“This world is not ready yet,” Eric Schmidt of Google told me and a bunch of London entrepreneurs rhyming with a catchy Dutch beer commercial. He confessed once thinking that all the big ideas were done when he was the CTO at Sun – and a month later the Internet was invented.
An hour strong Q&A session with Eric for London upstarts and selected Campus residents, masterminded by Eze Vidra, was a fantastic success. Short, yet thorough and thoughtful answers to question after question. No fluff, no wasting time.
The session was a good reminder of the Google vision, which has so incredibly – together with the three other pathfinders AAPL FB AMZN changed the way we interact. Through the hour one could pick up words of wisdom for different audiences.
- for governments – if you are building shiny technology parks on the outskirts of your capital next to a well connected highway – you have failed your entrepreneurs, this is not where world will be changed.
- for entrepreneurs – put your naíve and arrogance to work, these are awesome assets that generally fade away with age. You have once in a lifetime opportunity to imagine the world differently – the way it should be rather than the way it is.
- for talented people – get your maths right for a luck laden scenario. Slave for an investment bank and hope to earn max $500K a year or work 5 years for a startup and vest into $10M of equity. Your choice. Note: Eric made $7B along his journey from software engineer.
- for young companies – focus your resources on solving the real and the hard problem versus break even or early profit. Try and cure a disease, invent something that saves people time and helps put food on their table.
- for venture capitalists – tough business these days. know your game or watch out for a shake-out.
Someone asked if there is a particular theme or an idea that had particularly excited Eric. He said he is expecting a lot of value propositions in combinations bringing together: mobile access + crowdsourced intelligence + data algorithms + cloud oomph.
Wanted to ask Eric when is Google going to get their banking licence and when do they expect most people be transferring their paycheck directly to Google Wallet. Legend has that Larry and Sergey were thoroughly frustrated with the US banks in 2004 when they started accepting adwords payments at a large scale. They were determined to f** the banks and get a banking license for Google but Eric then convinced them not to.
Given how unexciting the news have been around Google Wallet, I decided not to ruin the perfectly fine session. Instead I asked him, where is Google planning to make the most impact to people’s lives and habits in the next five years. He said “improving search from queries to the depth of understanding”. Remember, this world is not ready yet.
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- Transcript: Schmidt and Thiel smackdown (tech.fortune.cnn.com)
