marissa mayer, president and ceo of yahoo!. this event is 75 minutes long. >> our subject tonight is how google works of man we will examine that question in more than just theory. google vice-president eric schmidt and jonathan rosenberg is here to discuss their new titles. most of all, it is an authentic inside look at the culture and practices behind one of the world's most successful companies. what a moderator we have to lead the discussion. marissa mayer, president and ceo of yahoo!, herself the 20th employee of google. she saw a lot of this from the inside and is now seeing it again from the ceo's office. please join me in a welcoming eric, jonathan,

and rsi. [applause] >> welcome. [applause] >> i am so delighted to be here tonight. [laughter] >> we have so much for you. >> i am sure. i have had the chance to work with both of these gentlemen, and they are might to longest standing mentors. i lucked out because i got to of the best business leaders and the world today as my mentors. also -- [laughter] literally not a day goes by when i don't think about something that each of them has said in a way that has shaped me or shapes what i do next. jonathan might be the most insightful person i've ever met about people. >> what about me? >> in addition, eric might

be the most insightful person i have ever met on scaling of all forms telecommunications, business, technology. >> something about morrison -- marissa. >> we have an hour, a lot of abuse. we will get there. >> tonight i am very excited to get a glimpse into more of their understanding of people, stealing. obviously just immensely interesting. so about the book, how did you decide to write it? what was the process like? >> you builds half of this stuff. you know the answers. [laughter] >> i used to come back from staff meetings, and i would get poured. i would write to our rules that people came up with when they said things that were insightful. i had all the rules like repetition does not spoil the prayer.

i could get everyone to move along more expeditiously. i would come to my staff and explain all of the rules. in 2009 our head of sales said, we should pass all of this tribal wisdom on to googlers, i wrote a speech which you helped me with. >> you are so wrong. one, it is a best seller, and number two, we did publish it. >> why are you not a co co-author? >> that is the reason. [laughter] >> so is a best seller. tell us about the reception. you are in the week number three of the book tour, what surprised you about what people have taken from the bark, al it has been received? >> people are very hungry for new ideas. as you know. i think along the way, over

the decades, google pioneered a whole new principles for managing things whether it is recruiting people or efficiencies, it worked, and it worked remarkably well. and, of course, the reason we wrote the book is because we all benefit, i think, by making american companies stronger, creating more innovators, trying this new model. i was concerned that there is a gap, a huge gap between the world that we all live in and the normal companies. there is this whole generation of people coming out for which the normal companies are just not designed. just as not make sense to them, and they are smart, mobil, quick, and walk into these companies with very turgid systems. >> that makes -- reading the book i felt like, for me, there are so many things and their and i was like, wait,

almost say it to my husband and family. you won't understand my values, read the book because there is so much in there, science, culture. one of the things that defines that culture is now hiring. what do you look for, how important is it? >> hiring is everything that you do, and we had -- had a set of attributes, which you help us create

[laughter] >> which we did, and it was the right strategy. do you remember this? [laughter] >> i remember it quite well. >> and she created this crazy debating system. >> go ahead. >> we raided people on a scale of 1-4, which seemed easy. one is bad, and for is good. she explains to me that, no, performance that this person

is so good for your committee that if you have the audacity to turn them down you need to call me out of whatever i am doing so i can come into the room and fight to make sure we bring this person into my company. one was the opposite. call me. this is so bad i don't want this person in my company, and that is how we ended up breaking people for committees. >> convince positive, convince-,. >> the spectrum. now you understand how it actually works. she was making things and i tried to follow the logic. so along the way -- let's take control of this. her most important accomplishment of her many at google was one day she decided we had to rethink the way product management worked. at that time there were three product managers.

and so the question was, how do we build a model and scale that the one had the idea to hire people with technical backgrounds and did not want to be programmers. and she called these the apms. and these are very, very young, right out of college, never worked for a company, eager to do everything. so she bill that, and if you look at that group, almost all of the interested start-ups in the valley are started by those people. so the model worked brilliantly. so jonathan had the idea -- sari, jonathan -- that we should have worked for these people. so he created something called the change gain. they had a work stream and they would take these tasks. and this is how we develop them. remember? >> absolutely. the whole program started,

jonathan would be there. starting google for four months, wanting to grow public management, we thought like 1-10, 1-8, hiring eight engineers per week for eight weeks, 64 people. jonathan hired two people of, a total of five at the time at the program has started for apms. one person to susan and one to another. i said, when do i get mine. and jonathan said, when you make revenue. and i was like, doing advertisement and, you know, partnerships and i was doing consumers but, you know, there is no revenue if there is no website. can i have a bet that i can hire and grow new product managers faster than you can hire experienced ones. and jonathan said, what are you going to do?

