Larry Page, every mention
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every year anyone David Rosenthal 140Ben Gilbert 58Brendan Eich 3Jason Calacanis 2
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Larry Page comes up
10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis) · Acquired
- ▶ 6:23 Ben Gilbert And so Larry and Sergei's first desks when they got kicked out of Stanford's offices were right there.
Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 8:26 David Rosenthal I mean, Larry Page always thought of Google as an artificial intelligence company.
- ▶ 8:30 David Rosenthal And in fact, Larry Page's dad was a computer science professor.
- ▶ 8:57 Ben Gilbert And so it was frankly contrarian for Larry's dad to spend his life and career and research work in AI.
- ▶ 9:05 David Rosenthal And that rubbed off on Larry.
- ▶ 9:19 David Rosenthal And Larry, of course, was always dreaming much, much bigger.
- ▶ 9:24 David Rosenthal In the year, 2002 years after Google's founding, when Larry says artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google,
- ▶ 10:13 David Rosenthal Now, Georges was one of Google's first 10 employees, incredible engineer, and just like Larry Page's dad, he had a PhD in machine learning from the University of Michigan.
- ▶ 12:57 David Rosenthal I think this coincides with that period in 2001, when Larry Page fired all the managers.
- ▶ 24:19 David Rosenthal So in April of 2007, Larry Page hires Sebastian Thrun from Stanford to come to Google and work first part-time and then full-time
- ▶ 25:16 Ben Gilbert And Larry came over and said, what if we just acquire your company before it's even started in the form of signing bonuses?
- ▶ 29:02 David Rosenthal So on the back of this win with ground truth, Sebastian starts lobbying to Larry and Sergey.
- ▶ 29:35 David Rosenthal So as you would expect, Larry and Sergey are like, yeah,
- ▶ 34:11 David Rosenthal So in the next couple years after 2007 here, Sebastian's concept of bringing these computer science machine learning academics into Google as contractors or part-time interns, basically letting them keep their academic posts and work on…
- ▶ 1:16:35 Ben Gilbert I've got a great story of how Larry Page found out about it.
- ▶ 1:19:11 David Rosenthal So, then Demis gets a third call from Larry Page.
- ▶ 1:19:17 Ben Gilbert Do you want my story of how Larry knows about the company?
- ▶ 1:19:20 David Rosenthal I absolutely want your story of how Larry knows about the company.
- ▶ 1:20:05 Ben Gilbert They're watching this video of how clever it is, and flying with them on the same private plane is Larry Page.
- ▶ 1:20:13 David Rosenthal Of course, because Elon and Larry used to be very good friends.
- ▶ 1:20:18 Ben Gilbert And Larry is like, wait, what are you watching?
- ▶ 1:20:31 Ben Gilbert And the crazy thing is, this kinship between Larry and Demis is, I think, the reason why the deal gets done at Google.
- ▶ 1:20:43 David Rosenthal Larry has always viewed Google as an AI company.
- ▶ 1:20:55 Ben Gilbert And Demis, in fact, we should share with listeners, Demis told us this when we were talking to him to prep for this episode, just felt like Larry got it.
- ▶ 1:21:02 Ben Gilbert Larry was completely on board with the mission of everything that DeepMind was doing.
- ▶ 1:21:14 David Rosenthal So Larry doesn't need Demis and Shane and Mustafa and DeepMind to come work on products within Google.
- ▶ 1:21:25 David Rosenthal Demis can really believe Larry when Larry says, nah, stay in London.
- ▶ 1:22:29 Ben Gilbert A few months earlier, Larry Page held a strategy meeting on an island in the South Pacific.
- ▶ 1:22:39 Ben Gilbert Larry thought that deep learning was gonna completely change the whole industry, and so he tells his team, this is a quote, let's really go big, which effectively gave Alan a blank check to go secure all the best researchers that he…
- ▶ 1:24:14 Ben Gilbert Demis has true kinship with Larry and
- ▶ 1:31:14 David Rosenthal As we said, Elon and Larry had always been very close, and now here's Google, who Elon has already started to sour on a little bit as he's now trying to hire AI researchers, and you've got Alan Eustace flying around the world sucking up…
- ▶ 1:42:24 Ben Gilbert That's a big enough price tag that the request gets elevated to Larry Page, who personally approves it, even though finance wanted to kill it, because he goes, look, the future of Google is deep learning.
- ▶ 2:30:26 Ben Gilbert Yeah, I think Larry and Sergey were like, mm, if we're gonna compete seriously, we kind of need Gnome back and blank check to go get him.
