Sundar Pichai: evaluation

Transcript context

…No. It’s amazing. I’m not good at it, but I’ve done it a few times. But sometimes you jump in the ocean, it’s so choppy, but you go down one feet under, it’s the calmest thing in the entire universe. So there’s a version of that. Running Google, you may as well be coaching Barcelona or Real Madrid. You have a bad season. So there are aspects to that. But look, I’m good at tuning out the noise. I do watch out for signals. It’s important to separate the signal from the noise. So there are good people sometimes making good points outside, so you want to listen to it, you want to take that feedback in, but internally, you’re making a set of consequential decisions. As leaders, you’re making a lot of decisions, many of them are inconsequential it feels like, but over time you learn that most of the decisions you’re making on a day-to-day basis doesn’t matter. You have to make them and you’re making them just to keep things moving. But you have to make a few consequential decisions and we had set up the right teams, right leaders, we had world-class researchers, we were training Gemini. Internally, there are factors which were, for example, outside people may not have appreciated. I mean TPUs are amazing, but we had to ramp up TPUs too. That took time to scale actually having enough TPUs to get the compute needed. But I could see internally the trajectory we were on and I was so excited internally about the possible, to me this moment felt like one of the biggest opportunities ahead for us as a company that the opportunity space ahead or the next decade, next 20 years, is bigger than what has happened in the past. And I thought we were set up better than most companies in the world to go realize that vision. I mean, you had to make some consequential, bold decisions like you mentioned the merger of DeepMind and Brain. Maybe it’s my perspective, just knowing humans, I’m sure there’s a lot of egos involved, it’s very difficult to merge teams, and I’m sure there were some hard decisions to be made. Can you take me through your process of how you think through that? Do you go to pull the trigger and make that decision? Maybe what were some painful points? How do you navigate those turbulent waters?…

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