Eric Schmidt

“Her romantic turned business relationship with Eric Schmidt that led to the, his investment in Danthropic to crossing paths briefly with Jeffrey Epstein in terms of pitching him on her company.”

“If I'm telling you that you are potentially going to lose status, purpose, income, and security. And I seem just fine, and I'm smiling as I say it, automatically there's no trust between us. You don't even think of me as, barely as like the same species, but y…”

“Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, was booed this week at the University of Arizona's graduation ceremony.”

“We helped start Brave One which is now very important. Defense innovation cluster, sort of like a DIU here in the US. We helped start a fund called D three just like I was started or co-started by Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google.”

“Almost every great founder or founding team Needs an Eric. Needs an Eric figure. If you look at it, Mark Zuckerberg had Sheryl Sandberg, Jack Dorsey at Keith Rebois, and Tony at DoorDash, we had Christopher Payne. So everyone had somebody who was complimentary…”

“Sam had been talking to Eric Schmidt and Tom Khalil, who was also a National Security Counsel at the Obama Administration, about how to like, scale up these ideas. And so Sam had this concept of, like, focused research organizations”

“We just announced our partnership with Qtai in France, which is an open science lab in Paris, one of the best research labs in the world. Eric Schmidt, I believe funded in addition to some French people. They are essentially acting as the partner that's curren…”

“And then we got a long tail, which was, like, Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt into the funds.”

“There's what Eric Schmidt wanted, which is crazy. He proposed, oh, let's just go buy Tesla, and that'll be our starting place, and then we'll just put all of our self-driving equipment on all the cars.”

“I am not in favor of essentially working at home. I, and the reason, I mean, many of you guys all work at home to some degree, but your careers are already established. But think about a 20 something who has to learn how the world works.”

“I think that the way robot war, essentially, drone war will occur is there will be these destructive waves, but eventually humans are going to have to cross a line. They're going to have to invade.”

“I don't agree with the three years, but I do agree that it'll be maybe six or seven years.”

“Not yet. I'm, I've funded a number of startups which claim to be close to it, but of course these are startups and you never know, which tells me it's five, 10 years.”

“I just think that there was an existing intellectual legacy that came from Bostrom that had some very influential people, right? Like Elon was pilled by that. You know, Eric Schmidt.”

“It was so uniquely googly that there would have been organ rejection if Eric tried to take a heavier hand.”

“The other thing that's happening at this exact same time is Eric Schmidt arrives and discovers that 50% of Google's searches are outside the U.S., but they have no international ad sales.”

“And so he would say, you know, hey, I'm coming to LA. I'll come by. You and Bobby just make a list of all the questions you have, and I'll help you answer them. And, you know, at that time, our questions were like, do we need a CFO? Like, you know, this kind o…”

“I think, you know, realistically, that seems like a really difficult hole to dig yourself out of where you're, you know, sort of billions of dollars. The team's probably somewhat, you know, sort of demotivated.”

“Like, this is why I think all, a lot of these billionaire funded projects where the billionaire has made it clear that they will backstop the company somewhat indefinitely without a clear end date have never really worked. Because you don't have this clear, li…”

“Anthropic and their investors like Eric Schmidt have been some of the people that have been encouraging, you know, more and more AI oversight and AI regulation and trying to make it such that open source AI would not be legal.”

“And then the day after, you know, a whole bunch of them basically Were getting Eric Schmidt to launch a firm for them, and we're out giving interviews to everybody who wanted and taking credit for a whole bunch of things that probably were not theirs alone to …”

“So now what has happened is there's been this view that you should bring your whole self to work, and now we're being forced to crawl that back because your whole self is maybe not what we want in work.”

“So with the engineering story is that we stayed, we actually liked each other so much that he stayed as my office mate until we were a public company where I couldn't violate the various SEC laws.”

“Hire the smartest people you possibly can and put up with them, right? And we all understand what that means, right? But you really need them for competitive advantage.”

“Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning.”

