. But this article takes their (rediff.com) entire post, posts it in full and never gives them credit. Why isn't this plagiarism?
- evilneanderthal 18y ago
  Larry Page said it, right? So, who is being plagiarized?
- aasarava 18y ago
  Plagiarism would be taking credit for having written the article. But you're right that there is a potential copyright violation -- unless the copyright owner has given pg permission to reprint the article in its entirety without attribution.
- projectileboy 18y ago
  I'm assuming PG did this for his own benefit, and then made it public. Having said that, this is a nitpicky and yet very serious charge - PG, you need to stick in a credit to the original source.
- popat 18y ago
  original link: http://specials.rediff.com/money/2009/jan/05slide1-want-to-succeed-like-googles-larry-page.htm http://specials.rediff.com/money/2009/jan/05slide1-want-to-s... though pg should have posted source link with his note, i dont think that even rediff.com is the copyright owner - to what i understand pg did it in the good faith to help HN readers and that's what it matters ...
- anewaccountname 18y ago
  This is simple copyright infringement, which is distinct from plagiarism. However, I have another complaint. Why a plain text file? I don't want to have to download some bloated reader just to read this thing. Can someone print to pdf and upload it to something sensible like scribd?
  - 18y ago
redorb 18y ago
I would like to personally thank you, pagination for the sake of advertising numbs me..
11ren 18y ago
# You don't want to be Tesla. He was one of the greatest inventors, but it's a sad, sad story. He couldn't commercialise anything, he could barely fund his own research. You'd want to be more like Edison. If you invent something, that doesn't necessarily help anybody. You've got to actually get it into the world; you've got to produce, make money doing it so you can fund it. The other Edison vs Tesla difference that strikes a chord in me is: Edison: "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration." Telsa on Edison: "just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 percent of the labour. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense." Edison was a hacker - and I mean one who hacks, like a bad golfer or a bad novelist, but who actually gets the ball in the hole, and actually writes the novel. When you are the only one who has done something, you are automatically the best. No matter how bad you are. The second last quote sort of reinforces the "learn through mistakes" attitude of Edison: # The thing that matters is experience. We have lots of executives from failed companies; they learned a lot from these things. They say, 'We can't do that -- we tried that and it didn't work.' So failure is useful.
- litewulf 18y ago
  ...kind of like that 37signals design post a few days ago, no?
  - deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
- mhartl 18y ago
  It seems to me the ideal would be a combination of Edison and Tesla. There's no reason one person couldn't have both Edison's work capacity and Tesla's theoretical genius. Certainly many of the best scientists qualify: Newton, for example, or Euler. Euler was incredibly prolific---his lifetime output fills shelf upon shelf---and yet he was undeniably a mathematical genius as well. In music, J.S. Bach also fits the mold of incredibly hard-working genius.
ananthrk 18y ago
# You can try to control people, or you can try to have a system that represents reality. I find that knowing what's really happening is more important than trying to control people. My take away from the whole list.
brown2020 18y ago
My favorite Edison quote is also the secret of his innovation: "I start where the last man left off." Innovation is always about learning from and standing on the shoulders of everyone who went before you.

129 points by popat 18y ago

Seems more like a Google press release than anything sincere. Maybe trying to regain their preferred status among the top talent looking for work during these tumultuous times?

hernan7 18y ago
It sounds like quotes from old interviews.
- daveambrose 18y ago
  He mentions that they "just launched Gmail". Guessing 2004? Not sure why it's appearing 5 years later though.
  - sqs 18y ago
    Yeah, but then he says they launched with 30,000,000 Web pages indexed two years ago. This appears to be a bunch of quotes compiled from different interviews over a span of many years.
dmoney 18y ago
Maybe trying to regain their preferred status among the top talent looking for work Have they lost it? Whom have they lost it to?
- orib 18y ago
  At least on this site, it sounds like any startup would be preferred to any established company including google. Although that really does seem to be mostly the tone of this site.

aston 18y ago

What's the original source on this?

indigoviolet 18y ago
http://specials.rediff.com/money/2009/jan/05slide11-want-to-succeed-like-googles-larry-page.htm http://specials.rediff.com/money/2009/jan/05slide11-want-to-...
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]

jorgeortiz85 18y ago

# Part of our brand is that we're pretty understated in what we do. If you look at other technology companies, they might preannounce things, and it will be a couple years before they really happen, and they don't happen in the way they said they would. I miss this aspect of Google. Android and OpenSocial were announced months before they had an actual product.

prospero 18y ago
Android and OpenSocial were platforms, and needed to attract developers to realize their full potential. Google leverages user data to improve their searches (and most of their other products), but there's not really a network effect in play: more users do not necessarily create a better user experience. But with platforms, there's a real question of the chicken and the egg, and you have no choice but to drum up as much excitement you can, the earlier the better. Without the artificial momentum, it might not go anywhere.

