David people would not recognize me if my tie was fixed. Lets leave it this way. All right. David i do not consider myself a journalist. And nobody else would consider myself a journalist. I began to take on the life of being an interviewer even though i have a day job running a private equity firm. How do you define leadership . What is it that makes somebody tick . When you joined google, google was a very Small Company. Did you, in your wildest dreams, ever imagine it would become the second most valuable company in the world . Eric i do not think any of us did. I certainly did, did not. When i met larry and sergey, they just seemed incredibly intelligent. They had this huge argument over something technical, and i have not heard back of the document and a long time, and i thought, i have to work with these people. I wanted to work with the company that would stay in one building. Today, we are of course many buildings. David you were the ceo of novell at the time you were getting ready to go to google. What propelled you to pick google as a company you wanted to go to because you had a lot of opportunities . Eric i actually did not interview anywhere else. John doerr asked me to visit google, and i said who cares about a Search Engine . It wont matter as much. Who uses Search Engines . Nevertheless he said go visit with larry and sergey. What they were doing was so interesting and the way they mash and the quality of the people they had recruited was so compelling that i just had to be there. David Search Engines were not that novel at the time because there were plenty of Search Engine companies, right, so why did you think google had a Search Engine that was going to change the world . Eric i did not particularly feel that google was going to be successful, but i did think the technology was unusually special. Google had invented a different way of doing ranking. All of the previous Search Engines had used ranking that was easily manipulated by business forces and so forth. But larry page had invented something known as page rank which is a different algorithm, a different way of doing search, and it had spread virally, first at stanford and then throughout the bay area. It was all wordofmouth and i thought, what a great project. David google is a word that existed before, and it kind of meant infinity, and it is spelled differently. Did google intentionally spell it differently than the original word googol . Eric there was a number called 10 to the 100th, and i will spare you the details, but this is a very large number. 10 to the 100th, and it was named by a russian mathematician, googol, and it was too hard to pronounce, so sergey decided it should be called google. David today the company is not called google anymore. It is called alphabet. Why did they pick google as the original name and why did you change it to alphabet in terms of the parent . Eric google has always done unusual things. So after 15 years of being google, we had all of these other companies that were sort of protocompanies. They were not real businesses and they did not have real ceos. We talked internally at great length about, how do you get Great Companies founded . And the answer is, strong ceos, strong incentive programs, strong boards of directors. There are not other models. So how do we recreate that within the context of google . That is what alphabet is. Apple bit is a Holding Company alphabet is a Holding Company of companies of which google is the best known. David Many Technology companies that are well known apple, microsoft or facebook, are run, the ceos initially are the founders. You had a different situation. You had two people that were the founders, larry and sergey, but they wanted more experience than they wanted a ceo with more experience, or at least the Venture Investors did. Was it awkward to come in and be the ceo when you are dealing with the founders that do not have the ceo title . Eric in their case they had been searching for somebody they could work with for 16 months. What they would do is they would have each of the candidates do something with them for the weekend, so they would go skiing with one of them and go play sports with the other one to see if they were compatible. When i met them, we all have similar backgrounds as computer scientists, but it was an immediate click. And i always knew they saw what had happened with john scully and steve jobs in the 1980s it , was their company, and my job was to make their company successful. David when you were interviewed, was it the normal interview . Eric well, what happened is, i walked into their office and it was a tiny office in this incredibly crowded building, which google still has by the way, and this tiny little office, they have lots of food, and they had my biography on the wall. And they proceeded to ask each and every question that was possible against the biography. And i had never been so thoroughly questioned, and i had just gone to visit. And they came to a product that i was building at novell, and they said, this is the stupidest product ever made. Which i of course had to respond to. David and you didnt think you were going to get the job after they said that . Eric i did not realize it was a job interview. As i left the building, which was curiously a building i had when i worked at the sun years earlier, to show you how history repeats itself, i knew i would be back. David so when you did come back, and i think it was a Small Company when you joined, like 200 employees, did you realize that advertising would be the medium through which you would actually make the company grow . Eric no, and in fact i was convinced the advertising approach they took was not working at all. When i became ceo, i was very concerned that something was wrong, i actually asked them to audit the cash accounts to make sure people were selling these ads, and what we learned was these targeted ads worked incredibly well, even though they were these little text ads, and that discovery, and then the subsequent algorithm