Sundar Pichai: belief

Transcript context

…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. I would say that, but I think in generally, at least, we might have gotten the decision wrong, but our approach, at least, was to say, if you got excited about something and had the conviction, you were willing to commit the capital to see it through. Another capital allocation question was, historically at tech companies, the large majority of the R&D expense was the people walking around the building. Headcount was managed through a very tightly-controlled process. Indeed, as you thought about allocating R&D effort, it was really allocating highly-paid people to go work on the challenge. The tech costs were, unless you were doing something very computationally expensive, which obviously Google did in place of Google Books or something. Broadly speaking, the tech was an afterthought compared to the cost of the people. We're now going to a world where, as you say, that's not the case with TPUs and how you allocate that. Just at a very concrete budgeting level, how does that work inside of Google? Do you have an overall TPU budget for the company? Then, when you are giving a project resourcing, previously you gave it a certain headcount budget, and now you give it a headcount and a TPU budget. Are they the same budget? Just how does that work when you're doing a quarterly review or an annual review?…

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