Secrets of success from Google co-founder Larry Page
ycombinator.com # 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.
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."
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.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.
I'd rather be Westinghouse. He didn't invent much but, bought the right's to Tesla's invention, successfully commercialized those and ultimately prevailed over Edison..
Interesting question - How do you look at yourself? Scientist -> Engineer -> Entrepreneur
...kind of like that 37signals design post a few days ago, no?
"# 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.
# 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.
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.
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?
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?
Why do you need a 'bloated reader' to read a text file?
Does your browser not render plain text?
Why isn't this plagiarism?
Plagiarism is when you try to pass off someone else's work as your own.
I think what you really mean is "Why isn't this copyright violation?" The answer to that is that I did not in fact "take their entire post and post it in full." (Did you even compare the articles?) I cut out everything rediff wrote, leaving only Larry Page's quotes. Arguably they could claim they have a copyright on the selection and ordering of the quotes, but that is a pretty weak claim.
While rediff may not have a claim on the copyright, they did go through the effort of compiling the quotes. At the very least, link back as a sign of respect for someone else's hard work.
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.
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.
original link: 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 ...
Larry Page said it, right?
So, who is being plagiarized?
# 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.
You can export data from Google Analytics pretty easily to CSV or excel.
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&...
# 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.
# I would rather have people think we're confused than let our competitors know what we're going to do.
I would like to personally thank you, pagination for the sake of advertising numbs me..
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?
It sounds like quotes from old interviews.
He mentions that they "just launched Gmail". Guessing 2004? Not sure why it's appearing 5 years later though.
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.
Maybe trying to regain their preferred status among the top talent looking for work
Have they lost it? Whom have they lost it to?
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.
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.
I feel a bit more secure and confidant than I did 5 minutes ago.