improvements which allowed for auction and so forth, which were done by impossibly young and creative engineers who i sort of viewed as experimenting with things, created what is today google. David the culture and google was very unusual at the time. Others later emulated it. It is a culture of do what you want a bit, wear what you want, sleep in the office if you want. Eric we do have a dress code. David you have a dress code . Eric you have to wear something. David ok. Eric we have problems where engineers would move in and put cots on the floor, and we would explain, you can do anything you want at google, but you cannot live here. You have to have a bed somewhere else. We famously encourage people to bring pets. Right . We have lots of rules about the pets. We didnt have any rules about the people. If your pet was over here, you had keep your pet over here. David so what about the food . Very unusual. You had free free for everybody. What was the purpose behind that . Eric the comment was the free food really changed everything, but the real reason we had free food, and many of these things were marketed as great fun, but there was a serious behind them. There was a Serious Business behind them. We, in the case of the food, this was sergeys idea, families eat dinner together, and he wanted the company to be a family, and so if you had people have proper good food, breakfast, lunch and dinner, they would work in teams, and work in whatever way made the most sense. Larry and sergey invented something called 20 time, and the idea is for each of the employees, especially the engineers, if they are interested in something, they can spend 20 of the time on whatever they are interested in. David oh, my god. How could you run a company that way . Eric that allowed the engineers sitting there at dinner to have conversations about what you what do you think, what do you think, what do you think . I will give you another example. Larry page was looking at our ads as they came out and he had studied them, and he put a big sign on the wall, and he wrote these ads suck. This one and this one and this one. And i was looking at this, and i said, this is another stupid google thing. Nothing is going to happen. We have an ads team, we have a manager, we have a plan. So, this was friday afternoon. I come in monday morning, and a completely different set of teams had seen the sign, and had invented over the weekend what today is the underlying outline and system of google and delivered it on monday morning. That could not have occurred without such a culture. David 20 time, have you gone into businesses that came out of the 20 time . Eric the most interesting examples are maps, many of the ad system components. Most people believe the 20 time the source of real creativity and what is a a large company. David one time i think you told me previously that you were out of the office, and then you came back to your office, and somebody had occupied your office. Eric it is important to remember that at the time, googles culture was seen as very unusual, and i knew this, and i was always careful to not commit a faux pas, if you will, in the culture. One morning i walked in and my assistant has this look on her face, like something bad has happened. And i walk into my office, which is 8 feet by 12 feet, and here is my new roommate, amit. He has moved himself in, is working and so forth. I did not know i was going to have a new roommate and after all, i am the ceo. Someone should tell me these things. I said, hello, who are you . He said, i am amit. And i said, ok. He goes, nice to meet you. I said, why are you here . He goes, your office was not occupied. You are never here, and i was in the six person office, and it is too loud. And i thought, what to say to this . Because this is a careerlimiting moment. If i say, get out of my office, they are going to fire me or something. I thought, ok. Did you ask permission . And he goes, yes, i asked my boss, and he said it was a great idea. And i said, ok. So we sat next to each other. And he would program, and i would do my work, literally next to each other for a year, and we became best friends. David do you think United States government is better at cyber terrorism than other governments are against us . Eric the one i worry the most about right now is actually russia. They are not shy about it. They dont mind people knowing about it. David i just want to talk about your own background. Your father was an engineering professor . Eric international economics. David you grew up in virginia . Eric rural virginia. David what made you want to be an engineer . Eric as a boy, i was a normal sort of science interested boy, this was at the time of the Space Program where everyone wanted to be an astronaut. In my high school they had a terminal. These were the old teletype, asr33 teletypes with paper tape, and my father had the good thought to get one for our house, which was highly unusual at the time, so i was spent every easy working and reprogramming and so forth. Today of course if i were a 15yearold, at home i would have five personal computers and the Super Network and sound blaring out of the speakers. David you went to high school in virginia. You must have done pretty well to get into princeton . Eric yes, although it was easier back then. David you knew you wanted to be an engineer at princeton . Eric i actually applied to princeton as an architect, and when i got to princeton, i discovered i was not a very good architect, but i was a much better programmer. Princeton again was kind in that i was advanced enough that i could be able to skip the introductory courses and go straight into the advanced courses and then the graduate courses. David you mustve done pretty well because you then got a scholarship to go to berkeley and get your phd. Was it hard to move across the country . Eric no, but to give you an example of how naive people were back then, i decided i wanted to move to california because i heard that it was sort of nice and sunny beaches, but