Eric Schmidt Quotes

200 Eric Schmidt Quotes

1 2 3 4 5



Larry and Sergey still look at all measurements for all traffic for all applications every week.
Eric Schmidt

We don’t just launch stuff anymore. We actually think about it.
Eric Schmidt

Google is seen as the largest player in this space, and we have to behave accordingly. It is easy when you are a challenger growing quickly. When you are the incumbent, you have to be careful with your tone. The Yahoo-Microsoft stuff is an example of where tone matters.
Eric Schmidt

The whole social networking space has been harder for us to monetize.
Eric Schmidt

[Social networking] It has to do with what people are doing… You’re looking at people’s photos, you’re figuring out where your friends are. You’re not as likely to be purchasing a new car at the same time or purchasing clothes or purchasing a book. So the development of the advertising tools and techniques has been more difficult.
Eric Schmidt

The board said that in the worst possible case, they would come up with the $50 million, so it wouldn't bankrupt the company
Eric Schmidt

[From APM program] One of these people will probably be our CEO one day – we just don’t know which one.
Eric Schmidt

[On business plan] The hiding strategy.
Eric Schmidt

And of course they were right.
Eric Schmidt

What Larry really means is…
Eric Schmidt



I don’t know the number of auctions that we run per day, but for the purposes of argument, us a billion or a hundred million.
Eric Schmidt

We run many more auctions than anyone else on the planet because we show them in real time, we run one auction per ad per page, and that’s multiplied by the number of ads per page. It’s a phenomenal number. Technologically, because of latency, you have to do this very, very quickly.
Eric Schmidt

Why don’t you take a look at the ad auction? It might make us a little money.
Eric Schmidt

Sergey walked in and said, ‘I’m going to invent this business,’ and I said, ‘Fine.’ Then he said, ‘I need money because I’m going to preguarantee these deals.’ And I said, ‘That’s bad business,’ and we argued for a good half an hour, because Sergey wouldn’t give up. Eventually, I said, ‘Okay, take a million dollars.’ Which was a lot of money for us then. Two months later, he comes back and they’ve spend a million and a half.
Eric Schmidt

Sergey, you couldn’t just stick to the million, could you?
Eric Schmidt

[On a customer being tensed based on the fact that Google ads were the way it made all it’s money] You’re kidding? Our system doesn’t work that way. There’s an auction, it sets the price, you win, it’s a fair price, and then there’s another auction.
Eric Schmidt

We’re very analytical. We measure everything, and we systematized every aspect of what’s happening in the company. For example, we introduced a spreadsheet product this week. I’ve already received my hourly updates on the number of people who came in to apply to use the spreadsheet, the number of people who are actually using it, the size of the spreadsheets.
Eric Schmidt

If you don’t want to lose your geeks, you have to find a way to give them promotions without turning them into managers. Most of them are not going to make very good executives—and, in fact, most of them would probably turn out to be terrible managers. But you need to give them a forward career path, you need to give them recognition, and you need to give them more money.
Eric Schmidt

Twenty years ago, we developed the notion of a dual career ladder, with an executive career track on one side and a technical career track on the other. Creating a technical ladder is a big first step. But it’s also important to have other kinds of incentives, such as awards, pools of stock, and non-financial types of compensation. At Novell, we just added a new title: distinguished engineer. To become a distinguished engineer, you have to get elected by your peers. That requirement is a much tougher standard than being chosen by a group of executives. It’s also a standard that encourages tech people to be good members of the tech community. It acts to reinforce good behavior on everyone’s part.
Eric Schmidt

While the tail is very interesting, the vast majority of revenue remains in the head.
Eric Schmidt



Eventually, the price that the advertiser is willing to pay for the conversion will decline, because the advertiser will realize that these are bad clicks; in other words, the value of the ad declines. But because it is a bad thing, because we don’t like it, because it does, at least for the short-term, create some problems before the advertiser sees it, we go ahead and try to detect it and eliminate it
Eric Schmidt

[On how many data centers Google has] I don’t actually know. In a year or two the very large ones will be small ones because the growth rate is such that we keep building even larger ones.
Eric Schmidt

The goal is to strip away everything that gets in our employees way. We provide a standard package of benefits, but on top of that are first class dining facilities, gyms, laundry rooms, massage rooms, haircuts, carwashes, dry cleaning, commuting buses – just about anything a hardworking employee engineer might want.
Eric Schmidt

It’s a group culture. There are almost no individual decisions… The really major, major decisions about the company are made by the founders and me – three is better than two. But almost all big decisions are made in groups of 15 or 20, after a long discussion… The other philosophy we try to adopt is that you don’t go for consensus, you go for the best idea, which is different.
Eric Schmidt

The feeling within Sun is that they have beaten everyone but Microsoft and Intel, and that’s the waterloo.
Eric Schmidt

[Company] policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.
Eric Schmidt

The data suggest that people are self-violating their privacy at a humongous rate.
Eric Schmidt

The number one cause of future privacy issues is going to be self-publishing of information. It’s the sum of photos, blogs, Facebook, Myspace…
Eric Schmidt

I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable, and recorded by everyone all the time.
Eric Schmidt

When I was growing up was I lonely? Sure. Was I bored? Sure. Did I not know everything? Sure. So now you’re never lonely because your friends are always reachable. You’re never bored because there’s infinite streams of information and entertainment. That’s a fundamental change in life.
Eric Schmidt



[It would be] hilarious to see such a law passed in the U.K., where facial recognition is being used to scan airport crowds for known terrorists. It seems to me that it’s probably a lot cheaper to scan the crowds for known terrorists than to do this invasive security searching that they have to do for everybody.
Eric Schmidt

Based upon [Microsoft’s] visceral reactions to any discussion about ‘open source’, they are obsessed with open source as a business model.
Eric Schmidt

Good luck. I’ve been trying to do that for years.
Eric Schmidt

[On Larry] He was very shy. A nice enough person, but what I remember most was thinking that search engines are not very interesting and that he was shy. I clearly did not understand anything at the time of what was going to happen.
Eric Schmidt

I had never had a reference check go on for fifty minutes. Sergey was enormously interested in Wayne [Rosing], but I remember noting that, just in general, he had this enormous curiosity.
Eric Schmidt

I thought, well, that’s pretty interesting. It was not the normal way I had been dealt with in my career. It was one of those things in life you know is just different. Interesting and different.
Eric Schmidt

[On Novell making a market for storage services for video] Which they [Sergey and Larry] thought was pretty stupid. They didn’t say that but they basically argued against the premise.
Eric Schmidt

I left feeling that something interesting was going to happen.
Eric Schmidt

Larry and Sergey seemed strange. They argued over all sorts of strange things. Every question was interesting, and every question debated.
Eric Schmidt

[On joining Google] I made the decision based on their precociousness. I had this tremendous sense that I wanted to stay because it was interesting. It was obvious that I should join Google.
Eric Schmidt



1 2 3 4 5


Return from Eric Schmidt Quotes to Quoteswise.com