Anurag Jain's Blog on Bangalore Events, Travel, IIM Bangalore, IIM, IIMB, Management

Friday, May 06, 2005

Posted 10:44 AM by Anurag

Larry Page's speech at UMich

Google co-founder and UMich graduate Larry Page gave the graduation speech at this year's College of Engineering graduation ceremony (via /.). You can download the MP3 file from here.

Neat speech. I liked the bit about a) Doing bigger things, b)about B-Schools, and c) about referring to India as an interesting travel destination. Some Excerpts (from a rough full speech transcript here).

# 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.

# (Edit: Its funny. laugh) 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.

# 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.

# I know some of you will be 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.

# 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.

# 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.

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