also referred to as: the alphabet
includes Google Search, Google Ads, Google Maps, Google AdSense, Google Calendar, Google Analytics, Google AdWords, Google Play, Google Voice, Google Chrome, Google Drive, Google DeepMind and 26 more
79 statements across 50 episodes · 22 bullish · 14 bearish · 46 people on the record · first statement Jul 27, 2017 by Jonah Peretti · said 888 times in 289 episodes since 2016 · across every show →
Mentions by year, the whole family
brought up most by Guy Raz (363), Luis von Ahn (37), Matt Mullenweg (15), Will Marshall (12), Sal Khan (12), Anthony Casalena (12), Emmett Shear (11), Jennifer Fitzgerald (8)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 46 mentions in 20 episodes 2 per episode
- Bobbie: Laura Modi. How a Baby Formula Startup Took Market Share From Two Industry Giants
- Advice Line with Miguel McKelvey of WeWork
- Advice Line with Chris Riccobono of UNTUCKit
- Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough
- Advice Line with Shazi Visram of Happy Family Organics
- Shopify: Tobias Lütke. How a snowboarder built a $150 billion business (2019)
- Advice Line with Sarah LaFleur of M.M. LaFleur
- Advice Line with Monica Nassif of Mrs. Meyer's
- 12 more episodes that year, every mention in 2026 →
2025 73 mentions in 34 episodes 2 per episode
- Nuts.com: Jeff Braverman. From Corner Store to Snacktime Powerhouse
- Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global
- Khan Academy: Sal Khan. From Tutoring His Cousins to Teaching the World For Free (September 2020)
- Snap: Evan Spiegel
- Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström
- Advice Line with Anthony Casalena of Squarespace
- Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business.
- Advice Line with Luis von Ahn of Duolingo
- 26 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 138 mentions in 43 episodes 3 per episode
- The peril (and promise) of AI with Tristan Harris: Part 1
- Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams
- AI is smarter than you think with Shane Legg of Google DeepMind
- Groupon and Descript: Andrew Mason
- Sonos: John MacFarlane
- On athletic shoes: Olivier Bernhard and Caspar Coppetti
- Advice Line with Fawn Weaver of Uncle Nearest Premium Whiskey
- Boll & Branch: Scott and Missy Tannen
- 35 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 127 mentions in 34 episodes 4 per episode
- reCAPTCHA and Duolingo: Luis von Ahn (2020)
- HIBT Lab! Nuro: Dave Ferguson
- When trucks drive themselves with Chris Urmson of Aurora
- The future of driving is autonomous with Dmitri Dolgov of Waymo
- Grindr: Joel Simkhai
- Yasso: Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington
- When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light
- Briogeo Hair Care: Nancy Twine (2020)
- 26 more episodes that year, every mention in 2023 →
2022 175 mentions in 34 episodes 5 per episode
2021 111 mentions in 34 episodes 3 per episode
- Planet: Will Marshall and Robbie Schingler
- Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald
- Live Episode! Clubhouse: Paul Davison and Rohan Seth
- KAYAK: Paul English
- Robert Reffkin: Compass
- Serial Entrepreneur: Gary Vaynerchuk
- Canva: Melanie Perkins (2019)
- Coinbase: Brian Armstrong
- 26 more episodes that year, every mention in 2021 →
2020 99 mentions in 31 episodes 3 per episode
- reCAPTCHA and Duolingo: Luis von Ahn
- Fitbit: James Park
- Khan Academy: Sal Khan
- Ring: Jamie Siminoff
- Dropbox: Drew Houston
- Impossible Foods: Pat Brown
- Stripe: Patrick and John Collison (2018)
- McBride Sisters Wine (Part 2 of 2): Robin McBride and Andréa McBride John
- 23 more episodes that year, every mention in 2020 →
2019 54 mentions in 17 episodes 3 per episode
2018 40 mentions in 22 episodes 2 per episode
- Stripe: Patrick and John Collison
- Wayfair: Niraj Shah & Steve Conine
- Wikipedia: Jimmy Wales
- Betterment: Jon Stein
- Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield
- Stitch Fix's Katrina Lake At The HIBT Summit
- Live Episode! Glossier: Emily Weiss
- DoorDash: Tony Xu
- 14 more episodes that year, every mention in 2018 →
2017 17 mentions in 14 episodes 1 per episode
- Live Episode! BuzzFeed: Jonah Peretti
- Instagram: Kevin Systrom & Mike Krieger (2017)
- Chipotle: Steve Ells
- Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg
- Southwest Airlines: Herb Kelleher (2016)
- Live Episode! Reddit: Alexis Ohanian & Steve Huffman
- Edible Arrangements: Tariq Farid
- Kickstarter: Perry Chen
- 6 more episodes that year, every mention in 2017 →
Everything said about Google, oldest first
Jul 27, 2017 positive
Peretti: The best internet businesses align core products with native advertising
“I looked at the best businesses on the internet, and they tended to use some form of native advertising. So Google had a search engine, and you enter a keyword in, and it would give you a bunch of related links, but it would also give you a bunch of related pa…”
Feb 26, 2018
May 7, 2018 negative
Collison: Google possessed every advantage and should have beaten Facebook
“Google should have beaten Facebook. Google had every advantage against Facebook. They had you know, more people, more money, more distribution, more brand recognition, more of kind of any of the obvious inputs, and yet somehow there was something missing.”