[laughter] >> but there is the book, jonathan. >> a moment in my career when i was most upset with you. i was in bill campbell's office and i confess i was trying to hire people like me and could not find them that would be approved of. so. [laughter] i am on the couch. [inaudible conversations] >> you are literally on the couch. >> yes. >> i remember this vividly, to plead he was on the couch . [laughter] >> look, marissa, i loved -- i can say that up here in the appropriate in avuncular where that an older male colleague can love you, i love you. but i almost strangled you that day. here is what really happened i am on bill campbell's couch before he has quit.

i explained to him that i cannot hire. and marissa is outside, and it is 2002, she is 25 out of were you? twenty-seven. when you give her math questions always to the answer before you ask the question and he will beat her to read. i have learned that, too. and she says, what is the matter? and feeling tired. and bill said, well, maybe marissa has an idea. and she is bubbly and excited and realized she has an opportunity, so she starts talking about this program. bill says, what do you think. and i said, well, i doubt it will work. marissa looks at me and says, well, your problem, jonathan, is, you are trying to hire people like you and we don't like people like you. [laughter] >> then he says, they like people like me. and that is when we had bill campbell. >> i would have reached over

and strangled her. [laughter] >> okay. so -- [inaudible conversations] >> ladies and gentlemen, i think we have exhausted this. the important thing about the apms program is what it created was, it served as the mechanism by building the creativity of the company, and they've worked brilliantly. >> welcome with a cute. one of the things talked about in the book is far creative spirit and one of the things, apm, we hire people right out of school to do a 2-year rotational program at google. >> she would make them go on these trips. and they would basically stay three people to a room, that kind of thing indeed poor quality food and go from city to city. >> it was like can't. >> it was literally like high-school. >> and it worked. >> we went in their saw our products in the wild and

meet with advertisers. so important. >> so our creative are people who are highly technical, business savvy and creative and passionately curious, the kind of people who do not take no for an answer, the kind of people who today can build a demo out of the tools that we have off the shelf that are easy to produce things with. and they show you, as opposed to tell you, what they're going to do, so you don't need to create rigid product plans to you can create demos and prototypes and test them and see where they go. >> and by the way, one of the things we figured out in the riding of this book is almost all of the traditional discussion is around scarcity , and rodeo manager marketing, channels, so forth. the internet has appended all of that. it allows you to distribute

and print yourself and pretty much anyway. many brands are popping up all the time. to take uber as an example. so what are you left with? if you don't have these creative as you will not be as competitive in such a hyper competitive world which is why the whole recruiting test, the kind of people you hire, and the focus our culture are so important going further -- ford. and i would go further, every company here, it is actually true for non tech companies as well. >> and we talked a little bit about the interview's deal before, but it is the most important skill for any business leader, talk about that. >> well, i would often in our staff meeting still on managers that you are the sum of what our people produce. i find it interesting that managers in most companies

don't spend the amount of time with recruiting as they should pay ridiculous get the coaches and sports teams the they seem to get it. the players that the draft on the team are all that matters. we lose sight of that and delegate recruiting to recruiters. and as soon as you delegate recruiting to recruiters, then you go in a downward spiral. you want to make sure all the individuals employees are focused on recruiting -- used to tell us when we were upset, we cannot meet the hiring quotas, we could double every single quarter if one person hired one person. hazmat was correct. >> as it always was. we did lots of interesting things. one of the more controversial ones was the reliance upon hiring committees which would make hiring decisions, and the manager was often not on the

committee. often the subject did not know what job they would work on. so it was modeled very much after how successful universities ire because hiring is critical and universities. and often jonathan and david ran a whole process that marissa helped design which produced this ruthless efficiency around the quality of the people, and we were heavily criticized for these hiring decisions, but if you look over the arc of a decade, it was one of the, if not the most important, thing that we did because it gave us a work force that was flexible for the challenges we face. >> we also heard from jim armstrong, you do not want to allow the invasion of the bozos. and what was very clear is that a can be taught to hire a, but be you will never hire a. below higher see because they are afraid of people better. so you create a positive effect if you manage to

limit the company to just hiring days and then teach them how to interview, teach them how to hire and you invade the -- avoid the invasion of the bozos. >> study you make sure the great people, smart, creative stay successful and happy? >> many people that visit google thinks it is because of the lava lamps, free food -- >> i like that stuff. [laughter] >> on site doctors, number of benefits, but there is a secret at the secret is, the best people want to work on what they want to work on and things that they care a lot about and be allowed to be successful. if you can build a culture which empowers them to do that, you will retain them. if you micromanage then, did not give them the resources they need in this competitive world of labor, they will go somewhere else. >> of think you cannot tell the people how to think, but you can manage the

environment in which they think, be transparent with information, jen meetings in a way that allows everyone to participate and you can do what we call in the book limit to the hippos. hippo is what we call -- >> jonathan, please define and build for our audience. >> highest-paid person's opinion. >> highest-paid -- >> h-i-p-p-0. >> eighty. >> at polk. >> the most dangerous animal in this event. >> they live actually in the water, eric. they do kill more people in africa and killed good ideas in companies. one of the reasons we had which i only figured out late in my tenure because i was always trying to get larry in sir gate to move to the model i had. if i only had three people working for me it would have been so easy if it was just you and susan and saw but i had sought or 15 people working for me. i would try to reorganize.

