Sunday, May 01, 2005

Graduation!

I've officially graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan! My parents and little sister came into town for the weekend graduation festivities, and we had a great time. I had an opportunity to show them mates (screenshots coming this week, I promise!), and got some more great feedback.

Larry Page, Google co-founder, spoke at the College of Engineering graduation, and his speech was definitely the highlight of the weekend (plus, I got to shake his hand and accept his congratulations!). Being the geek that I am, I made sure to record his speech with my Windows Mobile phone. I would definitely suggest listening to what he had to say to our graduating class. It was truly inspiring.

Dean Director's introduction (mp3)
Also available: original .wav, .ogg

Larry Page's speech (mp3)
Also available: original .wav, .ogg

New! Check out the video version given to me by Diganta Saha (see update below for more info on player compatibility)

(Appologies in advance for the less than stellar audio quality and for the sporadic skips -- I couldn't find a way to record directly to the SD card in my phone. If any audio gurus out there want to touch up and send me better quality .wav files, I'd be very greatful!)

John Seely Brown also spoke at the main campus graduation ceremony. His speech was a bit more brief and less targeted at engineers in particular, but he did mention blogging twice and Wikipedia once, which I found pretty spectacular. So, why doesn't he himself have a Wikipedia page? Or am I just unable to find it?

I've also uploaded quite a few pictures from graduation to flickr and created a new set, Graduation Weekend, Spring 2005. Most of the photos were taken with my new Canon PowerShot SD400. It's my second Canon digital camera, and so far, I'm loving it!

In exactly one week, I'll be heading to Israel for a few weeks. I'm going to try to blog semi-daily about interesting differences and advances in technology that I come across. Then it's off to Redmond, where I start at Microsoft towards the end of May!

Update: Here's a link to a transcription of Dean Director's introduction emailed to me by Franklin Lynam. I believe a transcription of Larry's speech is in the works. Thanks for taking the time to do this! [5/1 - 11:18pm]

Update: A reader has posted a rough transcription of the speech in the comments for this post. Thanks! (Note: It's "Mary Sue Coleman", not "Marisa Coleman" ;-) [5/2 - 3:50pm]

Update: I've posted Ogg Vorbis versions of both files per readers' requests. [5/6 - 3:10pm]

Update: I've posted a video of the speech kindly provided to me by Diganta Saha. It's H.264 format, which isn't yet supported by most players but can be viewed with Quicktime 7 on OS X or VLC 0.8.2 on other platforms including Windows and Linux. I've also moved the audio files off University web servers and changed plugins to links so the content does not auto-download and consume huge amounts of bandwidth. [7/9 - 8:30am]

Update: I've put Diganta Saha's video on Google Video and removed the original audio-only versions and text transcript due to changes in my web hosting setup. [12/23/06]

41 comments:

Anonymous said...

Any chance the link to Larry's speech in .wav format can be fixed?

adamjh said...

Why yes, yes it can! (Sorry 'bout that.)

Anonymous said...

Pls put up a link to a transcript if one becomes available.

Anonymous said...

mp3_download

Anonymous said...

if you are going to work for microsoft may be you should dump the gmail email and get a hotmail one :)

lets see if this page gets slashoted :)

Anonymous said...

Transcript dammit

Mikhail Capone said...

A transcript would be nice. You could also try having mirror links using Coral's thingy at nyud.net:8090

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_(network)

he-sk said...

Is there a transcript somewhere on the net?

Anonymous said...

Recorded with Windows mobile phone?
That's sarsastic... Larry will be sad....

Anonymous said...

Any chance of another mirror? The hosting for the files off your blog and off pair.com both appear to have been brutally murdered by the Slashdot hordes.

Mike said...

Just the MP3 of Larry's speech:
here

adamjh said...

j,

I'm in the process of moving the files over to University servers. The last file (the large .wav) will be done in about 10 minutes.

Regarding the transcript requests -- I don't know of one. If anyone wants to type it up, I'd be happy to post a link!

Cheers,
- Adam

[ .: Hols :. ] said...

Congratulations on graduating!

Anonymous said...

torrent! :)

Anonymous said...

*random slashdotter wanders in*...

Nice page :)

treehead said...

;working on transcribing. please post if you are doing this also. no sense having two of us slaving away.

;treehead

adamjh said...

