

Secrets of success from Google co-founder Larry Page - popat
http://www.ycombinator.com/pagequotes.txt

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11ren

        # 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.

~~~
mhartl
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.

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jimbokun
"# 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.

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jorgeortiz85

      # 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
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.

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Jasber
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?

~~~
anewaccountname
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?

~~~
Xichekolas
Why do you need a 'bloated reader' to read a text file?

Does your browser not render plain text?

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Harkins
# 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
You can export data from Google Analytics pretty easily to CSV or excel.

~~~
Harkins
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&...](http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=57161)

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ananthrk
# 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.

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

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

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Encosia
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
It sounds like quotes from old interviews.

~~~
daveambrose
He mentions that they "just launched Gmail". Guessing 2004? Not sure why it's
appearing 5 years later though.

~~~
sqs
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.

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brown2020
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.

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aston
What's the original source on this?

~~~
indigoviolet
[http://specials.rediff.com/money/2009/jan/05slide11-want-
to-...](http://specials.rediff.com/money/2009/jan/05slide11-want-to-succeed-
like-googles-larry-page.htm)

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