and there we would say, you cannot reorganize that way. there was an engineering manager who wanted to do the same thing. and larry said, you can't do that. you will be a hip belt. if you had too many people working for you you cannot possibly micromanages them. [laughter] >> what is the number in your case, jonathan? >> the number is seven. and if i had eight marissa working for me, i could talk to the world. >> you talk about being happily ever worked in a good way, tell us a little bit about that. always something. it always weigh more work than people. how do you bring that into a culture and make it a positive thing? >> we have been criticized over this general term. it does not sound right.

the kind of people we want working in our company and people you want in your company are people who do this because they love it and work more or less the best they can when they are not doing things they also enjoy, like being with their family, raising their kids. in other words, they are intense people. when we say over worked in a good way, that is the context we mean it in. if you believe that work should be 9-5 with a half-hour lunch break, then you should work for the government. by the way, that is a fine job of, but that is not the kind of person we are looking for. we're looking for somebody who wakes up in the morning and cannot wait to solve some new, interesting, and our problem, whether in sales, policy, legal, management, people who delight in that. and it is so much easier to manage these people. i went to visit warren buffett. he had a huge empire and 14

employees. this is the highest ratio of leverage. and he explained that he only bought companies where the leaders would stay in place, and they would do it whether he bought the mark not. so he never worried about it. he just called them and talked to them, and it worked. and at google the key aspect of this competition over resources was that the people are just dying to drive harder, to make things happen because they care passionately about it. it makes it much easier to decide where priorities are and so forth. you do not have to sit and worry that someone is of the reservation. >> on a related note you have this colorful metaphor in the book. >> did i read that? >> no, you did not. quit taking credit for this. the credit goes to arco author. >> allen is here. >> there he is. [applause]

>> explain what he meant so typically we find that the most explicit -- most successful teams are relatively small. engineering teams in small groups of three or four, and one of the things you find when you have small groups is, you kind of get eight vision for dynamics and social control. people help modify bad behavior in a social group, so the worst thing that can happen is you allow a naives into the midst of a small team. what is eight naives? someone who lies, cheats, steals, takes credit for someone else's work, spills coffee in the kitchen and does not pick it up. you want to help the team, exiles the -- exile the naives and get rid of them. c-span2 density. -- naives density.

>> you feel the need and want to minimize the number. >> minimize naives and helps the defense. what is a diva? a brilliant person who believes that everything should be done in an exceptional wine and is often dictatorial, difficult to work with, but has great vision and has a better notion of where the world is going and what they are doing with their products than anyone else. in the small environments, the teams can drive out those people off presoaked exile the naives and fight for the divas. and the reason you need the divas aside from the entertainment value and the culture, these are the people who drive the culture forward. these are the people that drive the average, not everyone will be a diva, push them to fight harder, and often these are the people who ultimately become the most famous in our industry. you can argue, for example,

steve jobs, brilliant, brilliant product manager, divas, very driven, very strong, look at the impact of people like that. we need that please do not drive them out. >> i talked in the opening about your thoughts on scale. i have never seen anyone manage scale as effectively, to take google from 200 people when you joined to today 50,000. and the most remarkable thing -- and i will tell some of the stories more broadly how you scale culture, but things that happened when you arrived. 200 people, way too much work. he came in, saw the annual plan and said, we are going to double. we're going to go to 400 people this year. eric said, no, no, no. we will have 50 people hired between now and the end of the year. we took our hiring plan. who is going to do all this work? these crazy little laminated

cards. every time you had to get -- tried to hire someone he had to turn in one of the 50 laminated, numbered cards. >> i made those at home with my eliminator. >> and they created this whole black market. the sales guy who needs something built. i can give you want so talk about how it -- why you did it. some ways it was important for us not to grow that fast that think if we had tried to double the company that here we would have probably messed everything up. that commitment to quality and pacing that was so important. >> if you talk to engineering team, every engineering team needs twice as many engineers as it has now right now. i assume people in the audience are living this. it's normal. there are ways in which a

corporation can higher quality and even eyeball lead. in our case i looked at the hiring rate and said, we will hire 50 people. we can try to hire more, but realistically 50, so let's do it with a quality measure presoaks the cards were a simple way of putting in advancement technique which ultimately became quite rigorous. the reason we could not use our financial system is we were using quick books. it was at a 5-user license. [laughter] and it was overloaded. and that is really true. so my position on the company was, we need to build a management team that could scale, and i am a strong believer that you can systematically innovate. in other words, innovation is not something that you do randomly. it is a culture, hiring, way of thinking and so forth.

so we would figure out a growth plan. and i would say, how much bigger will we be? and they would take the current growth rate and just extrapolate. one day there were rollerblading over to the sdi campus and came back and said to we are going to need that campus. and now today we are in the former sgi campus. so if you take a look at the growth rate, one of the things we talk about in the book is that companies don't really have long-term plans. they have plans for the next year. ultimately you need a 5-year plan, so ultimately what happened was, you and a set of other people said, this is the growth rate, the hiring plan, and off we go. >> what was interesting was the way we were able to scale the culture. around the same time during 2002 there was a notion, you said, we are a 1-building company and a 1-building culture, and it will not work if we are spread across multiple buildings.