Hi treehead,

Franklin Lynam stumbled across the page and emailed me a transcription of the introduction. I'm in the process of posting it. As soon as you've transcribed the rest of Larry's speech, I'd be happy to post that as well!

Thank you all for the help and the kind words!

Anonymous said...

Thanks for sharing the Larry's speech! And all the best for your future endeavours.
Incidently I am also graduating in a couple of weeks now :-)

Anonymous said...

*Very* rough transcription of first 6 minutes and 51 seconds. Someone pick up the gauntlet:

Thank you. It's a please and honor to be here. And, I don't know... we're in trouble if "Details Magazine" is the most authorative source. Um, it's really kind of amazing to be here 10 years after I graduated in 1995 from the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. [Applause] And, it's just, I have so much I want to say to you in a really short time, I'm going to go through it pretty quickly. Before I do that, something I wish I'd been able to do at my graduation... I'd like you all--you have tons and tons of people here supporting you--I'd like you all to get up and wave to your support: family and friends and everybody. [Cheering] Somebody's really happy out there.
So, I'm deeply indebted to Michigan. Dean Director gave a little bit of my history. One thing he didn't mention is my parent's actually met here [unclear], and I, so I really have Michigan to thank [unclear]. And ah, my dad actually said to me when I was deciding what school to go to, 'Well, I'll pay for any school you want to go to as long as it's Michigan." [unclear] significant impact [unclear]. I'm also indebted because Michigan was amazingly advanced in computation, and this has been going on for a really long time. I remember using Zephyr [?]--which you guys probably don't know about--but in 1993 we had instant messaging in the computer labs. When would arrive, you would know where they arrived and where they were, and you could instant message them, just like you do now on the Internet. But that was in 1993, [unclear] to then. In fact, the [unclear] graduated in 1970 in Computer and Communications Sciences, which, you know, wasn't the normal kind of degree to have in 1970. And in fact my dad graduated with his PhD in '65--also from the department--having one of the first degrees like that to be awarded. I also learned from my brother, his Electrical Engineering assignments he would bring home--he's 9 years older than me and he went here as well--and I learned how to do them all 9 years early. Which was pretty helpful. It made classes alot easier. I got great leadership training in [unclear] selling donuts. [Cheering] Apparently that still goes on here. One relaxing summer, I built an inkjet printer out of Legos, I recommend to everyone if you have some extra time on your hands. Now, I also got a deep and relavent engineering education just like all of you, and that's been very valuable in the 10 years since I left Michigan. And, with good midwestern values--which I know some of you probably don't really understand because you're here, but it's not true that everywhere people are nice, and will talk to you, and generally do the right things. Many of Google's early employees came from Michigan too and I really try to give back to the University in any way I can--ah, being on the Advisory Board, and I'm sure I'll do other things in the future.
Now, I need to know a little bit more about you guys before I can continue, so, how many of the--ah, well actually, the graduates and the audience here--how many of you work or will work in Michigan? [Applause] That's a pretty good number. Alright, how about, work or will work for a really big company? [Applause] Even more. How about, will--work or will work for [unclear]. That's a pretty good number. Ah, go to grad school [unclear]? Alright. Now, did I miss anybody else? Raise your hand. Alright, [unclear] I thought that would cover most people. Ah, how about, how many of you are women? Yeah. [Cheering] Alright [unclear], how about you work or will work for Google? [unclear] Alright, got a couple in the audience here. Ah, now you have to help me out a little bit. How about, how many of you would consider for Google if we had an Ann Arbor engineering labs? [Laughing] Okay, I think that's what I needed to take back with me. [Laughing] Now I'll touch a little bit on [unclear] as I go through the talk.
So, let me first give you a really quick history of Google. And I want the parents out there to pay particular attention. So, I left Michigan and I drove to Standford, and I always thought they made a mistake admitting me. I thought they were going to send me home on a bus once they found out it was really an accident. And we scooped together a bunch of computers at Standford, and I convinced a couple of people to help me out, including [unclear] graduated here from Michigan and [unclear]? Ah, and we basically downloaded the whole Web. And ah, we weren't quite sure what we were going to do with it. And, you know, it seemed like a good project at the time. And ah, we looked at the link structure--so which web pages linked to which other web pages--and we happened upon a way of doing ranking--which is by looking at the links--which pages are more important than others. And it's, ah, basically an [unclear]. So your page is important if other important people link to you. And that makes a lot of sense. And it turned out to work pretty well. And so then we decided, given the [unclear] we should actually build a search engine. Cause at the time, if you searched for a University, for example, you wouldn't get the University of Michigan or, in fact, anything reasonable. You would get pages that had "university" multiple times in the title, because that's how the ranking algorithms worked.