- ▶ 2:32:27 David Rosenthal To Sundar, Larry, Sergey, all of Google leadership that this is an existential threat to Google.
- ▶ 2:34:18 David Rosenthal Up until this point, Google and Sundar and Larry and everyone
- ▶ 2:52:42 David Rosenthal Larry came to Sebastian and was like, yo, that's self-driving car stuff.
- ▶ 2:52:50 David Rosenthal And Larry's like, no, no, you should do it.
- ▶ 2:53:02 Ben Gilbert And Larry finally comes to him and says, why?
- ▶ 2:53:29 Ben Gilbert So Larry then goes, great, I'll give you a benchmark, so that way you know if you're succeeding.
- ▶ 2:55:19 David Rosenthal I think at the time that negotiations were taking place between Elon and Larry and Google, this was in the depths of the Model S production scaling woes.
- ▶ 2:56:09 Ben Gilbert So then there was what Larry wanted to do, option three, build robo-taxis.
- ▶ 3:51:58 Ben Gilbert I mean, Larry and Sergey control the company.
Google Part II: Alphabet (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 10:57 Ben Gilbert In 2001, famously pre-IPO at Google, Larry Page feels like Google is moving a little bit too slow and gets rid of all engineering managers.
- ▶ 11:08 Ben Gilbert So Larry and Wayne Rosing, who is leading engineering, go and meet with each engineer individually to talk about ideas that they could work on.
- ▶ 11:40 David Rosenthal Ah, so Larry and Wayne,
- ▶ 12:24 David Rosenthal So, 2001, Paul gets to work with encouragement from Larry and Win.
- ▶ 17:14 David Rosenthal Shows it to Larry and Sergey.
- ▶ 17:18 David Rosenthal So supposedly Larry and Sergey become the first beta users of Gmail.
- ▶ 17:51 David Rosenthal So obviously Larry and Sergey are jazzed first because of just the incredible nature of this product and Larry, especially, he is a product person and his view is if we can build a better product
- ▶ 22:05 David Rosenthal For all the reasons we just described, Google, Larry, Sergey, Eric, they want it to be so compelling that consumers demand it.
- ▶ 24:56 Ben Gilbert It was something that you actually used every day, or in the words of Larry Page, pass the toothbrush test.
- ▶ 26:36 Ben Gilbert You know, all the things that would then sort of come later in the public actually happened inside Google first, but Larry and Sergey loved it.
- ▶ 28:01 David Rosenthal So once Gmail starts to take off, Larry and Sergey and Eric see this and they're like, wow, we should do this a lot.
- ▶ 33:29 David Rosenthal He ends up going to Larry and is like,
- ▶ 33:46 David Rosenthal And so, as you would expect, Larry's like, oh yeah, well, is this a web product?
- ▶ 34:56 David Rosenthal So Brett and Larry and Marissa are looking at this like, I think we can do better than this.
- ▶ 35:28 David Rosenthal And so they're meeting with them and Larry's like, okay, this is what we want, but we need it on the web.
- ▶ 52:49 Ben Gilbert And the slightly more altruistic answer, I suspect if Larry Page was sitting next to us, he would say, what is the goal of a company?
- ▶ 59:09 Ben Gilbert Here's how Larry describes it.
- ▶ 1:41:27 David Rosenthal Tim immediately sounds the alarm inside Google to Eric and Larry.
- ▶ 1:57:14 David Rosenthal Larry and Sergey wanted to build a web browser in 2001 for this very reason that we've been talking about the whole episode.
- ▶ 1:57:25 David Rosenthal And also, I mean, it was Larry and Sergey.
- ▶ 1:57:43 Ben Gilbert Calls like this are why Larry and Sergey brought in Eric.
- ▶ 2:01:36 David Rosenthal This was very clever on Larry and Sergey's part because of course these people doing Firefox are perfectly capable of going and doing another great web browser.
- ▶ 2:04:45 Ben Gilbert And Larry has this quote when they're deciding that they should roll out Chrome, and he kind of explains, we have found the web-based service delivery model
- ▶ 2:35:12 David Rosenthal As Andy is going around trying to gin up investment for another round, he ends up meeting with Larry Page.
- ▶ 2:35:21 David Rosenthal Larry immediately is like, forget raising another round.
- ▶ 2:36:07 David Rosenthal Because why was Larry so excited?
- ▶ 2:36:12 David Rosenthal Eric and Larry and Sergey, they all knew that they were late.