it was staring me. given how we are growing, down to 80 square feet per person. and hang on. how will we get our culture to scale. what are some of the insights you guys developed over time in terms of how to scale the culture? >> i think that at the outset google had a mission that was clear and created a sense of selection early on so that we got people that really believe in that same mission. and when we wrote it down it was actually the smart creative says, the founding people who had the vision that wrote these things down. most companies kind of do the opposite, get started and then have a little bit of success. so they can hire in some h.r. or pr person. that person comes in and says, well, i will write the culture out. and this person would not know the culture if it jumped up and bit them. so we produced something like, to build on rival partnerships with our customers through the dedication, hard work,

persevering of our wonderful employees to generate shareholder value. [laughter] >> by the way, i was in that meeting. >> the one you just quoted was from enron, right? [laughter] >> respect, integrity, communication, and excellence. this one was lehman brothers. [laughter] >> i don't know if you were in the meeting. when i first encountered it. explained to me, i thought, this is like some stupid marketing phrase because i had never actually seen marketing freezes inside a company be effective. we are sitting in the old conference room, if you remember, at 2400, and there is a conversation about search and add, and it was a product where we would cross

the search and that boundary. and halfway through the meeting, this participant named ron took his fist and slammed the table and said, that is evil. the whole conversation stopped. and i thought, oh, my god. and so after a link the hour of debate it was agreed to not move forward. all of a sudden i understood that, one, the company was serious about this, and it gave this -- and it gave this particular engineer a moral question to ask that will guide his or her actions. >> one of the amazing stories. that kind of culture meeting , holding together, looking toward values don't be evil. and someone said, well, you cannot have a negative corporate value.

can you rephrase that positively? in we were like -- [inaudible conversations] we were like, yes, it is not as catchy as don't to evil. >> we have other ones like, you can have fun without wearing a suit. >> and the first one was, focus on -- [inaudible] >> and one of the things that we talk a lot about in the book, when you have a framing principle like that, it helps you a lot. when you look today, we ultimately reach three, i think, successfully if we are doing it for the end user, we can get through anything. >> one of the things i learned from you along the way it was very technical, from both of you in different ways. i will go through each of them. around meetings. unremembered jonathan arriving and organizing all kind of meetings, and it was magical because i think larry answered a decide one night, you know, jonathan has arrived and he takes notes.

[laughter] and then we all know what was said in a meeting. a culture of organizing a meeting, having an agenda, notes afterward, making sure you have the stakeholders. >> jonathan forced having to projectors in the room, one for the presentation and the other to project the notes so that you could see what the note taker was saying. and they would be like, i did not say that. >> i have been a master in my previous job. what i felt product management was was sitting in a room and writing everything down and defining the adjectives after everyone else left so you could say what they have said they agreed to. [laughter] and so when i put the second projectors and the rooms, i decided i was not going to allow all the product managers who work for me to do that. they were going to follow eriks principal and leave the meeting. >> and remember, meetings, something that it takes time

out of the day. i remember you would say this phrase, i worked through a meeting. that is so i get the install and. >> managers spend their times in meetings. having figure out what the rules are it was important. when i was at nobel we have something called the new ball not. everyone would agree in the meeting and then after the meeting was over they would do whatever they wanted. [laughter] it was highly effective, as you can see, so when i showed up at google we had this new idea, we should try to figure out the best outcome and idea. we would sit around and someone would make a proposal and with china have a debate. and everyone would have an opinion. there are always two or three people, usually the guys, that talk a lot and dominate the conversation. so i learned to call on the people who do not normally say and try to get as part

of competition and all of a sudden you have a debate so you need to have a time limit. i found that my role was to stimulate the debate and have a time limit. if you don't have a time limit it's like a university. they just argue all the time, but if you have a debate you can move forward. and in the book we actually go through the china decision as a result not of the china decision which had been well covered but rather we followed through fully. >> jonathan, how do you feel meetings shape the culture of google command how do we do them differently? >> well, you were in my weekly staff meeting. >> i was. i was in all kinds of things . >> our staff meeting, we actually had one of the apm assigned to do it chain gang task each week, and his or

her out -- job was to assemble all the information so that instead of everyone coming into the meeting and getting an updated, they would have the information out the day before a. then we would come in, and after everyone got to really get at reciting information i would insist we go around the table and force everyone to articulate what it is they need from their peers, the other people in the room, to be more efficient. and that was how we ran my staff meetings, which eventually you got good at. you would come in with your list ahead of time. >> and one of the principles we talk about in the book is , why do you start your management meetings with actual data? what a shock. so marissa would show up @booktv she drove this on her own. she would have a complete study, in charge of the users, the most important thing in the company, showing where the users work, what the trends were. the moment she put that flag up, we would have an