Anonymous said...

go blue! last year we had bill joy and his speech was boring. i hope larry's was much more interesting.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the speech and also the translation. I thought it was going to be a lame blog read, but it wasnt half bad :)

Anonymous said...

*Another random slashdotter walks in*

Uhh... hi there. Nice recording of the speech there. Should have brought a microphone. :)

*Looks around and walks out*

Satya said...

Hey Thanks for transcription. I coudn't download the mp3 or wav because of sloppy speed. I'd like to read the full transcript if somebody is working on it.

Anonymous said...

nice, thanks for the work.

greetings from germany,
sancho

Anonymous said...

Hey, random slashdotter here. Have fun in Israel, it's one of the best/most fun places on earth!

Anonymous said...

Up through 7:13 (sorry I only had a few minutes)

And I remember going to some people who worked on search engines going “Well when you search university, don't you think you should get something important, like or at least thats interesting about universities?” They said “Well, no, if you want university homepages you should type the university homepage.” That didn't seem quite right to me so we went through and we figured out how to do this rank thing and it worked really well.

Anonymous said...

BTW, it's "fast-paced" not "fast-pace"

Anonymous said...

Please transcribe more, can't understand the speech at all.

Unknown said...

Congratulations on graduating!
and thank you for paosting

GNU/Deep

Anonymous said...

Holy shit Adam, you got slashdotted! Anyways, this is Sean from your old 281 group. Was wasting time at work as usual and stumbled across this on slashdot. Glad to hear you graduated, best of luck.

Anonymous said...

Rough text transcript of Larry Page's speach. '??' means I couldn't hear it.

I typed this out /.444675, but don't blame me for stuff thats wrong, reply to it to correct it. Or Google anything you want to know from it ;-)

I have no idea about copyrights, but it's Larrys speach, and I would bet deaf people have the right to see it.

--

Well thank you, it's a pleasure and honor to be here, And, I don't know... we're in trouble if "Details Magazine" is the most authorative source.

It's really kind of amazing to be here 10 years after I graduated, in 1995, from the electrical engineering and computer science department. [cheers] I have so much I want to say to you in a really short time, and we're going to go though it pretty quickly. Before I do that there is something I wish I was able to do at my graduation. You have tons and tons and tons of people here to supporting you. I'd like you all to get up and wave to your support, family, friends, and everybody.

I am deeply indebted to Michigan. Let try to give you a little of my history. One thing we didn't mention is my parents actually met here cleaning a car. So I really thought we should give them some thanks for that. ?? My dad actually said to me when I was deciding what school to go to "Well Ill pay for any school you want to go to as long as its Michigan" I have to admit this had a significant impact on where I ended up going. I'm also indebted to Michigan which was amazingly advanced in computation and this had been going on for a really long time. I remember using Zaptor? Which you guys probably don't know about, but in 1993 we had instant messaging, in the computer labs. Somebody would arrive, you'd know when they left, where they were. and you could instant message them, just like you do now on the internet, but that was in 1993, not today. In fact the main ?? speaker John ?? Brown, graduated in 1970, computer and communication sciences, which wasn't the normal kind of degree to have in 1970. In fact my dad graduated with his PhD in '65 also from that department having one of the first degrees like that to be awarded. I also learned from my father his electrical engineering assignments he would bring home he's 9 years older than me, and he went here as well, and I had learned how to do them all 9 years early. Its pretty helpful, made the classes a lot easier. I got great leadership training in ?? selling doughnuts apparently, that aparently still goes on here. One relaxing summer and I built an inkjet printer out of legos witch I recommend to everyone. If you have some extra time on your hands.

I also got a deep and relevant engineering education, just like all of you, and that's been very valuable in the time since I left Michigan. With good and lasting values, which I know a lot of you probably don't understand because your here, but its not true about everywhere people are nice and will talk to you and generally do the right things. Many of Goggles early employees came from Michigan too and I've really tried to give back to the university in anyway I can. I have been on the advisory board here and I'm sure I'll do other things in the future.

