Mă uitam în acest weekend pe recomandările de pe Longform și printre ele era acest articol din Business Insider, scris de Nicholas Carlson. L-am început și timp de vreo oră am avut ce face.

Larry Page este fondatorul gigantului Google. Acesta l-a avut avut alături de la început pe co-fondatorul Sergey Brin. Dar despre Brin se vorbește mai puțin, pentru că adevăratul vizionar de la Google este Page. Iar visurile sale îndrăznețe i-au pus de multe ori în dificultate poziția în cadrul propriei companii.

Câteva extrase:

Page eventually wrote down his rules for management:

  • Don’t delegate: Do everything you can yourself to make things go faster.
  • Don’t get in the way if you’re not adding value. Let the people actually doing the work talk to each other while you go do something else.
  • Don’t be a bureaucrat.
  • Ideas are more important than age. Just because someone is junior doesn’t mean they don’t deserve respect and cooperation.
  • The worst thing you can do is stop someone from doing something by saying, “No. Period.” If you say no, you have to help them find a better way to get it done.

In that moment, Page realized it wasn’t enough to envision an innovative technological future. Big ideas aren’t enough. They need to be commercialized.

It wasn’t that he was a tyrant. It’s just that he connected to people over their ideas, not their feelings.

Asked about his approach to running the company, Page once told a Googler his method for solving complex problems was by reducing them to binaries, then simply choosing the best option. Whatever the downside he viewed as collateral damage he could live with.

Page was convinced that Google could use a CEO after all. But only if that CEO was Steve Jobs.

By 2005, one of Page’s visions was to put handheld computers with access to Google in the pocket of every person on the planet. So, that year, Page directed Google corporate development to buy a small startup with the same ludicrously huge ambition. This startup was Android.

He went on. “Look at Android. Look at Gmail. Look at Google Maps. Look at Google Search. That’s what we do. We build products you can’t live without.”

So, in Page’s vision, if you walk into your house and feel cold, your Google-powered wristwatch will be performing a search to understand that feeling. The search result will be for your Google-powered thermostat to turn up the heat.

Likewise, if you run out of milk and your Google-powered fridge notifies your Google-powered self-driving car to go collect some more from the Google-powered robots at the local grocery warehouse (no doubt paying with your Google wallet), it will all be a function of search.

“Anything you can imagine probably is doable,” Page told Google investors in 2012. “You just have to imagine it and work on it.”