Jul 30, 2018
Google's early Blogger help docs explicitly recommended users host photos on Flickr
“Google had bought Blogger which was one of the early blogging programs, and they didn't have a way to host photos, so they put, you know, in their help materials online When people said, how do I upload photos? They said, use Flickr.”
Dec 6, 2018
Gebbia: Top VCs behind Google and Facebook said Airbnb would never work
“I can tell you all the times and show you all the emails from really credible investors, like people that, these, they're investors that picked Google and PayPal and YouTube and Facebook and all of the kind of internet greats that came before us, and so sittin…”
Mar 4, 2019
Jun 24, 2019 neutral
Steve Jobs called Stoppelman urging Yelp not to sell to Google
“You know, he said, don't sell to Google. We think you're a great company. We think what you're doing is really interesting. He didn't say, oh, well, Apple, you know, is interested in you, but he did say, is this about money? Because Apple has a lot of money, a…”
Jun 24, 2019 negative
Google licensing clash led directly to Yelp acquisition talks
“We started by licensing our content to them in a way that we thought was reasonable, and then over time, it became clear that they really wanted to compete with us directly and collect information. Reviews themselves. And so then they said to us, well, we're g…”
Mar 9, 2020
Patrick Collison: Money cannot be mechanically turned into great software products
“And this is one of the great facts about our industry is that you cannot turn Money into great products as a kind of mechanical operation. If it were possible, there would be many more great iPhone competitors. Facebook would have been long since eclipsed by M…”
Mar 9, 2020 neutral
Patrick Collison: Google had every advantage over Facebook and still lost
“Google should have beaten Facebook. Google had every advantage against Facebook. They had you know, more people, more money, more distribution, more brand recognition, more of kind of any of the obvious inputs, and yet somehow there was something missing.”
May 11, 2020 negative
Pat Brown: Impossible Foods Will Not Risk Its Mission by Selling to Acquirers
“The mission is to eliminate the need for animals as a food technology, and by doing so, to save the planet from an environmental catastrophe. Nobody cares as much about it as I do and my colleagues do. And I don't want to put the mission at risk by putting it …”
May 25, 2020
May 25, 2020
May 25, 2020
Sep 21, 2020 positive
Google and the Gates Foundation granted $4M to Khan Academy in 2010
“And by fall of 2010, both the Google and the Gates Foundation each gave about two million dollars. So we had a four million dollar initial funding for that first two years to hire up a team, internationalize, and start scaling Khan Academy.”
Oct 1, 2020 negative
Jan 11, 2021 neutral
Apr 1, 2021
May 6, 2021
Seth: Stayed at Google because H-1B visa prevented founding a startup
“The reality was that I was still on an H-one B visa and I couldn't. And so I just continued working at Google and just kept building stuff there, hoping that one day I would get a green card so that I could work in my own company.”