- ▶ 2:49:51 David Rosenthal What is widely reported, and you can actually see in photos, Larry and Sergey do show up.
- ▶ 2:50:01 David Rosenthal There are all these T-Mobile and HTC executives there in suits, and here come Larry and Sergey on rollerblades on stage.
- ▶ 3:20:35 Ben Gilbert So Larry is sensing this.
- ▶ 3:21:29 Ben Gilbert So officially then, in January 2011, Google announces Larry Page will return as CEO in a few months.
- ▶ 3:21:35 Ben Gilbert That April, right away, Larry moves his office into what would become the Google Plus building.
- ▶ 3:23:40 Ben Gilbert I don't know if he raised his hand, I don't know if Larry said, hey, I really think you should do this on our behalf, but what is definitely true is it became Vic's thing, and Eric and Larry and Sergei stepped back and let Vic run with it,…
- ▶ 3:35:44 David Rosenthal Google is becoming Alphabet in August of 2015, and Larry Page will be the CEO of this new Alphabet holding company.
- ▶ 3:36:47 David Rosenthal Why did Larry become CEO of Alphabet?
- ▶ 3:42:46 David Rosenthal So I want to end with one more quote, this time from Larry Page.
- ▶ 3:42:52 David Rosenthal All the way back in the year 2000, this is Larry talking in the year 2000,
Google Part I: Origins of Search. How the Best Business in Human History Happened (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 5:21 David Rosenthal And that story starts in March of 1973 in Lansing, Michigan, where Larry Page is born as the second child and second son to Carl and Gloria Page.
- ▶ 5:33 David Rosenthal And Larry, of course, grows up in Lansing because his dad, Carl Page Sr.,
- ▶ 5:59 David Rosenthal Yeah, yeah, both of his sons, and unfortunately, Larry's mom also went to Michigan, also got a CS degree there, and also teaches programming as a programming instructor at MSU.
- ▶ 6:13 David Rosenthal Pretty Michigan heavy, but, uh, pretty amazing childhood in, you know, the early mid-seventies here for Larry and his older brother.
- ▶ 6:37 Ben Gilbert Larry Page grew up with two computer science academics as parents in the seventies, which would have meant that his parents would have needed to start in the fifties.
- ▶ 7:01 David Rosenthal So, even more so, for future Google to come, for the, 1979 to 1980 academic year, when Larry is six and seven years old, his dad does a sabbatical year at Stanford.
- ▶ 7:12 David Rosenthal So the whole family goes out and lives in Palo Alto, and Stanford and early Silicon Valley there makes a big impression on young Larry.
- ▶ 7:30 David Rosenthal Carl goes to Michigan, majors in CS, just like Larry would.
- ▶ 7:51 David Rosenthal But back to Larry here.
- ▶ 7:52 David Rosenthal Part of the reason I say all this, and I want to include Sergey, too, in what I'm about to say, even though we haven't introduced him yet in the story, I think there's this perception today that Larry and Sergey were these, like, bumbling…
- ▶ 8:31 David Rosenthal Larry's a different generation and a very different personality than Mark Zuckerberg, but you should think about his ambition and his desire to build a huge world-changing company.
- ▶ 8:53 Ben Gilbert I think they publicly, Larry and Sergey, don't get the same sort of ethos that those two get, but the same fire was there.
- ▶ 9:01 David Rosenthal Larry would say later, this is a quote from him, probably when I was 12, I knew I was going to start a company eventually.
- ▶ 9:37 David Rosenthal Yes, and Larry got this all along, and Sergey did too.
- ▶ 9:41 David Rosenthal Okay, so as we all know, Larry goes to Michigan undergrad, he graduates in 1995, and then he goes off to Stanford to get his PhD in computer science, where he has a fateful meeting with his business partner, friend, soulmate, Sergey Brin.
- ▶ 9:56 Ben Gilbert And isn't the way this all went down that Larry was visiting and Sergey was already in the program, I think Sergey was leading some kind of tour to try to sell Larry on joining the program, and
- ▶ 10:09 Ben Gilbert Larry is, even though he's like the new guy there, he's like challenging Sergei at every little corner.
- ▶ 11:02 David Rosenthal So she organized Larry and Sergey meeting.
- ▶ 11:21 David Rosenthal So Larry and Sergey, they end up shutting the bar down that night.
- ▶ 11:49 Ben Gilbert So Charles Schwab funded the first date of Larry and Sergey.
- ▶ 12:14 David Rosenthal I don't think we've really covered founders before that were true partners in the way that Larry and Sergey are.
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