Google co-founder: anything is possible

Photo by Flickr user *ejk*

When the co-founder of Google talks, people tend to listen. Larry Page addressed the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual conference in San Francisco recently. During a wide-ranging, and fairly disjointed address, Page offered opinions on everything from solving global warming to building a business to creating artificial intelligence (AI).

The AI stuff (Google has people working on AI right now) received the most mainstream media headlines, but elsewhere in that address Page exposed how Google approaches problems that gave substantial insights into the search giant’s success that can be applied to any innovative company.

Stephanie Olsen of CNET News covered the event, and noted, “…the common thread in the lecture seemed to be enthusiasm for what Page (and co-founder Sergey Brin) managed to do well with Google: good old-fashioned entrepreneurialism while solving a single problem.”

Page suggested some of the biggest problems the world was facing right now, from climate change to AIDS, could be solved by making sure people were “working on it.” For example, Page said bringing down the cost of solar power is easily doable, but not a lot of people are actively working on it. The Google approach is to look at a single problem, decide to tackle it, and assign people to work on finding the solution.

In essence, he says, anything is possible as long as enough of the right people are enabled to try. Page suggests innovators and entrepreneurs are forced to spend too much time simply convincing others that “it’s possible.”

Page also urged the audience of scientists to think outside the box and look ahead, instead of relying on solutions that worked in the past.

“Too few people are working on groundbreaking things,” he said. He pointed to places like Africa, where cellphone penetration is booming because the cost of building out wireless networks was less than building traditional telco infrastructure. A traditionalist might say, “Let’s build landlines before we try and sell people cellphones.” An innovator sees the opportunity.

Page said the same thinking could be applied to transportation–-a huge resource hog in time and energy. Why should humans build roads across Africa when small, affordable aircraft with auto-pilot technologies could be built, allowing people to get where they’re going faster and more efficiently?

The notion of “because that’s the way we’ve always done it,” is something that innovators and entrepreneurs run up against often. If a young man named Larry Page had walked in and suggested the solution to searching the internet was to make multiple indexed copies of the entire thing using thousands of cheap Linux servers, what would you have said?

Further reading/viewing:

• Google video – Google’s Larry Page at the AAAS
• PIMM blog – Google’s Larry Page at the AAAS meeting: entrepreneurship and unlocking in science
• Wired Magazine – The birth of Google