“When you pitched a 20% project, you had to pitch it to Larry, Sergey, and Eric. You had to go to, like, the exact meeting. Pitch the project and explain to them how you were going to also keep up your normal day job while doing the project.”

“At Google, I was very stroppy with Eric when they bought Android. And I said, Eric, I used to work in the mobile industry. I thought he hired me for my experience. And we shouldn't be buying Android.”

“I remember getting yelled at in the first time we went in to propose that we should do a browser. Cause obviously at the time Eric Schmidt One of my longtime mentors, who I just love, had been deeply embedded in the wars with Microsoft, and he was like, you kn…”

“Patrick Carlson from Stripe and also Eric Schmidt at Google basically had a hard and fast rule that you could only scale teams 30% a year without damaging the culture of the org.”

“If I had just been, like, a random Google employee with this idea, and no legal protection, and the CEO wasn't, you know, a fan of the project, it would have died. Like, there's no way it would have made it through that, that negativity, and that pessimism”

“I remember when Eric Schmidt fucking banned the browser. Like, he was like, you know, this is Eric Schmidt, the CTO of Sun. I was like, you can't have a browser because people aren't going to work, right?”

“I mean, this is driven by Eric Schmidt, let's just say it, which I don't think is like good or bad necessarily, but like, you know, I think he went in there and said, here's what you should do, and they did it. That's my read of it.”

“The number is 80% of the management team will turn over in a turnaround.”

“The other thing I learned, and this is from Lou Gerstner, Who said, who had written a whole book on this, and his IBM turnaround, he said, you only have six to nine months to change the culture of a company before you're stuck with it.”

“The answer is simple. Hire the smartest people you possibly can and put up with them. Right. And we all understand what that means. Right. But you really need them for competitive advantage.”

“They were wildly transparent and their executive meetings, they had a note taker who would take the notes and then you could subscribe to the notes from that meeting. They would be published after the end of the meeting. And you could see almost like a script,…”

“The reality, of course, hit on the first day, because I was presented with different numbers for revenue for the quarter than I'd been told when I was interviewing.”

“Any CEO worth their salt is starved for argument and debate. So I'm not incredibly surprised by Schmidt's response, because one of the big problems with power is that most people won't argue with you if you're in a powerful position.”

“I was absolutely convinced that this would bankrupt the company. And I was so convinced that I ordered a cash restriction period Where the only thing that you could do was spend money on Friday mornings at 10. You had to come to my office and you had to convin…”

“We made the decision to purchase YouTube in about 10 days, right? Incredibly historic decision because we were ready.”

“And glue people are very nice people who sit between functions and help either side, but don't themselves add a lot of value. And I thought, these are nice people, but we don't really need them. We can have these groups talking directly.”

“Persistence is the single biggest predictor of future success, and so we would look for persistence. And the second thing was curiosity. What do you care about? The combination of persistence and curiosity is a very good predictor of employee success in a know…”

“Ultimately, as Eric Schmidt will always say, you know, leadership is defense. You know, he's like, look, unfortunately, as an executive, like, you don't get to write code, you don't get to design things anymore. Your job is point the team in a direction and th…”

“Now, back then, and this is kind of incredible, Google CEO Eric Schmidt sat on Apple's board of directors, which is a crazy thing to think these days, and it was basically like having a crystal ball. You know, Eric knew that over multiple generations, you know…”

“They call them the coach, the trillion dollar coach, because he would, as you know, coach Steve Jobs, who no one in the world thought was coachable, and then he would coach Larry Page and Eric Schmidt and Sergey at Google on two of the most important companies…”

“To date, Adrian has raised funding from some of the true greats of the business, including Mark Benioff, Eric Schmidt, Joe Lonsdale, Aaron Levy, and Josh Kushner, just to name a few.”

“All the information collected by the human race from the dawn of humanity in 2003 is five exabytes, whatever that is, because I'm not a data scientist, and now every two days we're generating five exabytes.”