[Background: Formerly a senior vice president at Charles Schwab; worked at Price Waterhouse and the RAND Corp.; ran a small consulting company in Southwest Asia; taught at Northwestern; has a doctorate in psychology at Princeton]
TOOLS THAT ALLOW FOR EXPLORATION
"I was deaf as a child, and I am dyslexic. I spent a lot of my childhood struggling to do things that everybody else found easy. I adapted by finding tools to make things simple. I'm still fascinated by tools that make it easier for people to explore their worlds. During the carpool this morning, we heard a song by the band Living Colour on the radio, and the driver asked, 'When did that come out?' I whipped out my iPhone and did a Google search. That's what drew me here, the idea that we can take the world's information and render it all available and useful. We make it easy for people to ask questions about the world."
UNLOCKING HIDDEN KNOWELDGE
"Historically, knowledge has been power because it has been hidden or impossible to find. Four hundred years ago, less than 5% of the world could read or write. Two hundred years ago, something like 20% of people could read or write. Today, we have an incredible transformation in which knowledge has become explicit in the world. But that's not the same thing as making it available."
THE FRAGILITY OF INNOVATION
"Innovation is superfragile. It's like a flower in early spring, where just the wrong weather will kill it. It's very easy to kill, by having the barriers of entry too high, by requiring people to say yes to something. Leadership can help, but it can also hurt, by accidentally saying, 'This is a dumb problem.' If you build a culture where the leader's voice has more weight, you'll step on things. We try very hard to let people innovate sort of freely."
ALL THE WORLD'S INFO, NOT JUST OUR INFO
"We're about to start adding other currencies for of payment. You can imagine the classic business which would say, 'Here are the countries with the highest revenue. Here's the highest percentage of coverage we don't have. Let's build those.' We did that, but we also wanted to help places where e-commerce isn't wildly successful yet.
Take sub-Saharan Africa. There are relatively few search queries from that area. Why? Well, partly because there are about 100,000 wireless Internet ports in the entire region. An hour of time in an Internet café costs roughly the equivalent of one month's wages. So no one is going to go do that. But there are more than 10 million Internet-enabled mobile phones. We started thinking about ways to accept those currencies and engage in mobile efforts. There's not a lot of business, but the business that could be created could change people's lives. One of our core values is making all the world's information available, not just what's in English."
GOOGLE'S OUT LOUD CULTURE
"Organizations that exist for a long time almost always have strong cultures. But any sociologist will tell you that it's rare for people to talk about the elements of their culture. They're just assumed. For example, if we all got in an elevator, we would turn around and face the doors. There's no reason to face the doors. Nothing happens. But we all understand those rules, without talking about it.
Is it a good idea to run ads that make fun of a competitor's product by name -- like the Apple ads that target Vista?
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