argument. but you start with the data. >> you start with -- >> you start with the dashboard, the data. if we have data, let's look at the data. if all we have our opinions, we will go with -- [laughter] that could because they have built. [laughter] >> you talk about the people and culture. one of the most important things is product and service. we talk and the book about how important it is, basically every great product has a key technical insight. why is that so important? how do you define technical insight? >> it is the kind of thing that could end up in a journal article, the kind of thing that typically a researcher, a scientist is going to come up with. he think about google and make a list of all of our great products, there is a

technical aspect behind them . the notion of quality of the ads. why is grown so great? it is secure and faced. why is mass -- maps so great it is a virtual mirror of the world. and if you look at other products, sales force dot com, they realized that you use the cloud for contact and relationship management. pixar, you can tell stories with computers. the great products when technology is changing quickly leverage some insight about how technology works to usurp an existing set of products that make the product better by a factor of ten. >> and a current example, for the audience, has to do with cloud computing. the smart phones are where all the apps are, and that is where the excitement is. they're well enough connected now that you can connect to a server bank

that can do incredibly powerful calculations, speech recognition, those kinds of things of phone and send it back fast enough that the user thinks the farm gate. in fact, there is a supercomputer, literally a million computers that help answer this question. >> what are some of the technical insights that are not being capitalized on today? what are some of the things, the trends that you see that you feel will define products, services five years out? and what are the technical insights and trans appearing today that will help that? >> the one that is the most profound is artificial intelligence. you say, i don't really use a i? you do it every day. he do it in the search engine that google does, voice recognition engine, an incredibly sophisticated algorithms that are, again, often server-based to do this.

a highly accurate speech recognition, image recognition. it means that we will begin to start learning really profoundly. what is that useful for? imagine and a system that helps you figure out do you have to get up out? stay asleep, is your plan going to be late, do i need to get to the dentist, to it i forget? those sorts of things. of the things that are annoyances to the average person's life that a computer can help you with. where are we with that? two years ago there was a neural network was no programming whatsoever. not thinking what else to do we had than their own network start to watch youtube, and it launched 11,000 hours of youtube. what did it discover? two things. it discovered the human face, eyes, nose, mouth, and it discovered cats.

[laughter] and i mean the whole concept of a cat to mattel, running around to my furnace, purring, all of that kind of stuff i wish that i could report to you that this seminal moment in the moment of humanity. >> aristotle, plato, something like that. >> but that is what we discovered. a lot of evidence that will establish a broad set of new applications, and not just what we do but madison and so forth. >> i think probably the biggest and most exciting ones are in health care, you know, certainly lots of robert kennedy's in terms of genetic research and data and designer drugs, the other exciting thing is this notion of horrible devices and longitude elite being able to track information about physiological information information you get about people. today we are seeing these type devices and staying fit type of things, but that

will move to measuring things about you that matter. you could get information for an at-risk teenager from their cell phone to a psychologist, and it will tell you more about the state of that kids depression or anxiety than when you ask a teenager how they're doing and they sort of give you some type of answer. imagine what a phone could do. and as there are all sorts of other potential opportunities with anything that you can track longitudinal the over large numbers of people. >> i am going to open it up for audience questions in just a minute, but i have a few more. the buzzword of the day is millenials. and the way google works, the products you talked about will be used by millenials. have you think their expectation about products and technology will shape things? howdy think they will interact?

and also how will they be in the workforce and how you think google works? >> my observations of millenials, i will say the following. what do they do? text, text, text, text, text, picture of themselves, text, text, text, picture of the food they're eating. [laughter] occasionally they use important and powerful apps and change the world. what do you learn from this? you learn that they are highly, highly interactive. they are highly verbal in a text way. they are communicating all the time. and they are very much savvier than i was at that age. the amount of information sources, whether traditional or fund or social are on the supercharge all the time, and my guess is that this will be true of teenagers and young people. frankly, if you have a child , your child is on line all the time. they wake up at night, they

are on line when they wake up and then go back to sleep . >> jonathan. >> clearly eric is more insightful about the state of glen mills than i could ever hope to be. i would ask the apm who you hired for me as opposed to go in and tell them how to develop products for these millenials. we are certainly seeing a big transition to apps on mobile devices. i have not yet figured out what the preferred form of communication is. i just wrote a book dollar alan date, and we wrote our rules of the mail. and i can tell, they do not answer my e-mails. i have yet to figure out the best way to communicate. >> the activity, and that think there is clearly a new hyperactive form of communication that will emerge out of this because these are communication communication-centered people. if it is interesting. if you look at how news

spreads among that generation, it is linked to a link to link. look at this, this is interesting. what they encounter on social networks. >> i think one thing that defines millenials for me is that they have and entitled sense of information, a lot more transparency, products and services, government, how things are billed to my company cultures. one of the great things at google throughout the years was his commitment to all hands, how big the company got, there was this access information. the last thing before i moved to the audience questions, but talk about the effect that has on culture, if it is important, if it is not important, what role does it play. >> i think it is hugely important. did i think it went beyond just that t gif meeting. it went to all aspects of pretty much all information.

eric would get up quarterly, and we would produce more slides, with spots of you would help me with, and he would literally present the same slide to all of the employees that were presented for the entire board. so it was clear to all of these smart creative that they understood not only the mission but the metrics by which we're running the company, the metrics by which we were running. and they had access to information and the company intranet. and if you have the idea that information will percolate up from the smart creative scum you have to be completely transparent about sharing information with them. >> and a big question and answer session at the end. so questions from the audience that we will try to go through rapid-fire so everyone has a chance. first question is, what opportunities are there for google in the sharing economy?

