Above is a lengthy and highly informative C-SPAN interview with Ken Auletta of The New Yorker about his new book on Google, which is called Googled: The End of the World As We Know It.
Here are some quotes and facts raised that particularly struck me:
- “Google is a surrogate (in many ways) for the Internet”
- “Google is a miraculous service for consumers but the problem is that it hurts businesses, especially media companies”
- “The Google founders start from the assumption that most things are inefficient”
- “The engineer is the content creator at Google”
- Every minute 15 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube (which includes the above interview)
- Google’s initial funding was $25 million from 7 key investors
- Adsense is essentially a Vickrey auction system and made Google $21 billion last year
- A Google data center looks like this
- Part of the reason Google are so secretive is because co-founder Larry Page once read a book about Nikolai Tesla (one of the pioneers of electricity and radio) and felt he died poor and bitter because he was too open about his inventions and secrets.
- Jeff Bezos of Amazon was an early investor in Google but this wasn’t widely known for quite a long time. His GOOG stock (if he held on to it) would be worth a $1 billion today.
- Sergey Brin suggested to Auletta that he put his book up for ‘free on the Internet’ because more people would read it that way.
- Auletta uses DropBox, which came in handy last week when his computer died.
Anyway, the whole thing is worth watching.
