Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Given the way Google considers everything as a problem that engineering can fix, I assumed its founders are pure geeks. Which made it all the more surprising how they’ve managed to run the company so well, and retain control… aspects you associate with managers, not engineers. Walter Isaacson’s Innovators answered those questions for me. When he was twelve, (Google founder) Larry Page read a biography of Nikola Tesla and was troubled by it: though he was one of the greatest of inventors, he was very poor at commercializing his inventions. Page describes his learning from that: “If you invent something, that doesn’t necessarily help anybody. You’ve got to actually get it into the world; you’ve got to produce, make money doing it so you can fund it.” Which is why Page made sure he majored in both computer science and business . He also got to learn from his older brother (by 9 years) Carl’s experience of founding a social networking company that was eventually bought by Yaho...

Balaji Srinivasan, from Stanford, gave this talk (I don’t know the word for it) , where he asked this provocative question: “Is the USA the Microsoft of nations?” That’s Microsoft as in obsolete, a dinosaur. Back in 1998, Bill Gates feared that Microsoft’s rule would end not due to the likes of Oracle but due to “some guys in a garage”. Those guys turned out to be Larry and Sergey (Google’s founders). And now, says Srinivasan, Silicon Valley is becoming the garage guys to the entire US! Pointing out that the post-war US was run by 4 cities (Boston: education; New York: Madison Avenue and Wall Street; Los Angeles: music and Hollywood; and Washington DC: laws), he next says that Silicon Valley is “putting a horse head in all of their beds”: that’s a declaration of war, Godfather style. If you’re wondering how, consider how the Valley’s outputs are taking on the traditional bastions of those 4 cities. Online courses, Khan Academy, and Udacity are the Valley’s assault on...