Now, I need to know a little more about you guys before I continue, so how many of you? I'll ask the graduates and the audience here, 'How many of you work, or will work, in Michigan?'

That's a pretty good number.

Alright, How about, 'Work or will work for a really big company?'

Uh huh, even more.

How about 'Work or will work for a start-up?'

Oh, that's a pretty good number.

Uh, 'Will go to grad school ?? ?'

Did I miss anybody else? Raise your hands.

OK well I thought that would cover most people.

How about, 'How many of you are Women?'

Yeah.

Alright, alright. How about 'Work or will work for Google?'

We got a couple in the audience too.

Help me out a bit. 'How many of you would consider working for ?? the ?? engineering ?? ?'

OK I think that's what I needed to take back with me.

Now I've touched a little on the stats since I go though the ??

Let me first give you a really quick history of Google. And I want the parents out there to pay particular attention.

I left Michigan and I drove to Stanford and I always thought they had made a mistake admitting me, I thought they were going to send me back on the bus once they figured out that it was really an accident. We ?? together a bunch of computers at Stanford and I convinced a couple people to help me out. Alan Sturnberg who graduated here from Michigan and did the ?? underground. We basically downloaded the whole web, and we weren't quite sure what we were going to do with it. It seemed like a good project at the time. We looked at the link structure, so which WebPages link to which other WebPages. We happened to have found a way of doing ranking which by looking at the links which pages are more important than others and its basically an igon fracture?? calculation. Your page is important if other people link to it, and that makes a lot of sense. It turned out to work pretty well. So then we decide, well given this ranking we could build a search engine, because at the time if you searched for university, for example, you wouldn't get the university of Michigan or in fact anything reasonable. You'd get pages that had university multiple times in the title, because that's how the ranking algorithms worked. I remember going to some people who worked at search engines and going, "well when you type university don't you think you should get something important? or at least that's interesting like universities", and he said, "Well no if you want university homepages you should type 'university homepage'.". That didn't seem quite right to me, so we went though and we figured out how to do this ranking, and it worked really well We did this research for many many years at Stanford. After awhile we found people sort of using it and thought, maybe we should start a company here, because nobody else would license the technology, we talked to all the other search engines. Now, for the parents out there, what would you think of this moment. Your son wants to ?? leave his PhD program in Stanford and hasn't graduated yet, would you let him go off and start a crazy company? Your supposed to nod. So maybe not, I guess its really important for people to take risks.

Let me just go though a bit of quick current Google stats. The leverage of computers is absolutely amazing. Google's really possible because of mores law. The increase in compute power basically doubles every 18 months, its an amazing amazing thing. In fact when we started the company we had three or four people and we had a couple of million people using our site. We actually accidentally put our phone number on our site, on the about page. People started calling us we couldn't do anything, the phone just kept ringing. We were able to operate our service using the power of computation and the power of our software. Which is an amazing amazing thing. Today we have 3500 people hundreds of millions of users a hundred languages, 1.2 billion in revenue per quarter and 369 million in ??, and we hire in 22 different countries, about 7 years after we started. That's been a huge amount of hard work, its probably 110% of my time for the last 10

[gap in audio]

How many ?? do you know? Well there you go. So, there's some other ?? words [inaudible].

Let me go though some of the surprises I've had in going though this process, there's a bunch of things that I didn't realize when I started. One is that, doing bigger things is easier than doing smaller things. I know that sounds really strange but it turns out, if you do something really big, you can get other people to help you, and you can get more people to help you. You get more of the kind of resources that you need. So its worth thinking about those big things to get done in the world. The example I'd give you is Google's mission, from the early days, even when we were just a couple of people, was to organize the worlds information. Make it universally accessible and useful. Now it wasn't just to be a search engine, now you've seen us do many other things since then.

[gap in audio]

If you keep that in mind that will help you, help improve the world. New ideas are worthwhile, and you can have really good ideas that can have a big impact.

Sergi and I would would hope ?? I think that was really important because he promised to question everything and learn independently and not always listen to the voice of authoritarisim. I encourage all of you to do that. That's also more fun. One of the biggest things that suppresses me is, there is a lot of money out there and resources for things, and there is very few people out there trying to do them. One of the things that amazes me is that very few people approached me that have good ideas, that have a team of people, even a small one, that have a little bit of traction and a good idea. Almost never happens, in California there's one street that has maybe 10 companies, with about 10 people each. They have a billion dollars in their pocket waiting to put it somewhere and its taking them much longer to find places to put it than they would like. That's a lot of money I mean you can do a lot of things with that kind of money. I'd encourage you, there's a lot of resources available, if your dedicated to working on the right thing, you have a small team, and your making some progress. It's not necessarily that hard to get into that state. All you need is a little support from your friends up here.

