Always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting!
Larry PageRead
You need to invent things and you need to get them to people. You need to commercialize those inventions. Obviously, the best way we've come up with doing that is through companies.
Interpretation
Innovation needs to be shared and monetized for it to have an impact.
This quote by Larry Page emphasizes the importance of not only creating inventions but also ensuring they reach the public and are commercially viable. It highlights the role of companies in facilitating this process, suggesting that innovation is most effective when it is successfully integrated into the market.
In practice
During a technology conference, one might quote this to inspire entrepreneurs to focus on market impacts.
Always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting!
Technology should do the hard work, so you can get on and live your life. We're only at one percent of what's possible, and we're moving slow relative to the opportunity we have.
Lots of companies don’t succeed over time. What do they fundamentally do wrong? They usually miss the future. I try to focus on that: What is the future really going to be? And how do we create it? And how do we power our organization to really focus on that and really drive it at a high rate? When I was working on Android, I felt guilty. It wasn’t what we were working on, it was a start-up, and I felt guilty. That was stupid! It was the future.
Always deliver more than expected.
You don't need to have a 100-person company to develop that idea.
I like going to Burning Man, for example. An environment where people can try new things. I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society. What's the effect on people, without having to deploy it to the whole world.
The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.
We humans are not the end of evolution, so if we can make a machine that's as smart as a person, we can probably also make one that's much smarter. There's no point in making just another person. You want to make one that can do things we can't.
Many of us now expect our online activities to be recorded and analyzed, but we assume the physical spaces we inhabit are different. The data broker industry doesn't see it that way. To them, even the act of walking down the street is a legitimate data set to be captured, catalogued, and exploited.
A Web site that promotes flow is like a gourmet meal. You start off with the appetizers, move on to the salads and entrees, and build toward dessert. Unfortunately, most sites are built like a cafeteria. You pick whatever you want. That sounds good at first, but soon it doesn't matter what you choose to do. Everything is bland and the same.
There's always been a lot of information about your activities. Every phone number you dial, every credit-card charge you make. It's long since passed that a typical person doesn't leave footprints.
I don't subscribe to the view some people have in the industry that you should purposefully design products that do not last that long. I don't think it is good for anyone.
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