And nobody else would consider myself a journalist. I began to take on the life of being an interviewer, even though i have a day job of running a private equity firm. How do you define leadership . What is it that makes somebody tick . David when you joined google, google was a very small company. Did you, in your wildest dreams, ever imagine it would become the second most valuable company in the entire world . I dont think any of us did. I certainly did not. When i met larry and sergey, they just seemed incredibly intelligent. We had this huge argument over something technical, and i hadnt had that good of an argument in a long time, and i thought, ive got to work with these people. I wanted to join a company that was gonna stay in one building. Today, of course, we are many buildings. So you were the ceo of novell, at the time that you were getting ready to go to google. What propelled you to pick google as the company you wanted to go to . Because you had many opportunities. Well, i actually didnt interview anywhere else. I john doerr asked me to visit google. I said, who cares about a Search Engine . It wont matter very much. Who uses Search Engines . But he said, nevertheless, go visit with larry and sergey. And what they were doing was so interesting, and the quality of the people that they had recruited were so compelling that i just had to be there. So Search Engines were not that novel at the time because there were plenty of Search Engine companies right . So why did you think google had a Search Engine that was gonna change the world . Well, i didnt particularly think google was gonna be that successful, but i thought the technology was unusually special. Google had invented a different way of doing ranking, and all of the previous Search Engines had used ranking that was easily manipulated by, you know, business forces and so forth, but larry page had invented something, now known as pagerank, which is a different algorithm, a different way of doing search, and it had spread virally. First at stanford and then throughout the bay area, and it was all word of mouth. And i thought, what a great project. So google is a word that existed before, it kind of meant infinity, and its spelled differently. Did google intentionally spell it differently than the original word google . What happened was there was a number called ten to the 100th. And ill spare you the details, but this is a very large number. Ten to the 100th. And it was named by a russian mathematician, googol, googol. And it was too hard to pronounce, and so sergey decided it should be called google. Now, today the company is not called google anymore. Its called alphabet. So why did they pick google as the original name, and why did you change it to alphabet, in terms of the parent . Well, google has always done unusual things. So after 15 years of being google, we had all of these other companies that were sort of protocompanies. They werent real businesses and they didnthave real ceos. We talked internally, at great length, about, how do you get Great Companies founded . And the answer is strong ceos, strong incentive programs, strong boards of directors. There arent other models. So how do we recreate that within the context of google . And thats what alphabet is. So alphabet is a Holding Company of companies, of which google is the bestknown. So Many Technology companies that are wellknown, lets say microsoft or apple or facebook are run the ceos initially are the founders. You had a different situation. You had two people who were, quote, the founders, larry and sergey, but they wanted a ceo who had more experience, at least the Venture Investors did, was it awkward to kind of come in and be the ceo when youre dealing with founders who dont have the ceo title . Well, in their case, they had been searching for somebody they could work with for 16 months. And what they would do is they would have each of the candidates do something with them for the weekend. So they go skiing with one of them, and they play sports with another one to see if they were compatible. And so when i met them, we all have similar backgrounds in the sense that were computer scientists. But it was an immediate click. And i always knew, based on what had happened with john sculley and steve jobs in the 1980s, it was their company, and my job was to make their company successful. When you were interviewed by them, was it a normal interview . Well, what happened was i walked into their office, and it was a tiny office in this incredibly crowded building, which google still has, by the way. In this tiny Little Office they had lots of food, and they had my biography on the wall, and they proceeded to ask each and every question that was possible against the biography. And id never been so thoroughly questioned, and i had just gone to visit. And they came to a product that i was building at novell, and they said, this is the stupidest product ever made, which i, of course, had to respond to. And you didnt think you were gonna get the job after they said that . Or you thought you might . Well, i didnt realize it was a job interview. Okay. But as i left the building, which was curiously a building that i had had when i worked at sun, years earlier, to show you how history repeats itself, i knew i would be back. So when you did come back, and it was a small company, i think 100, 200 employees when you joined, did you realize that advertising would be the medium through which you would actually make the company grow . No, and in fact i was quite convinced that the advertising approach that they had taken did not work at all. And when i became ceo i was very concerned that there was something wrong. And i actually asked them to audit the cash accounts to make people who were selling these ads, and what we learned was that these targeted ads worked incredibly well, even though they were these little text ads. And that discovery and then the subsequent algorithmic improvements, which allowed for auctions and so forth, which were done by impossibly young and creative engineers, who i sort of viewed as sort of experimenting with things, created what is today google. The culture at