When I was 12 I wanted to be an inventor. Some point I came across the biography of Tessla who was of course the great electrical engineer. He invented power transmission, many other things we use today. He was an amazing amazing inventor, but he had trouble just supporting his research, and getting his inventions out into the world. I just read this story and I was just very saddened, like why did he have so much trouble? and I said I didn't want to be just an inventor I wanted to be someone who had enough resources to change the world by doing these things. I think that is what an engineer is, your a combination of a scientist, someone who can really bring that to practice, and really make things happen in the world. That's a wonderful thing. Now a lot of people think of engineering as a courier or a way to get money, but your really the people in the world that can make a huge change. You know, just like our computers and our millions of users, a couple of you can make something that everybody in the world can start using, improves upon their life, or has a huge impact. There's very few professions where that's true.

It's easy for the world to get sidetracked. In fact I don't know what the dean director was going to say but something very similar, that all of you are going into positions of public service, positions running companies, of positions running universities, governments, whatever you want, because I think there is very very little representation of engineering in those places, I'm probably one of the few executives, even in silicone valley, whose really a technologist and an engineer at heart, there's a very very small number of people. We hired Eric Schmitt? whose our CEO. We spent like a year and a half to find him. He's one of the only people we interviewed who had a PhD in computer science. He probably was the only such person who'd been CEO of a large public company. We thought that was important. We wanted Google to be an engineering company, not a business or sales firm. I really encourage you to think about that. If you want to change the world, a good way of doing it is to be in a position of authority, positions of leadership and they're waiting for you.

I do want the parents up there to encourage the kids to take a little bit more risk. I think you should give your kids a little credit, and not just for graduating from Michigan engineering, which is the greatest engineering school in the world. [applause] But also, you should give them a little credit as in credit cards, all of these kids are going to make a lot of money, you don't have to worry. There going to have a fine income you should encourage them to take some rest, you should encourage them to travel well their still young, and use up a little bit of that credit card. Let me just talk a little bit more about risk. I almost didn't start Google because I was worried about risk, you know me leaving the PhD program. That was really pretty much all that was in my head. I could leave it, they wouldn't take me back, its not a big deal, its not like I would be out of a job, ?? , I would have a fine life if even if Google hadn't worked out. At Google we really try to encourage innovation and risk taking. That's not something that necessarily happens by itself, especially in companies. One of the things we give all of our people time, 20% time we call it. That's time basically where you do whatever you want, what you think is the best thing to work on, so its free of all management discretion, you can work on whatever you want, almost all the products that dean director mentioned have been started by individuals in their own time, and that's where we get all that innovation, gmail, maps, all these things. Also we keep the teams really small, initially it might be just yourself, most of our teams are just a couple of people. Once it becomes successful, it starts getting many many many more people, but you know, innovation happens in small groups, much like your used to doing in your projects. We also have 70-20-10 we call it, 70% of the company focus on our main areas of revenue, which is search, and advertising, 20% on related things, and 10% on sort of anything goes. Now every once and awhile we check to make sure a ?? of people aren't ??, then it turns out they are, that gives us a nice sort of compromise between, exploiting our current business but making sure we're devoting enough resources, to really generating new ones.

I know some of will ?? going to business school. I know what its like in business school and I wanted to give you a plug. I think you don't really need to go to business school. You have a pretty rigorous education, much of this covers rocket science, but it does help us to have interests in business. [cheers] Yeah. Rocket Science. I'll talk about that in a minute. You basically just need the interest and read a lot of books. I read a whole bookshelf full of business books, and that's basically what I needed.