>> we are a big investor in uber to start. >> a lot of it depends on where our future of products and is up. it is one of the discussions that people have had -- have had about the self driving cars, perhaps in the future self driving cars will be shared, you will get in, it will take you somewhere, you get out of it, and it will take someone else somewhere else. you rethink the ownership model, one of the interesting statistics about cities is 9 percent of the urban landscape is devoted to parking. imagine if you could get that back somehow, the impact in terms of the ability to of both buildings , strengthen the city. >> i think our role is probably in the middle. what google does is help reduce information cost and with payment if we can help people reduce transaction

costs, in any asset in the sharing economy that at any moment will go fallow we can get this synapse firing between the person who can sell that asset and the person you might want to buy that asset. and that can apply to any good, your cars sitting idle , your home, the dress that you were this week that you're not going to wear again next week >> one of the most important things that google and other companies are trying to do is make the entire business transaction, that velocity and increasing the velocity of that transaction benefits the entire record system appears, processors, the advertiser, the manufacturer, and the consumer. >> very cool. are there any aspect of the google culture when you look back you wish had been different or would do differently the next time around? >> well, for me, i think all

of the errors that we have made, the core error was in taking too long to do something or allowing something to go on for too long. you will remember wave, a team of hours brought out ways. it sounded like a good idea to me. i more or less understood it we launch it, every month the traffic goes down and down and down, but i was sort of attached to the product. we kept trying things. during that time, the real opportunity cost was taking that team and not putting them on something which was more likely to go straight up. businesses -- the highest cost of our business, which i thought was taxes, by the way mathematically, is an opportunity cost. >> cool. going back to self -- smart creative is, how do you tell the smart created from the crazy ones?

[laughter] >> well, i tend to interview for passion. so to actually get them talking about the things that they are passionate about the end of the things they rehearsed, and that is when you see people let their guard down. and the farther they go in the interview and the more that they tell you, the crazier they are, the more likely they are to be a diva -like personality and the better. i would rather err on the side of bringing in more of the people that are actually crazy than having to figure out how to -- and figure out how to manage and then air on this side of not allowing some of those crazy people in the door. >> very cool. the next question is around h-p. i taught my son to recognize it. i will say, what is that? and he says, h-p garage.

this questionnaire asks, how much do you ascribe the cultural success of google cheese the example set by bill and dave? >> i worked at h-p briefly for a summer. actually read bhp wake pleaded is surprising to me that most people do not read these documents. i think there was a time at h-p where management was by walking around. and i think that senior managers at google, once they kind of come in and figure out that they have not been brought into the dictators but as readers of viewpoints and have been brought in to help get synapses firing across teams, they are finally able to be successful, and i really think that that is the kind of management style that bill and dave espouse. >> can a cake to be highly successful and have time and energy be left over for a family? >> yes.

we have a number of googlers here on the stage to have managed to do that to. >> and a lot of our family members. >> the most important thing to say is that it is easier to net it out. think about diversity and think about trying to get to the very best people and think about trying to have professional women who are fantastically talented people, you have to solve the child care problem in a way that works for them. after a lengthy conversation we ultimately decided to purchase three closed schools and created three slightly different day care centers. the employees had a copay and so forth. that is an example of the stuff you have to do. you have to solve the problem on their terms, just using that as a specific example but when everyone can understand. we talk in the book about how, as middle-aged white men, we would notice the women we would work with would disappear for a few

hours presumably taking care of kids or whenever they were up two and a comeback after word at night working very hard late into the night. obviously by their choice. and you have to find a way to let them get those done. we learned, do not encroach on that time. you are encroaching on family time which is just as important if not more important. >> next question, i think start-ups in silicon valley are crazy. do you think they are overvalued? if i am the ceo of a startup should i keep hiring aggressively or secure funding and spend it more wisely, fully, and carefully over time? [laughter] true question, word for word >> you always want to spend money wisely, but i think the question is really asking, are we in a tech bubble. i think that the answer is no. i used to circulate

regularly, and if you go back and look at the bubble in 2000, the nasdaq lower -- >> the nasdaq is not quite at the bubble level of 2,000. >> but bring it back, by the way. those were great times. >> go to those slides, and just as a proxy for the value of this set of these companies, look at e-commerce. the amount of lead-commerce has grown enormously, and we are moving to this model which was mentioned earlier of eliminating friction. if you eliminate friction between people it is seamless to create a transaction complications and permutations of transactions you get go through the roof exponentially. the other thing that needs to be added into the equation is, cell phones are getting much cheaper. we have two and half billion people in the next five years from all corners of the globe that will join the on-line medium and be able to access information on the

