David Rosenthal: prediction

Transcript context

…The Internet is a phenomenon like no other, and it keeps going. It’s amazing for something to grow 700% year over year at all, but it happens. But for that to keep happening year over year over year for half a decade, that is worth quitting your job, dropping everything, changing your whole life. And just a couple of years before, two other PhD students at Stanford had started this thing called Yahoo. I think perhaps inspired by what Yahoo was doing, Larry proposes that they’re going to work on this idea of a system that will allow people to make annotations and notes directly on websites instead of in a centralized directory like Yahoo. Because Yahoo was human hand–curated commentary, a directory of websites. The idea is like, oh, this could be a decentralized annotation system where anybody can say what’s interesting about a website. It’s funny. I thought I knew the whole history of Google. I somehow missed this.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.