May 11, 2021
May 24, 2021
Jul 26, 2021 negative
Reffkin: Traditional brokerages pocketed profits instead of investing in R&D
“This has been a model for over a hundred years where brokerage firms had taken the profits from the agents, split it between the manager, the manager's manager, and the owner, and on balance that owner put in their pocket and then they went on vacation. But wh…”
Jul 26, 2021 neutral
Sep 6, 2021 positive
Lynda.com secured massive enterprise adoption entirely through organic employee demand
“A lot of people who taught web design and Photoshop were using our courses, and they were bringing it into their schools and into their companies, so we'd be installed in all of Apple, all of Adobe, all of Microsoft, all of Google, and the employees were start…”
Dec 13, 2021 positive
Dec 13, 2021 positive
Marshall: Planet founders shared a communal house with Apple, Google, and Stanford peers
“Yeah, no, actually, but it wasn't just NASA people. We had Students who are at Stanford, people that worked at Apple, people that worked at Google, all these places, and that created a fervor of intellectual dizziness that was always fun for us. So it was a mi…”
Dec 13, 2021
Marshall: Apple and Google's consumer electronics R&D far outpaced NASA's electronics budget
“But now, the billions and billions of dollars that would be going on in the consumer electronics industry, like Apple and Samsung and Google and all these companies, was far outpacing what NASA could spend on the development of electronics.”
Jan 24, 2022 negative
Mar 7, 2022 neutral
Mar 21, 2022 negative
Mullenweg accidentally invented an SEO spam technique using hidden CSS links
“And I unintentionally invented a new way to spam. I basically was able to use some code called CSS to have the code on the website, but if you visited it in a browser, it would be invisible. But if you visited as a bot, like Google, it would look like the word…”
Mar 21, 2022 negative
Mar 21, 2022 positive
A mid-2000s Google survey revealed WordPress powered 0.8% of the web
“Google had done this survey, published a survey of the internet. It was kind of like a statistical analysis of all the websites that were in the Google index and the code they used. And there was this part of the report that said, yeah, and then on .8% of webs…”
Mar 21, 2022
Mullenweg joined CNET because it allowed him to retain code IP
“And the job I took, which was for CNET, I took it for a few reasons. First, they allowed me to retain the intellectual property to the code I was creating. So normally when you join a company like Google, you sign over the rights to everything you create there…”
Mar 21, 2022 neutral
Default backlinks in early WordPress installs boosted developers' search rankings
“Every install of WordPress had links to all the main developers. So because these thousands and thousands of websites were all linking to the word Matt, that would make Google think, oh, these websites, you know, Photomat.net, et cetera, is the number one site…”
Jun 9, 2022 positive
Jun 9, 2022 positive
Jun 9, 2022
Pichai: Most leadership decisions are inconsequential; simply deciding is what matters
“A lot of stress comes from, you know, you have to make a lot of decisions as a leader, but over time you realize most of those decisions are not consequential. And there are a few consequential decisions, but most of the times, it's more important to make a de…”
Jun 9, 2022
Jun 9, 2022 positive
Jun 9, 2022 positive
Pichai: Companies must reward ambitious effort over outcomes to prevent risk aversion
“You have to reward efforts, not always outcomes. I think most companies only reward successful outcomes, which means everyone becomes more conservative in their attempts. And so at Google, we've always had this feeling of setting ambitious goals, and we do fai…”
Jun 9, 2022 positive
Jun 20, 2022 positive
Jun 20, 2022
Levchin: Entrepreneurs realize their true nature when following others' rules
“For an entrepreneur, you get reminded you're an entrepreneur when you're not trying to run a company the most. You start realizing that sort of rules are written and you kind of have to follow them because you're in, in someone else's backyard.”