google was very unusual at the time. Others have emulated it, but its a culture of kind of do what you want a bit, wear what you want, sleep in the office if you want. We do have a dress code. You have a dress code . You have to wear something. Okay. We had problems where engineers would move in, and put cots on the floor. We would explain that you can do anything you want to at google, but you cant live here. You have to have a bed somewhere else. We famously encourage people to bring pets, right, and we would have lots of rules about the pets. We didnt have any rules about the people, but, you know, if your pet was over here, you had to keep the pet over here. So, what about the food . Very unusual. You had free food for everybody. What was the purpose behind that . Well, the comment was that the free food really changed everything, but the real reason we did food and of course many of these things were marketed as great fun, but there was a Serious Business behind them. We in the case of the food this was sergeys idea. Families eat dinner together, and he wanted the company to be a family. And so if you had people have proper good food, breakfast, lunch and dinner, they would literally work as teams. And it would they would work in whatever way made the most sense. Larry and sergey invented something called 20 percent time. And the idea is that for each of the employees, especially the engineers, if they are interested in something they can spend 20 percent of their time on whatever theyre interested in. Oh, my god. How could you run a company that way . Well, that allowed the engineers, who were sitting there at dinner, to have conversations about what do you think, what do you think . Ill give you another example. Larry page was looking at our ads, just as they came out, and he he studied them, and he put a big sign on the wall, and he wrote, these ads suck. And he this one, and this one, and this one. And i was looking at this, and i said, this is another stupid google thing, right . Nothing is gonna happen. We have an ads team, we have a manager, we have a plan. So this was friday afternoon. I come in monday morning, and a completely different set of teams had seen the sign and had invented, over the weekend, what today is the underlying ad system of google, and delivered it on monday morning. That could not have occurred without such a culture. But the 20 percent time, have you gone to the businesses that came out of the 20 percent time . Well, the most interesting examples are maps. Many of the ad system components. Most people believe that the 20 percent time is the source of real creativity in now what is a very large company. So one time i think you told me on a previous occasion that you were out of the office, and then you came back to your office, and somebody had occupied your office. Its important to remember that, at the time, googles culture was seen as very unusual, and i knew this. And i was always careful not to commit a faux pas, if you will, in the culture. And so one morning i walk in, and my assistant has this look on her face, like something bad has happened. And i walk into my office, which is 8 feetby12 feet, and here is my new roommate, ameet. And hes moved himself in, hes working, and so forth. I didnt know that i had a new roommate, and after all i am the ceo, someone should tell me these things, right . So i said, hello, who are you . And he says, hello, im ameet. And i go, okay, and he goes, nice to meet you. And i said, well kind of, why are you here . And he goes, well, your office was not occupied. Youre never here, and i was in a sixperson office. It was too loud. And i thought, what to say to this . Because this is a careerlimiting moment. If i say, get out of my office, you know, theyre gonna fire me or something. So i thought, okay, did you ask permission . And he goes, yes, i asked my boss and he said it was a great idea. And i said, okay. So we sat next to each other. And he would program, and i would do my work, literally next to each other, for a year, and we became best friends. So a lot of employees, i mean, like him, came through a very arduous interview process. Who invented that idea, and do you still use that to get new employees . We do. And the again, most of these things were invented by larry and sergey, and larry and sergey viewed google very much like the way you would view graduate school. Of course theyd just come out of graduate school. Teams of people of incredible capability, and they would look for unusual talent. So they always wanted people who had done something exceptional. So in sales, for example, we wanted people who were olympians. Not because olympians were good salespeople, but because an olympian has the pattern and the lifestyle of a very devoted and dedicated human being. With programmers we would give them tests, and ask them complicated, intricate questions. And we did not particularly value experience because we didnt know what we were getting ourselves into. We have since changed this. We now value experience somewhat more, were somewhat less focused on gradepoint averages. But it produced a quality of workforce that was unusually both youthful, in the sense that they were relatively new to the industry, coming right out of school, and also very, very creative. So how many employees does google have now . Well, today the company is more than 70,000. And virtually all of them have gone through this interview process . Thats right. Which has been changed since the original. But for every applicant who gets a job, how many actually apply . Is it . Well, many thousands, and what we do is we for many years we would actually review every offer. One day, i was talking to larry and sergey and i said, i think that the problem with this company is were beginning to develop fat. You know, people we dont need. Because we need this kind of person and that person, but im afraid that were not hiring the right people. And larry said, well, why dont we just inspect every offer . And i said, you cant do that. And i said, sure we and he said, sure we can. And so we would review every packet to make sure that we were bringing in the right people. And