Quotees Archive

You need to invent things and you need to get them to people. You need to commercialize those inventions. Obviously, the best way we’ve come up with doing that is through companies.

- Larry Page

It’s quite complicated and sounds circular, but we’ve worked out a way of calculate a Web site’s importance.

- Larry Page

Lots of companies don’t succeed over time. What do they fundamentally do wrong? They usually miss the future. I try to focus on that: What is the future really going to be? And how do we create it? And how do we power our organization to really focus on that and really drive it at a high rate?

- Larry Page

Many leaders of big organizations, I think, don’t believe that change is possible. But if you look at history, things do change, and if your business is static, you’re likely to have issues.

- Larry Page

Most people think companies are basically evil. They get a bad rap. And I think that’s somewhat correct.

- Larry Page

My grandfather was an autoworker, and I have a weapon he manufactured to protect himself from the company that he would carry to work. It’s a big iron pipe with a hunk of lead on the head. I think about how far we’ve come as companies from those days, where workers had to protect themselves from the company.

- Larry Page

My job as a leader is to make sure everybody in the company has great opportunities, and that they feel they’re having a meaningful impact and are contributing to the good of society. As a world, we’re doing a better job of that. My goal is for Google to lead, not follow that.

- Larry Page

The idea that everyone should slavishly work so they do something inefficiently so they keep their job – that just doesn’t make any sense to me. That can’t be the right answer.

- Larry Page

The ultimate search engine would basically understand everything in the world, and it would always give you the right thing. And we’re a long, long ways from that.

- Larry Page

We can’t have democracy if we’re having to protect you and our users from the government over stuff we’ve never had a conversation about. We need to know what the parameters are, what kind of surveillance the government is going to do, and how and why.

- Larry Page

We do benefit from the fact that once we say we’re going to do it, people believe we can do it, because we have the resources. Google helps in that way: There aren’t many funding mechanisms like that.

- Larry Page

We don’t have as many managers as we should, but we would rather have too few than too many.

- Larry Page

We feel like right now, computers are still pretty bad. You’re just messing around. You’re scrolling on your touchscreen phone, and trying to find stuff. You’re in a car. It’s bouncy, and you can’t– it doesn’t really work. I think the actual amount of knowledge you get out of your computer versus the amount of time you spend with it is still pretty bad. So I think our job is to solve that, and most of the things we’re doing make sense in that context.

- Larry Page

We have a mantra: don’t be evil, which is to do the best things we know how for our users, for our customers, for everyone. So I think if we were known for that, it would be a wonderful thing.

- Larry Page

We want to build technology that everybody loves using, and that affects everyone. We want to create beautiful, intuitive services and technologies that are so incredibly useful that people use them twice a day. Like they use a toothbrush. There aren’t that many things people use twice a day.

- Larry Page

We’re at maybe 1% of what is possible. Despite the faster change, we’re still moving slow relative to the opportunities we have. I think a lot of that is because of the negativity… Every story I read is Google vs someone else. That’s boring. We should be focusing on building the things that don’t exist.

- Larry Page

What is the one sentence summary of how you change the world? Always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting!

- Larry Page

You can make an internet company with 10 people and it can have billions of users. It doesn’t take much capital and it makes a lot of money — a really, really lot of money — so it’s natural for everyone to focus on those kinds of things.

- Larry Page

You may think using Google’s great, but I still think it’s terrible.

- Larry Page

Invention is not enough. Tesla invented the electric power we use, but he struggled to get it out to people. You have to combine both things: invention and innovation focus, plus the company that can commercialize things and get them to people.

- Larry Page

It’s important that the company be a family, that people feel that they’re part of the company, and that the company is like a family to them. When you treat people that way, you get better productivity.

- Larry Page

It really matters whether people are working on generating clean energy or improving transportation or making the Internet work better and all those things. And small groups of people can have a really huge impact.

- Larry Page

If your access to health care involves your leaving work and driving somewhere and parking and waiting for a long time, that’s not going to promote healthiness.

- Larry Page

Especially in technology, we need revolutionary change, not incremental change.

- Larry Page

For me, privacy and security are really important. We think about it in terms of both: You can’t have privacy without security.

- Larry Page

I can’t really comment on rumors.

- Larry Page

I do think there is an important artistic component in what we do. As a technology company I’ve tried to really stress that.

- Larry Page

I don’t think we’re going to run out of important things to do, compared with the resources that we have. There are many, many problems in the world that need solving.

- Larry Page

I have over 2 million followers now on Google Plus.

- Larry Page

I like going to Burning Man, for example. An environment where people can try new things. I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society. What’s the effect on people, without having to deploy it to the whole world.

- Larry Page

I like the fact that I can meet anyone now and have a conversation.

- Larry Page

I really like using my Samsung (005930:KS) tablet. I previously used the Motorola Xoom for a while and liked that.

- Larry Page

I think part of the reason we’re successful so far is that originally we didn’t really want to start a business.

- Larry Page

I used to have this debate with Steve Jobs, and he would always say, ‘You guys are doing too much stuff.’ He did a good job of doing one or two things really well. We’d like to have a bigger impact on the world by doing more things.

- Larry Page

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

- Larry Page

If we were motivated by money, we would have sold the company a long time ago and ended up on a beach.

- Larry Page

If you ask an economist what’s driven economic growth, it’s been major advances in things that mattered – the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that.

- Larry Page

If you say you want to automate cars and save people’s lives, the skills you need for that aren’t taught in any particular discipline. I know – I was interested in working on automating cars when I was a Ph.D. student in 1995.

- Larry Page

If you’re changing the world, you’re working on important things. You’re excited to get up in the morning.

- Larry Page

Always deliver more than expected.

- Larry Page

Deep knowledge from your manager goes a long way toward motivating you. And I have a pretty good capability for that.

- Larry Page

Computing is kind of a mess. Your computer doesn’t know where you are. It doesn’t know what you’re doing. It doesn’t know what you know.

- Larry Page

Big companies have always needed and cooperated in areas where it made sense.

- Larry Page

Basically, our goal is to organize the world’s information and to make it universally accessible and useful.

- Larry Page