Fast learners win.

Remember, when you go to YouTube, you do a search. When you go to Google, you do a search. As we get the search integrated between YouTube and Google, which we’re working on, it will drive a lot of traffic into both places. So the trick, overall, is generating more searches, more uses of Google.

John Seely Brown, the former director of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, once said, “The essence of being human involves asking questions, not answering them.

To innovate, you must learn to fail well. Learn from your mistakes:.

Voltaire wrote, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”188 Steve Jobs told the Macintosh team that “real artists ship.”189 New ideas are never perfect right out of the chute, and you don’t have time to wait until they get there. Create a product, ship it, see how it does, design and implement improvements, and push it back out. Ship and iterate. The companies that are the fastest at this process will win.

It’s a mistake to predict the size of markets that are so new. This model has shown no signs of slowing down. So we are going to get as much of it as we possibly can, and when we get close to that we’ll figure out other problems.

Praise is underused and underappreciated as a management tool.

A lot of the Google inventions came from engineers just screwing around with ideas. And then management would see them, and we’d say, ‘Boy, that’s interesting. Let’s add some more engineers.’

One of the unintended negative consequences of online advertising has been the loss of value in traditional classifieds. It’s simply quicker, simply easier for an end user who’s online, on a broadband connection, to look things up and to figure out what they want to buy.

You should never be able to reverse engineer a company’s organizational chart from the design of its product.