up until recently we were able to do that in a large company. I just wanna talk about your own background. So your father was an engineering professor . Economics. International economics professor. You grew up in virginia . Yeah, rural virginia. What made you think you wanted to be an engineer . As a boy i think i was a normal sort of scienceinterested boy. This was at the time of the space program, and everyone wanted to be an astronaut. In my high school they had a terminal. These were the old teletype, asr33 teletypes, with paper tape. And my father had the good thoughts to get one for our house, which was highly unusual at the time. And so id spend every evening working and reprogramming and so forth. Today, of course, if i were a 15yearold at home, id have five personal computers and a super network, and sound blaring out of the speakers. So you went to high school in virginia, you must have done pretty well to get into princeton . Yes, although it was easier back then. Right, but you knew you wanted to be an engineer at princeton, and . I actually applied to princeton as an architect, and when i got to princeton i discovered that i wasnt a very good architect, but i was a much better programmer. And princeton, again, was kind, in that i was advanced enough that i was able to skip the introductory courses, and go straight into the advanced courses and then the graduate courses at princeton. So you must have done pretty well because you then got a scholarship to go to berkeley and get your phd, and. Was it hard to move across the country and . No, i but to give you an example of how naive people were back then, i decided i wanted to move out to california because i had heard that it was sort of nice and sunny beaches. But of course i went to the wrong part. And this is of course before google maps. I worked at bell labs, where unix, which is the basis for much of computing today, was invented. I was a Junior Programmer there, and i worked at xerox paulo Alto Research center, where the workstation and screens and many of the editors and many of the networking things that we use today were invented, as a young programmer. So i was unusually fortunate to be, as a young person, an assistant to the people doing that kind of research. So from there i went to sun microsystems, where i was an executive for many years. And then from there you were recruited to novell . Yes, and i was at sun for 14 years. Novell for four, and now google for 16 plus. As the Company Became bigger and bigger, and it dominated the search business, it has 90 percent plus of the search world, more or less i guess, so why did google say, we wanna do other things . We dont wanna just be in the search business. You began to decide to go into other things. Lets talk about a few of them. I should say that googles motto was not only search the web. It was all the worlds information. And information is broadly consumed. So the company set out with all of the hiring we were able to do, and the talent to begin to solve some new problems. We became very interested in maps, right. We developed our own maps, hugely successful product line. We bought a Company Called youtube, today incredibly successful in terms of video, another form of information. We built an Enterprise Business that has done incredibly well. I can go on. In some cases we bought little companies that we grew, like google earth. In other cases these were technologies that we grew ourselves. But the whole idea was to integrate around information. At some point, four or five years ago, we became interested in solving other problems. Not just information problems, but problems where Digital Technology could make a material difference. The most obvious one being selfdriving cars. Weve been working on that as a research project. David youve been in one of these . Eric yes. David you feel safe driving . Eric well, the funny story is so i get in the car on the highway in california, and its driving, and ive decided its following too close. And so i complained to the engineering. He says, no, no, no, were exactly right. And of course they got it right. And it gets off the freeway, it parks itself and all of this. Another case im driving or nondriving in the selfdriving car. And it turns left, and here we have a mother and a child, right, crossing the street illegally. And im going, oh, no. This is the movie, you know, that youve seen. You know, the car running over the mother and child. Skids to a stop, right . So the technology works. And it works because theres a very, very powerful laser imager on the top of the car, which sees more accurately than we do. So imagine a car that has vision all around it, rather than just in front of it. Theres more than 32,000 people scheduled to die this year in america, we just dont know who they are. Right, thats how bad this is. So imagine if we could reduce that by half, or a third, or a quarter. Most of the accidents are driverinduced, of one kind or another. We may ultimately be able to make driving accidents a very, very rare event. Now, youve been involved in Artificial Intelligence, better known to some as ai, is Artificial Intelligence dangerous for humans or is it gonna be helpful to humans . I see it as extraordinarily useful. And let me give you examples. Today, Artificial Intelligence is being used to do things which are hard for humans to do because of data. We theres a disease called diabetic retinopathy, and its diagnosed by ophthalmologists. We can detect that 99 percent of the time. The best ophthalmologists do it at 90 percent of the time. Why are we so good at it . Because we see more eyes, we can train the computer against eyes. Theres a lot of reasons to think that this kind of intelligence, as we say, will allow things which are either repetitive, or require deep pattern analysis, will be much, much better. So do you think the United States government is better at cyber terrorism, if thats the right word, then other governments are against us . The u. S. Government has never acknowledged that it plays an active role in cyberspace, that is active offensive role. Although the people who might be our targets have certainly been claimin