Eric Schmidt Quotes
200 Eric Schmidt Quotes
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[To bait them] ‘Why hire me? You seem to have everything under control.’ Larry looked at me and said, ‘We don’t need you now, but we will need you in the future.’ Which I thought was the right answer.
Eric Schmidt
[On Larry and Sergey’s corporate instincts] I think they were born with it. They had remarkably good judgment for such young people. It’s intelligence, but also street smarts, insight. It’s very impressive. It took me twenty years to develop the insights they had learned in two or three.
Eric Schmidt
Larry and Sergey are good at anything they choose to be good at. Their role has evolved. Before we went public, they were doing everything. After going public, they retreated to work on the product side and the innovation side. Today, that ballet works.
Eric Schmidt
[On a list of questions a CEO should know the answers to] They had good answers for everything.
Eric Schmidt
Who works for whom? Do Larry and Sergey work for me or do I work for them? On the organization chart they work for me. But at the time I joined, they owned half the company. Any CEO who walks into a company where the founders own half of the company and thinks those founders work for him is not paying attention to how a board of directors works.
Eric Schmidt
I thought we could go bankrupt.
Eric Schmidt
I called the board members and they said, ‘Oh take the deal. We can always get a loan against your receivables.’ So we signed the deal on Larry’s and Sergey’s terms.
Eric Schmidt
Give us half a million dollars and we’ll show the ad wherever it’s appropriate.
Eric Schmidt
We made quite a few mistakes. But at the end of the day, the company went public in a way that generated so much publicity that if given the choice of doing it the conventional way or an odd way, I would still choose the odd way today. In the four months before the IPO we got the worst press we’d ever had. But the IPO itself was a marketing event. The New York Times wrote about it on the editorial page. Everybody had an opinion. You can’t buy that kind of publicity. I watched our traffic numbers, and our traffic was exploding.
Eric Schmidt
Larry and Sergey came up with the target ad model. That model coupled with search is a gold mine.
Eric Schmidt
I told [them] we were going to have to make a hard decision. I knew what the end game was going to look like.
Eric Schmidt
In general, Larry and Sergey don’t value conventional wisdom the way I do. Whatever the conventional wisdom is, they’re suspicious of it. They felt that if we’re going to go public, it might as well be in a way that addresses the apparent unfairness of the process.
Eric Schmidt
If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines – including Google – do retain this information for some time and it’s important for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.
Eric Schmidt
In a world of asynchronous threats it is too dangerous for there not be some way to identify you. We need a [verified] name service for people. Governments will demand it.
Eric Schmidt
If I look at enough of your messaging and your location, and use artificial intelligence, we can predict where you are going to go. Show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are. You think you don’t have 14 photos of yourself on the internet? You’ve got Facebook photos!
Eric Schmidt
We don’t do the same thing as everyone else does.
Eric Schmidt
If you try to predict our product strategy by simply saying well so and so has this and Google will do the same thing, it’s almost always the wrong answer. We look at markets as they exist and we assume they are pretty well served by their existing players. We try to see new problems and new markets using the technology that others use and we build.
Eric Schmidt
I think about you as the Facebook and the Google generation, the first generation that really grew up with the Internet. When I grew up, you know, we had Tang, you had Red Bull. We used a program that was called basic, you all used Java. We had VCRs that held a half an hour of video that cost $700, and you all can upload 15 hours of video in to You Tube every minute. We got our news from newspapers, you get yours from blogs and tweets. And for those of you who don’t know, that’s not what you hear in zoos. We stood in line to buy Pong, you stood in line to buy Wiis. We just didn’t tell anyone about our most embarrassing moments, you record them and post them to Facebook and You Tube every day. I am so happy that my record of my misachievements is not around for posterity. I’m looking forward to yours being there for many, many years.
Eric Schmidt
Did you know that we used mainframe computers with 300 megabytes of storage to go to the moon six times? Your iPods, 120 gigabytes have 500 times more just to get you to your next class.
Eric Schmidt
In our lifetimes, literally, certainly in yours if not mine, essentially every human being in the planet will have access to every piece of information known on the planet.
Eric Schmidt
What you do now with oppressive regimes and people who do evil things is you attack them with information. You get that information out there, you use the tools and technologies that all of us have worked so hard on to make the world a better place.
Eric Schmidt
You can also ask questions like what’s the solution going to be to global warming, where’s the vaccine for pandemics … and you thought finals were hard. Right, think about the challenges before you.
Eric Schmidt
Don’t bother to have a plan at all. All that stuff about plan, throw that out. It seems to me that it’s all about opportunity and make your own luck.
Eric Schmidt
You study the most successful people, and they work hard and they take advantage of
opportunities that come that they don’t know are going to happen to them.
Eric Schmidt
All you can do is try very hard to be in the right place and be ready. You know, the pacemaker for example was invented 70 years in one form or another before it was applied. It was applied to this one poor fella, and 25 pacemakers later he was still alive. But the important part is he wouldn’t have been at all had the pacemaker not have been invented. You never know.
Eric Schmidt
Life is … this is a John Lennon quote … life is what happens to you while you’re
busy making other plans.
Eric Schmidt
If you live your life and forego your plan, you could also forego fear.
Eric Schmidt
In some sense you’ve been penalized for making mistakes historically, now you have to go out and make them because mistakes allow you to learn and to innovate and try new things, and that’s a culture of innovation that is going to create the next great opportunities for all of you as you come to run and rule the world and the rest of us retire.
Eric Schmidt
Watson and Crick who discovered the structure of DNA met at a university, today they would meet on Facebook, and they would find each other and then they would do these amazing things. And they’d say to each other, “What are you doing right now? Oh, finding the secret of life. Oh, then off to a pub, LOL.
Eric Schmidt
Leadership and personality matter… Intelligence, education, and analytical reasoning matter.
Eric Schmidt
Don’t live in the past, live in the future.
Eric Schmidt
We are all in unchartered waters.
Eric Schmidt
We thought friend is a noun, right, you think it’s a verb. We had phone booths, anybody seen a phone booth recently? You have cell phones. We wore watches, took pictures with cameras, navigate with maps, and listened to transistor radios. You have a cell phone. We thought that the marvels of computers and technology again, largely invented here, would change the world. You agree, and we’re both right.
Eric Schmidt
I would argue that you have the opportunity to be the greatest generation because right in front of you now are tools that we never had, that you can take advantage of. And you sit there and you say this guy must be made, and maybe that’s a little true, but in front of us you say oh, you know, the world’s falling apart, we have this recession and so forth. I mean I did some research using my favorite search engine, of course, and the Great Depression spurred some incredible innovations … Rice Krispies, Twinkies and the beer can. You would never have gotten through college without these three things. So good things happen in recessions.
Eric Schmidt
You need to turn off your phone, you need to actually look at the people who are near you and around you, and decide that it is humans who ultimately are the most important thing to us, not the other aspects.
Eric Schmidt
I believe very strongly that people all around us of every race, color, and viewpoint fundamentally want the same things. They want a great and safe world, and they want prosperity and peace among all of us.
Eric Schmidt
You’ll find that nothing beats the holding the hand of your grandchild as he takes his first step.
Eric Schmidt
A mindset in its own ways, set in its ways locked down is a mind and life wasted. Don’t do it.
Eric Schmidt
You’ll find that the resilience in the human spirit is amazing. It’s what got us through World War I and World War II, and it will get us through our current challenges just fine.
Eric Schmidt
Today is the best chance you have to start being unreasonable, to demand excellence, to drive change to make everything happen.
Eric Schmidt
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