of course i went to the wrong part. And this is of course before google maps. I worked at bell labs where unix, which is the basis for much of computing today, i was a was invented. I was a Junior Programmer there. And i worked at xerox where the workstation and the screens and many of the editors and many of the networking things we use today were invented. I was unusually fortunate to be , as a young person, an assistant to people doing that kind of of research. From there i went to Sun Microsystems where i was an executive for many years. David from there you were recruited to novell . Eric i was at sun for 14 years, novell for four years, and now google for 16 plus. David as the Company Became bigger and bigger, it dominated the search this notice. The search business. It has 90 of the search world, more or less. Why did google say, we want to do other things . We do not want to just be in the search business. You began to go into other things. Lets talk about a few of them. Eric i should say googles motto was not only search the web. It was all the worlds information. Information is broadly consumed. So the company set out with all , of the hiring we will able to do and the talent to begin to problems andw became very interested in maps. Developed their own maps, a hugely successful product line. We bought a Company Called youtube, today incredibly successful in terms of video, another form of information. We built in Enterprise Business but has done incredibly well. I can go on. In some cases we bought little companies that we grew like google earth. In some cases these were technologies that we grew ourselves. The whole idea was to integrate around information. At some point, four or five years ago, we became interested in solving other problems, not information not just information problems, but problems where Digital Technology could make a material difference, the most obvious being self driving cars. We have been working on that as a research project. David you have been in one of these cars . Eric yes. David and you feel safe . Eric the funniest story, i get on the car on the highway in california, and it is driving, and i decided, it is following too close, and i complained to the engineer who said, no, no, no, we are exactly right, and of course they got it right. It gets off of the freeway and parks itself and all of this. Another case, i am driving, or nondriving in the self driving car, and it turns left, and here we have a mother and a child crossing the street illegally. I am going, oh, no, this is the movie that you have seen, the car running over the mother and child. Skids to a stop. The technology works. It works because there is a very, very powerful laser imager on top of the car which sees more accurately than we do. So, imagine a car that has vision all around it than just rather than just in front of it. It is where the 32,000 people scheduled to die this year in america. We just do not know who they are. That is how bad this is. Imagine if we could reduce it by half or one third or one quarter. Most of the accidents are driver induced in one kind or another. We may ultimately be able to make driving accidents a very, very rare event. David you have been involved in Artificial Intelligence better known to some as ai. Use Artificial Intelligence dangerous for humans or is it going to be helpful to humans . Eric i think it is extraordinarily useful. Let me give you examples. Today, Artificial Intelligence is being used to do things which are hard for humans to do because of data. We there is a disease called retinopathy. It is diagnosed by ophthalmologists. We can detect that 99 of the time. The best ophthalmologists do it 90 of the time. Why are we so good at it . We see more eyes. We can train the computer. There is a lot of reason to think this kind of intelligence , as we say, will allow things which are either repetitive or require deep pattern analysis will be much, much better. David so do you think the United States government is better at cyber terrorism, if that is the right word, than other governments are against us . Eric the u. S. Government has never acknowledged it plays an active role in cyberspace and that is active offensive role, although the people who might be our targets have certainly been claiming we have been doing it. The consensus of people that do not know any of the details, which includes me, is america is very good at this, but other countries are as well. The one that i worry about the most right now is actually russia. If you look at their actions in the last few months, they have done a number of very publicized invasions, attacks, and alterations which can only be understood as cyber activity, and they are not shy about it. They do not mind people knowing about it. This must be part of their strategy to keep in our face, if you will. David the europeans seem to not like google as much as americans do. Have you resolved those issues with europe . Eric the core issue is the european governance model is not set up to build global companies. David a few years ago, you gave up being position of ceo. You were ceo for how long . Eric for a decade. David and now your the executive chairman for alphabet. In that role, you have become a Technology Advisor to the president of the United States, secretary of defense, and a very wellknown commentator and advisor on technology to many people. Do you enjoy this role . Eric i do. It is important in life as you get older to not do the same thing your entire life. There are better people now doing the technology the work i used to do, and this is something i can uniquely do because of the background i have. It is always hard to know when to get off the stage and join the next stage, but from my perspective, this was the right time, and a decade is a perfectly good amount of time. David you have been an advisor on Technology Matters to president obama. Is he a person that really understands technology . Eric he does now. As president when he started, i dont think he knew very much abo