David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Amazing. Even more so for future Google to come for the 1979 to 1980 academic year when Larry is six and seven years old. His dad does a sabbatical year at Stanford. The whole family goes out and lives in Palo Alto, and Stanford and early Silicon Valley there, makes a big impression on young Larry. Then he continues to be influenced by this, because I mentioned his older brother, Carl Jr, who’s nine years older than him, Carl goes to Michigan, majors in CS just like Larry would. Then when he graduates, he goes out to the West coast, actually to the Pacific Northwest, and he works fairly early at Microsoft and then Mentor Graphics down in Oregon. Carl Jr would ultimately also come down to Silicon Valley and play a little role in this story as we will see in a little bit. But back to Larry here. Part of the reason I say all this, and I want to include Sergey too in what I’m about to say, even though we haven’t introduced him yet in the story, I think there’s this perception today that Larry and Sergey were these bumbling academic guys, who weren’t really business minded, and Google was a research project, and this all happened by accident that they built the best business of all time. Absolutely freaking not. We want to dispel that notion right now. One of the things we heard over and over again talking to people in research is how hugely ambitious the two of them were, not just for the products they were building but for Google for the business. Larry’s a different generation and a very different personality than Mark Zuckerberg, but you should think about his ambition and his desire to build a huge, world-changing company at the same level as him. To your point, Google did not happen by accident. Or another reasonable comparison, the generation before Bill Gates. I think they publicly—Larry and Sergey—don’t get the same ethos that those two get, but the same fire was there.…

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