internet, health care affirmation, engaged in commerce, so the number of opportunities we have our huge, and e-commerce is already far greater than it was at the beginning. >> the reason it feels like a bubble is the financing higher key, of a sudden it went up. and it went up because these companies had a product and you could see over a billion people. so all of a sudden if you have a successful product to have a much better likelihood of success. so it depends on where you are in the company staged. if you are still building your technical team, you want to be careful to hire carefully, high-quality people, work very hard, classic startup model. you have revenue, you want to be careful to understand what the revenue growth rate is. so depending upon whether you have revenue or not you get a different answer.

>> next question, what is a chain gang? >> in the manager could define a task. larry actually once assigned a task which was for a chain gang member to help him figure out my project where their resources and the engineers of the company were being allocated so that we could figure out what all of the people were doing. so it was basically a euphemism, they guy he was popping balloons and torturing the apm. and it was a risk @booktv list of random tasks. and to be fair to marissa, what she told them was, you are going to get something -- she recruited them and said, you will get grand project straight out of school. she gave brian rakowski g mail. and i'd give him all these

crappy little change gain that he had to do to keep him busy. >> that is where the name came from, actually. jonathan said, i want to give them all these little tasks. okay, managing. people don't realize, this same people did those. this list of tasks. okay. i am being enslaved so we created this little page, jonathan's chain gang, and that is where it came from. >> is serious point, imagine a situation where you have these incredibly smart people you can apply questions about your business. we ultimately figured out what we really needed were physicists, and i put them in the office next to mine. and she would talk about the physics of the code of our revenue, and we would go and

analyze these and say, how can we make it better? how can we make it stronger? and we would use these as internal checks and balances, and they would discover very interesting things, even asking the question would cause an interesting outcome. we called it the physics of clicks. >> the user priorities. >> do you acquire? >> i was there, but it was not mine. >> a fantastic product. and for those of you do not know what it is, it is a fantastic photo manager. and most of the use of picasso has been shifted over to the cloud-based photo services. i happen to still be a huge picasso user. >> by the way, a quick story about our photo service. remember when i came back from africa and had all these beautiful pictures,

and said, hey, guys, look at all my pictures. i went to eric staff meeting and try to show them the pictures. larry pooh-poohed my pictures and said, you missed all sorts of stuff. and he said in seven, eight, nine, ten years you will not need to take pictures like this. you will put a camera on your head, and when you come back software will figure out all of the best pictures for you. and like, he is almost right, right? today you can put a camera on your head and come back and google stories can say this is the best stuff. >> this is an example of more recently the notion, the best pictures of the ones you have given in the fall of the stream. >> it is also very useful. >> very cool. last question, the management, work at google,

hiring, work at other places? >> i would argue firstly, the principle we talk about in the book will work very well at any tech startups anywhere in the world. i say this with conviction because many of them have copied us. many of them came from our culture. to me, the question is, what happens for existing companies? here they are regulated in a different way and have different problems. the first question is, look at a hiring. it turns out that large, existing companies will hire 5-10 percent of their work force every year through normal attrition. right there over five for ten years you can massively changed people in your corporation by adopting the hiring principles, which the two of you pioneered, which are contained in this book and an upcoming book, which is a more detailed version of all of this. i think that is step one. the second is, in this book

there are two pages which i actually wrote -- >> strategy pages. >> thank you, and they are whichever pages. but in the wake -- and is the largest companies that i deal with have -- they don't really have 5-year strategy spirit they have not figured out what to do if their model is disruptive. so what is the narrative? all business, new business, old media, new company. if you believe as i do that growth in america, all of these entrepreneurs, the most important thing that we can support and our country, then the right answer is over a 5-year timeframe each and every company should organize itself around the destruction they will face from new entrants, and almost no company can answer that question in a coherent way. examples. @booktv versus the cab

industry. the existing car companies. i will give you example after example. >> you know, a 5-year plan, i would have missed every great thing that could have happened. sometimes you just cannot see far enough ahead to plan that far. >> so my point is that you have to have a vision. let's have a conversation about our five. plan. to end five years, let's start with smart phones. we will all have them, you're still going to sleep with him next to your bed. really powerful apps that you will use extensively, the back end, services of one kind or another, the friction of the transaction will be much more slow. you start making those assumptions, right, and you can begin to say, how am i going to do? what will happen from my product? how will i make my revenue? [inaudible question] current -- how can i transition to that new model?