Technology companies really have an engineering technology advantage, most of them acknowledge that. I think that's one reason Google's been successful. Now, also many of the amazing insights that happen in business, actually come from people who aren't really in the business. I just want to give you two quick examples. One is the guy who started Bank of America, geovine. He actually started Bank of America because he was in a board meeting, he was a successful business man in another business. He was added to the board of a bank and got so upset with the way they were running the bank, that he stormed out, one day, of the board meeting, and he started his own bank, and is was really just out of, you know, just all anger that he did it. He thought that he should loan money to poor people. That turned out to work really well, he was really good at it, and he he basically helped san Francisco rebuild quickly after the earthquake. He started this whole huge institution which is now Bank of America. What's amazing to me, 20 years later, something like that Mohammad Unus in Bangladesh has done almost the same thing, and he's given out over 2 billion dollars now, $160 at a time to poor people. and been very successful, the money gets returned its a functioning business, he makes money, and its a very simple idea, just have banks for poor people. They need banking services too, they need loans, they need households, they need lots of things. Both have been very successful doing that. You all can do that, its not a really deep business strategy. Some of the biggest things are really like that.

As we started hiring business people, one of our early engineers started writing around our whiteboards, 'Don't be evil.' You know, just write it from time to time it would appear on a white board in the company. It was like I said when we had more business people than engineers, we started to get more people, that would turn out to be a really important thing, and it really caught on in the company. It's been something that's been really good. I would characterize Hugh and Watson, engineers, as the being very much the good part of the world. You should think of yourselves that way.

Last weekend I was in Atlanta, I was at something called the FIRST competition started in 19?? there was 25,000 people there, in the Georgia dome basically building robots, to compete with each other. I don't know if you have all seen that but its an amazing amazing thing, and I encourage all of you to participate in it. His goal is to market engineering, get more kids in high school interested in engineering, many of these kids are from other cities and other places, its just an amazing thing. I would also like you all to focus on that. How can we get engineering better marketed make it more sexy for the world, get more people working in it. Both Women and many other people because we need everybody's skill and talents to make the world better.

There's a couple more things that Ill beat up. Let me just talk a little about the future because that's really fun. I think its amazing the things that are likely to happen, even that you can sort of see happening now. I'll spin you a couple of examples, one of them is carbon nano tubes, who would have ever thought that you could build the worlds strongest material out of carbon? Which is like everywhere. Well its an amazing amazing thing. You can build totally crazy things ??. You might be able to go into orbit and I got interested in this I joined the board of the X-Prize which is something that sponsored Burt Rutan's Space Ship One, which won the $10 million prize recently. They're trying to foster competition to get people into space. I have a good friend who really wants to go to Mars, and so he decided he should build a rocket company. In fact he has been pretty successful about it. I just sent him an email I asked him for some stats, and like two hours he sent me back a reply, so what is the theoretical cost of getting a pound of something into space, using a rocket? what's the lower ??, well its basically the fuel, that powers the rocket into orbit. It turns out that the space shuttle costs about 10 to 20,000 dollars per pound it carries up. What do you think the theoretical limit is? the lower limit? its actually about $10 to $20 per pound, you can move something into orbit. you think about that, for you or your body that's probably the cost of an expensive airplane ticket, right? just in fuel, basic fuel cost. Do you think someday we might figure out how to get close to that? I think we could. That would change things a lot and might get us to Mars or the other things.

Dean director mentioned our library project. We have been working on that project probably almost, 9 yeas now. The hard part was really trying to get people to believe that it was possible. It hasn't been so much in doing the work so much as getting everything digitized that's and so on, that's a big deal and will take many more years.

I like to when I ?? talk to university presidents and we had the ?? Marisa Coleman out to Google recently and asked her well why don't you make Michigan bigger? She kind of looked at me funny, which is usually what university presidents do when you ask them this question. I do think that if you think that universities are a good thing as I certainly did coming out of Michigan. How do we get them to be bigger? How do we get them to be more? How do we get everybody to go though an experience like Michigan, not just in the U.S. but everywhere in the world. That's a big job. Can you build better cities can you have better construction technology. A better quality of life for people. China is building something like 9 and a half ?? size cities for the next 15 years or something, just think about that. They are doing it much the way we did it in the past, there is probably huge opportunity there. Finally I mentioned a little bit about micro credit. That I believe eliminating poverty is really something we could do. Bono Is actually much more eloquent than I am on this. So ill read you two quotes from him. "Africa is not a cause it is an emergency." He also says that. "?? grand U.S.A. could use some polishing." I say that as a huge fan. He's saying basically, imagine how the world would think of America if we were able to eliminate poverty, or how did they handle it, and that's probably something's that's probably obtainable.

