Sundar Pichai: belief

Transcript context

…Sorry, I have two more capital allocation questions. Can you make the case that Google has historically been under-levered, where Google has historically carried a strong net cash position? Given that both Google has more ideas than it knows what to do with, it's just brimming with good ideas, and just the core business grows very durably, and I think Google clearly has a very good understanding of that core business, and it has grown at a higher rate than Google's cost of capital. As you look back on it, should Google have been more leaned in and said, "Okay, we will be willing to have a leveraged position that's slightly more aggressive than strong unit cash, and we will put that towards new initiatives, or just buy more of this core Google business for Google shareholders, or do more minority investing, which again, Google seems to have been best in class at?" It's a great question. For example, if Waymo had reached this point earlier, I think I would have invested the capital earlier. To some extent, I think you were judging it by... You want to be good stewards of capital. To the extent you're bullish on ROIC, you want to invest every last dollar you can there. But to the extent you have excess where you don't think... This is why we've invested in other companies, too, even if not in. But we always thought about it with the lens of being good stewards of it. We felt our investment in Stripe was being a good steward of our capital. SpaceX, and Anthropic and so on. I think now with the AI shift, there are more opportunities on which we can deploy capital in a good way, and so we are doing that. I think we always had that mindset. I would have been glad to invest more capital in Waymo earlier, but we weren't at the level of maturity needed to do that. There was a point in Waymo, from a safety standpoint, we did approach Waymo safety first, and it wasn't the right thing to do. You feel like you cannot point to projects where they would have gone faster had they gone more capital sooner? They had a natural ramp.…

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