Oct 31, 2022 positive
Jan 19, 2023
Ferguson: Google's early self-driving car project incorporated ML first into behavior prediction
“When I got there, I actually worked on, on the prediction system. So this was trying to predict what other agents, other road users were going to do. And so this was some of the first machine learning that, that we incorporated into the self-driving car projec…”
Jul 20, 2023 neutral
Media attention on autonomous vehicle crashes rapidly diminishes as incidents recur
“So I remember back when I was at Google, you know, the first time we had a crash, it made national news. The second time we had a crash, it made national news, the third time it made local news, and, you know, the fourth time people stopped reporting on it, ri…”
Aug 10, 2023 neutral
Hollier: Early app business models prioritized time spent over direct monetization
“Well, there's kind of like a golden metric that was really what was most important, and that was how many hours a day someone spent with the product. So if you could make something that was sticky and You know, that people would use for hours a day. There didn…”
Aug 21, 2023
Oct 16, 2023
Founders cold-emailed hundreds of bag factories found via Google
“We literally turned to Google and started to Google things like how to make backpacks, how to start a backpack factory, where to make backpacks, and we took our little PDF on the same email, and we sent it to, like, hundreds of email addresses we found in comp…”
Nov 23, 2023
Dolgov: Google gave self-driving team a 100,000-mile zero-intervention mandate
“The first one was to drive a 100,000 miles in autonomous mode. That was, you know, way more than orders of magnitude, more than, you know, what anybody has done at that time. And the second one, and, you know, actually that one turned out to be more interestin…”
Nov 23, 2023
Dolgov: Waymo never seriously considered manufacturing its own cars
“I don't think we ever seriously entertained building a car. It just never made sense, you know, to me, you know, or others to, you know, do that. Like we're not a car company. Building cars hard, right? There's many companies that, you know, spend a hundred ye…”
Nov 23, 2023
Dec 14, 2023 positive
Dec 18, 2023 neutral
Dec 18, 2023
Luis von Ahn: Google Acquired ESP Game for Google Image Labeler
“And at some point, actually Google, in fact, bought it. They just bought the technology, and then it got implemented. They changed the name from the ESP game, which I call it the ESP game, because it's like ES, extrasensory perception. The idea was like, tried…”
Dec 18, 2023
Feb 19, 2024 negative
Sonos Anticipated Apple, Amazon, and Google Would Enter the Audio Market
“What we were worried about is that Apple, Amazon, and Google would ultimately get into this space, and they understood software clearly they had a global footprint, They could do an amazing job, so we knew down the road we would compete, be competing with them…”
Feb 19, 2024
Feb 22, 2024 negative
Mar 18, 2024
Apr 11, 2024 positive
Google merged DeepMind and Google Brain because separate scaling made no sense
“It was becoming clear that extremely scaled up models were going to become a really important thing in the future. And, you know, for Google it was important that we had the biggest and best models. And it doesn't make sense to have, you know, two different gr…”
Apr 11, 2024 neutral
May 6, 2024
Founders should only sell for burnout, imminent failure, or undeniable money
“I thought about it very deeply, and I came up with this, like, okay, why would you sell a company? I think there are three reasons, and none of these meet that criteria. Three reasons being, you don't want to do it anymore, and so you need someone to do it for…”
May 6, 2024
May 6, 2024 positive
Williams suspects Google has lost money running Blogger for 20 years
“Blogger, I'm happy to say, 20 years later, is still running. And anything written on Blogger 20 years ago, unless the author took it down or it was like a violation, is still up on the internet for free, and Google has, you know, Paid for that, and you know, p…”
Jul 22, 2024
Jul 22, 2024 positive
Sep 9, 2024 positive
Sep 9, 2024 positive
Jan 27, 2025
May 1, 2025 neutral
Von Ahn: CapitalG partner warned Duolingo had to start making money
“And at some point, we raised money from Google. Capital G is one of their investment arms. And the partner from that firm sat me down and she said, nobody else will invest in this company if you don't figure out how to make money. You know, you're not going to…”
Sep 15, 2025 bearish
Nirav Tolia predicts AI action platforms will completely replace multi-link search
“Particularly in a world of AI, where most consumers are going to go to one place, ask a question, and everything's going to be taken care of behind the scenes. It's not going to be, You go to Google, you get 15 links, you click on all of them, you hit back, yo…”
Sep 15, 2025 negative
Sep 29, 2025 negative
Newmark denies Craigslist killed newspapers, blaming TV news, Google, and Facebook
“I, in the past, felt that Craigslist did have a substantial effect on newspaper survival, but until
No one had done any of the numbers.
I'd spoke to industry analysts like Ken doctor and Rasmus Nielsen, who said it was ridiculous to think Craigslist had that b…”
Nov 3, 2025 positive
Dec 8, 2025
Google and the Gates Foundation each granted Khan Academy $2 million in 2010
“And by fall of 2010, both the Google and the Gates Foundation each gave about two million dollars. So we had a four million dollar initial funding for that first two years to hire up a team, internationalize, and start scaling Khan Academy.”
Dec 29, 2025 positive
Co-founder Chrissy Holler snuck into Google Seattle to pitch the cafeteria chef
“Actually Google, the Google campus in Seattle was probably one of our first big accounts, and Chrissy snuck into their cafeteria, found the chef, and convinced him to bring the product in and offer it to their employees.”
Jan 15, 2026 bullish