medianama 18y ago

# I would rather have people think we're confused than let our competitors know what we're going to do.

alaskamiller 18y ago

I feel a bit more secure and confidant than I did 5 minutes ago.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

jimbokun 18y ago

"# We spent a lot of time getting our offices right. We think it's important to have a high density of people. People are packed together everywhere. We all share offices. We like this set of buildings because it's more like a densely packed university campus than a typical suburban office park." I work at Carnegie Mellon, and Google Pittsburgh is literally right next to the building I work in. I visited a friend there, and there really isn't much distinction between their office layout and the way the rest of the campus looks (except they have better food). Googlers attend and give talks on campus and in their offices all the time, right alongside the faculty and students. So, yes, I would say they have succeeded in recreating the grad school environment, assuming their offices are anything like the Pittsburgh one.

Harkins 18y ago

# The 'be good' concept also comes up when we design our products. ... We will make it possible for you to get your e-mail out of Gmail if you ever want to. I'd like to see this applied to Google Analytics, which is nice but has no way to export any data. I'd also like a way to delete all the junk Google has on me like logs of my searches. I guess I'd believe that "be good" was some kind of important principle to Google if they acted any different than any other company: use personal data for customer lock-in and to reuse/resell/mine elsewhere; give a small escape hatch to only those few services people complain loudest about.

dcurtis 18y ago
You can export data from Google Analytics pretty easily to CSV or excel.
- Harkins 18y ago
  No. You can export reports, but you can't export the hit data itself. If there's a report with the columns ip address, session id, timestamp, url visited, referer, etc. I'll be happily proved wrong. http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=57161 http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

Jasber 18y ago

I'm all for making reading easier on us by condensing it. But this article takes their (rediff.com) entire post, posts it in full and never gives them credit. Why isn't this plagiarism?

evilneanderthal 18y ago
Larry Page said it, right? So, who is being plagiarized?
aasarava 18y ago
Plagiarism would be taking credit for having written the article. But you're right that there is a potential copyright violation -- unless the copyright owner has given pg permission to reprint the article in its entirety without attribution.
projectileboy 18y ago
I'm assuming PG did this for his own benefit, and then made it public. Having said that, this is a nitpicky and yet very serious charge - PG, you need to stick in a credit to the original source.
popat 18y ago
original link: http://specials.rediff.com/money/2009/jan/05slide1-want-to-succeed-like-googles-larry-page.htm http://specials.rediff.com/money/2009/jan/05slide1-want-to-s... though pg should have posted source link with his note, i dont think that even rediff.com is the copyright owner - to what i understand pg did it in the good faith to help HN readers and that's what it matters ...
anewaccountname 18y ago
This is simple copyright infringement, which is distinct from plagiarism. However, I have another complaint. Why a plain text file? I don't want to have to download some bloated reader just to read this thing. Can someone print to pdf and upload it to something sensible like scribd?
- 18y ago

redorb 18y ago

I would like to personally thank you, pagination for the sake of advertising numbs me..

11ren 18y ago

# You don't want to be Tesla. He was one of the greatest inventors, but it's a sad, sad story. He couldn't commercialise anything, he could barely fund his own research. You'd want to be more like Edison. If you invent something, that doesn't necessarily help anybody. You've got to actually get it into the world; you've got to produce, make money doing it so you can fund it. The other Edison vs Tesla difference that strikes a chord in me is: Edison: "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration." Telsa on Edison: "just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 percent of the labour. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense." Edison was a hacker - and I mean one who hacks, like a bad golfer or a bad novelist, but who actually gets the ball in the hole, and actually writes the novel. When you are the only one who has done something, you are automatically the best. No matter how bad you are. The second last quote sort of reinforces the "learn through mistakes" attitude of Edison: # The thing that matters is experience. We have lots of executives from failed companies; they learned a lot from these things. They say, 'We can't do that -- we tried that and it didn't work.' So failure is useful.

litewulf 18y ago
...kind of like that 37signals design post a few days ago, no?
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
mhartl 18y ago
It seems to me the ideal would be a combination of Edison and Tesla. There's no reason one person couldn't have both Edison's work capacity and Tesla's theoretical genius. Certainly many of the best scientists qualify: Newton, for example, or Euler. Euler was incredibly prolific---his lifetime output fills shelf upon shelf---and yet he was undeniably a mathematical genius as well. In music, J.S. Bach also fits the mold of incredibly hard-working genius.

ananthrk 18y ago

# You can try to control people, or you can try to have a system that represents reality. I find that knowing what's really happening is more important than trying to control people. My take away from the whole list.

brown2020 18y ago

My favorite Edison quote is also the secret of his innovation: "I start where the last man left off." Innovation is always about learning from and standing on the shoulders of everyone who went before you.