It’s equally important to remember that Google became a meaningful, substantial and then dominant player not just on the back of having a great product, but because of a whole set of incredibly shrewd business moves that the company made- everything from powering search for Yahoo!, to their early deal with AOL (which brought a very influential community of users to Google) and smart deals with PC manufacturers such as the Dells and Compaqs of this world which made Google the default search engine for many users.

nothing can prepare you. It’s just that someone trusts you can do it.

search- as a product- was just going to continue to face more and more revenue pressure, forcing us to show more and more ads, and inevitably making the product worse over time.

we can then layer personalisation on top meaning that with your permission and with full transparency, your personal data can be used to serve you a better product- and not for any other reason.

If we don’t make you happy, we don’t make money, and that’s the very direct tie-in we have with the user.

Advertising is about more volume tomorrow whereas subscription is about more value today.

Google spends roughly the same amount of money on search as it did a decade ago but makes vastly more returns on that investment. Those returns however don’t’ come to you and me.

As we get scale, we will either add more features to search, or lower the cost. All the economic innovation we take for granted- the computer, the microwave- all started off as things that only rich people could afford and got cheaper over time.

some research shows that 20-30% of the population would be happy to try a different search engine.

If we put a snippet from your site (for example, a great blog) into our search results because it creates a better user experience, we think it’s our duty to share a portion of revenue with you as a content creator

Long-term, we think of search as a different way of funding content.

The most important lesson for anyone wanting to transition from a successful role in a company to a start-up is to remember that the things that made you successful in a large company may be hindrances in making a start-up succeed.

To me, taking risk and understanding that you might not have any impact is a humbling experience that makes you grow.

I feel very fortunate that I even have the opportunity to think this big about a foundational problem of humanity.