My ?? advice to you, have confidence, fail often, have a healthy disregard for the impossible. You have a huge opportunity to use engineering, technology and businesses skill to improve the world. You should do things that matter, and you should have fun, because otherwise you wont succeed, and you should travel, and I suggest China, Africa and India there's lots of amazing things there.

Finally let me just leave you with two things. Our mission at Google is really to build the ultimate search engine. That means that it would understand everything in the world, it would understand exactly what you wanted when you type the query, and it will give you back exactly what you want. In computer science we like to call that artificial intelligence. That you can type any query into Google and it will always give you the right answer, it will be smart and so obliviously that's not the easiest thing in the world to do, but as we get closer and closer to that. we have real improvements in quality and make Google better anyway so its a great ??.

Finally you are now Michigan engineers, save your world by building your dreams.

--

Jack Roberts said...

Congratulations on your graduation and thanks for recording LP's speech. Is it possible to mute the slashdot crowd as usual they are out of control and hellbent on interfering with web content. Did LP mention altavista at all? or he Science Citation Index? He sure spoke about linking a lot but never seemed to credit the linking system that he and Sergey emulated: the Citation Linking System. Oh well you know those innovators!

Anonymous said...

That was an excellend speech!

Anonymous said...

Arrr! Reading this speech makes me so mad. First of all, it's not like Google is all that great of a company. Think about it. Have they done anything that Yahoo hasn't already done? Except for some minor differences, no.

In fact, I think Yahoo and some other companies do a lot of these thing much better, like reporting the news for example.

And I am still bitter about not even being able to try out gmail even though I signed up to recieve updates on when I would be able to signup. I just waited and watched everyone else is the whole world get a gmail account when I was more interested in trying it out when it first came out.

And, I am bitter about spending a lot of time solving a computational problem(a Google problem) that was in Linux Journal so that I could email them the answer along with my resume. I never even got a reply from anyone. Why do they advertize all over my school for positions at Google, as if anyone has a chance of being hired, let alone getting a reply when you submit your resume.

So I think Google really sucks and I will never work for them and I hate them with a vengence and I only use Yahoo! search now.

adamjh said...

Anonymous, would you like a gmail account? Send me your email address. ;-)

Anonymous said...

The level of insecurity in Page's lecture is unbelievable - yada yada yada, google is great, google is great, google is great, yada yada yada, google is great, google is great, google is great ...

Google is a great search engine - but can't the head of a great compny like google, talk about something other than google? Why do we need to be told over and over again how good and fun and great they are? How wonderful it will be if we worked at google? How they serve free lunch every day and have free massage, and yoga balls and car mechanic on campus and blah blah blah ...

Do you see companies who actually made a difference, and who run state of the art research facilities like IBM talk like this?

Page and his friends are still kids, sad to say. They act like kids, and if they don't grow up, they will destroy google just like a kid destroyes his new toy one day.

Anonymous said...

Haha. Let's all bash Google. Seriously, I don't get why Google gets all the attention when a lot of other guys out there are doing very similar things. Could it be, that they have sufficient mula to get PR companies to hype their various projects.

Still, I did really enjoy hearing Larry's speech and I think he's one of a handful of people who others will listen to.

So, anyone want to start a company with me?

Btw adamjh, what phone is that you can record audio with? I never heard of Windows Mobile phone.

bert[2^3][2^2][2^1]@yahoo.com

adamjh said...

Right now I'm using an HTC Blue Angel, branded as a T-Mobile MDA III. Here's a review.

Here's some more info on Windows Mobile.

Anonymous said...

hey there adam,

i must confess, i stumbled onto ur blog quite by accident, through www.INc.com. (it mentioned the speech by the google co founder on your graduation)

but now that i HAVE visited ur blog, i'm glad i did..you really DO seem to be an 'enterprising individual' [;)]

Unknown said...

Hay, first of all congrates for graguation, second thanx for putting speach.
Page or any other(Google fan), have just one belief, "Whatever Google does: It's great", wheather it's copy(like search history from a9.com) or some nonsense research. Everything is great, google did a great job. uff, I am tired of all these things.

Hideyo Imazu said...

I found this entry by chance, and I was impressed by the speech. Thank you so much for the owner of the blog as well as the people posted the transcripts.
Japanese translation of several parts of the transpcript is now posted at:
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/himazublog/20051107/