.. everything in communication, repetition, sharing everything, a lot of principles focusing on the user in any company and any industry. >> how a senior executive, and it to me to make decisions. >> you do make mistakes.

is important to acknowledge little companies make mistakes. we make a culture where you fail quickly and admit your fill years and move forward and we made plenty along the way but the gaudy enough right that it produced a good success and i think that is principal number one. principal number 2 is with the new aspect of technology we can all use we can extend the value and reach of an executive far and wide. read and answer your e-mail and know what is going on. i am a big fan of holding ceos and senior executives accountable for what they do. there's all this bureaucracy, fix it. our product sucks, fix it. there is actually someone or a team in charge, unlike other things like the government. >> i disagree with the premise there's less information

available to management today particularly in web based business. all the decisions we made in early years were related to our products, with done on the basis of a b testing and state and statistics that told us what was going on. the same thing was true in terms of inventory and existing businesses. walmart and target and bed bath and beyond know when a more about what is going on in their business than they did ten years ago. >> in 1987 i was working when i was young and didn't know very much. >> marissa was 12. after that? >> we had a crisis. a transition in computer manufacturing and we nearly ran out of cash. involved inventory planning and so forth. scott neely was justifiably worried and so he ordered all of us to spend four of every five

days per week in a factory working on this and this was simply as a management team to answers the question how many machines had been manufactured and how many did we have in place? you want to understand the difference between the air and today, when i first was on google i was shocked we knew our revenue was down to the second. today we know it down to the nanosecond day. it is a huge change over a 25 year period. >> to a sense of humor about r as i look -- one of the things you want to do is -- in conference giving it in an opening, turned to me and said you are funny, why don't you create of video for my entrance so i was hugely complemented her, i hired some writers and put together a little skit and video and i got the video back

and it was awful, so awful

this story, we were all 41 at the time, there was a review of a proposal and engineer had to go to wire up san francisco and we did it in a different way and this gentleman was proud of his proposal. and this binge in the year did not know the answer to any single question and you could watch -- very proud of it, you could watch their mood go from ecstatic to this august board, to being about to kill themselves. they had actually just were literally just distraught. the question is what do you do at that point? the answer is you go to the engineer and say your ideal was brilliant and i want you to spend some time and come back and i want to tell you how to address it.

if you don't do that you are not going to get any productivity out of that. the engineer went back, inc. all feedback and came back with a product that helped make the internet happen. >> we will lead to google for fun with all these other things, we make fun of the most senior people in management. and co-manage and techniques from michael porter, just mentioned when you leave my office, what we want you to smile. and the brilliant management writer we learned that from. oprah. of russia is a very gifted woman and she explained successfully

if you want to change human behavior, we have to change thes hearts, not their heads. it is true. we learned that about the oprah principal. >> the heart and the head thing, you talk about being googley is required to be successful. >> fun, witty, quick, laugh at my jokes. it is about marissa. the ultimate smart creative, the founder of goofiness. [applause] >> as a young man in the audience, whose dream it has been to ask eric a question.

>> come on up. >> just jump. >> give him the mic. >> don't kills them. >> what is your name? >> a vegan khalil. i want to know how google is trying to deliver internet coverage to deegan remote areas. it -- i wanted to know how they're delivering internet coverage to them? >> wow. >> another question.

>> i want to know about google and into china. is google willing to accept internet censorship? >> stay right here. >> he can debate right now. >> is my future the hardest question in the debate? in the first place you understand how balloons work. we invented a. that would sit in the stratosphere and float around -- and give him the mic, put it on him. what happened was we figured out ways to make a transponder on the balloon that would talk to existing smart phones. this had never been done before. i figured it would never work. not only did it work but it worked fabulously. people you are talking about in

remote areas take their normal phone and talk lot to literally balloons in the sky 60,000 feet all-around a southern and northern hemisphere. really cool. and they move up and down. the neatest thing ever. your question about china, ask the question again. >> is grueling to accept internet censorship to enter china? >> actually know. >> the most people -- china has the most people in the world. did most countries been willing to accept any terms to get that market open? >> we debated this a long time. we talked about this in the book which you clearly read. >> i haven't read it. i haven't heard of it. >> here is my copy.

anyway, what happened in shyness is we decided the level of censorship is counter to google's principles and we decided we would not operate in china as long as that is part of their plan. an historic decision and a decision most other companies would not have made. >> oh. >> thank you very much. thank you. >> thank you all. ladies and gentlemen, that is how google works and a real-life example of inside debate, such an honor. >> when you apply it to work for us? >> the secretary of state. >> he wants to run as u.s. secretary of state. you heard it here first.

we are a supporter of you as a politician. thank you very much. thank you very much. [applause] thank you. thanks so much. thank you. all right, everyone, thanks for coming tonight. hope to see and next tuesday for walter isaacson. >> you are watching booktv, television for serious readers. you can watch any program you see here online at booktv.org. >> christian sahner is author of "among the ruins: syria past and present," he talks about the civil war in syria and the u.s. fight against isis. this event was hosted by the woodrow wilson center in washington d.c.. it is just over 50 minutes.

>> thank you very much for coming to today's meeting. the history of the future of syria. we are very fortunate to have with us christian sahner from princeton university. he is the author of "among the ruins: syria past and present". which you can purchase after his presentation. he will discuss today with us what is happening in syriac, what took place in the last four years.