Larry Page on how to change the world
Breakthrough ideas are around the corner, says the Google co-founder. But most of us are failing to take a chance on them.
That's part of the problem, but I think that can be overcome with education and environment and infrastructure. My experience is that when people are trying to do ambitious things, they're all worried about failing when they start. But all sorts of interesting things spin out that are of huge economic value. Also, in these kinds of projects, you get to work with the best people and have a very interesting time. They're not really taking a risk, but they feel like they are.
As a public company, you have an obligation to shareholders. How does that come into play when you start designating resources to speculative projects?
In practice that's not an issue. I've told the whole company repeatedly I want people to work on artificial intelligence - so we end up with five people working on it. Guess what? That's not a major expense. There's a reason we talk about 70/20/10 , where 70% of our resources are spent in our core business and 10% end up in unrelated projects, like energy or whatever. [The other 20% goes to projects adjacent to the core business.] Actually, it's a struggle to get it to even be 10%. People might think we're wasting money or whatever. But that's where all our new stuff has come from.
Isn't this easier to do at a place like Google than, say, at older Fortune 500 companies?
