Quotes By 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.

I want to push the envelope for what's possible for an innovative company with large resources.

We didn't start out to build a search engine at all.

In late 1995, I started collecting the links on the Web, because my advisor and I decided that would be a good thing to do. We didn't know exactly what I was going to do with it, but it seemed like no one was really looking at the links on the Web - which pages link to which pages.

Stanford would be first. You can take universities and just rank them, and they come out in the order you'd expect. So we thought, "This is really interesting. This thing really works. We should use it for search." So I started building a search engine.

Sergey also came on very early, probably in late '95 or early '96, and was really interested in the data mining part. Basically, we thought, "Oh, we should be able to make a better search engine."

Search engines didn't really understand the notion of which pages were more important. If you typed "Stanford," you got random pages that mentioned Stanford. This obviously wasn't going to work.

I think the age is a real issue. It's certainly a handicap in the sense of being able to manage people and to hire people and all these kinds of things, maybe more so than it should be. Certainly, I think, the things that I'm missing are more things that you acquire with time.

If you manage people for 20 years, or something like that, you pick up things. So I certainly lack experience there, and that's an issue. But I sort of make up for that, I think, in terms of understanding where things are going to go, having a vision about the future, and really understanding the industry I am in, and what the company does, and also sort of the unique position of starting a company and working on it for three years before starting the company.

I think I was really lucky to have the environment I did when I was growing up. My dad was a professor, he happened to be a professor of computer science, and we had computers lying around the house from a really early age.

I think I was the first kid in my elementary school to turn in a word-processed document. I just enjoyed using the stuff. It was sort of lying around, and I got to play with it. I had an older brother who was interested in it as well. So I think I had kind of a unique environment, that most people didn't have, because my dad was willing to spend all his available income on buying a computer or whatever.

From a very early age, I also realized I wanted to invent things. So I became really interested in technology and also then, soon after, in business, because I figured that inventing things wasn't any good; you really had to get them out into the world and have people use them to have any effect.

So probably from when I was 12, I knew I was going to start a company eventually.

I just sort of kept having ideas. We had a lot of magazines lying around our house. It was kind of messy. So you kind of read stuff all the time, and I would read Popular Science and things like that. I just got interested in stuff, I guess, technology and how devices work.

I wanted to be able to build things. Actually, in college I built an inkjet printer out of Legos, because I wanted to be able to print really big images. I figured you could print really big posters really cheaply using inkjet cartridges. So I reverse-engineered the cartridge, and I built all the electronics and mechanics to drive it. Just sort of fun projects. I like to be able to do those kinds of things.

Kids certainly don't have fear of using computers now. It's the same kind of thing. If you grow up in environments where you have ICs (integrated circuits) lying around, you don't have fear of that either.

I think it definitely helps to be really focused on what you are doing. You can only work so many hours, and I try to have some balance in my life and so on. I think a lot of people go through this in school.

At Google, especially, we are really lucky. Everybody is our product! Or it's starting to be everybody.

No matter who you talk to, they're like, "Oh, Google today was great. I found exactly what I needed." Somehow we've done a really good job.

People are really happy with our company, and we have provided pretty good service. So that sort of transfers onto how people interact with me as well, which is really nice.