Top 100 Eric Schmidt Quotes
#1. If you focus on your competition, you will never deliver anything truly innovative.
Eric Schmidt
#2. Every 2 days we create as much information as we did up to 2003.
Eric Schmidt
#3. Google's architectural model around broadband and services and so forth plays very well to the powerful devices and services Apple is doing. We're a perfect back end to the problems that they're trying to solve.
Eric Schmidt
#4. I think I could argue that the press has more impact on politics than corporations.
Eric Schmidt
#5. We weren't here to hope and hang on. We wanted to win.
Eric Schmidt
#7. General Electric CEO Jack Welch said in Winning: No vision is worth the paper it's printed on unless it is communicated constantly and reinforced with rewards.
Eric Schmidt
#9. Are there members of your team whom, if they told you they were leaving, you would not fight hard to keep? If there are employees you would let go, then perhaps you should.
Eric Schmidt
#10. Since I have access to every, every crisis in the world because it's always blaring at me on cable television, that doesn't mean I have to worry about every one of them. This is also known as knowing where the off button is.
Eric Schmidt
#11. Establishing a successful hiring culture that delivers a steady stream of outstanding people starts with understanding the role of recruiters in sourcing candidates. Hint: It isn't their exclusive realm.
Eric Schmidt
#12. When you use Google, do you get more than one answer? Of course you do. Well, that's a bug. We have more bugs per second in the world. We should be able to give you the right answer just once. We should know what you meant.
Eric Schmidt
#13. Tom Lehrer line - "Life is like a sewer: What you get out of it depends on what you put into it"112 - and a promise that if they put real effort into the exercises, he will help them.
Eric Schmidt
#14. Working from home during normal working hours, which to many represents the height of enlightened culture, is a problem that - as Jonathan frequently says - can spread throughout a company and suck the life out of its workplace.
Eric Schmidt
#15. The business world traditionally rewards people for being closer to the top (case in point: outrageous CEO salaries) or for being closer to the transactions (investment bankers, salespeople).
Eric Schmidt
#16. We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about;
Eric Schmidt
#17. The lack of a delete button on the internet is a significant issue,
Eric Schmidt
#18. I use Google+, and I find the quality of the comments are very sophisticated because there is more trust inside of Google+ than there is inside of Twitter and Facebook, for example.
Eric Schmidt
#19. In whatever number of years I have on Earth, I think that promoting the values of free expression, the openness of the Internet, that's the best use of my time.
Eric Schmidt
#20. It's also true that many companies get comfortable doing what they have always done, with a few incremental changes. This kind of incrementalism leads to irrelevance over time, especially in technology, because change tends to be revolutionary not evolutionary.
Eric Schmidt
#21. The Internet is fast becoming a cesspool where false information thrives.
Eric Schmidt
#22. With your permission you give us more information about you, your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches. We don't need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less guess what you're thinking about.
Eric Schmidt
#23. Stop being an idiot; all that matters is growth.
Eric Schmidt
#24. Technology is always evolving, and companies.. not just search companies.. can't be afraid to take advantage of change.
Eric Schmidt
#25. Can a robot be brave? Can it selflessly sacrifice? Can a robot, trained to identify and engage targets, have some sense of ethics or restraint?
Eric Schmidt
#26. In our case, we focus on quality, and we have a very simple model. If we show fewer ads that are more targeted, those ads are worth more. So we're in this strange situation where we show a smaller number of ads and we make more money because we show better ads. And that's the secret of Google.
Eric Schmidt
#27. The trend has been mobile was winning. It's now won.
Eric Schmidt
#28. Or you could take a more deliberate approach. Adjust your course. Make your five-years-out ideal job closer to your if-only-I-could dream job, yet attainable from your current path. We've seen even this simple act of setting the right goal turn around people's careers.
Eric Schmidt
#29. Google dress code was: "You must wear something".
Eric Schmidt
#30. You have to fight for your privacy or you lose it.
Eric Schmidt
#31. Google was founded to get information to everybody. A by-product of that strategy is that we invented an advertising business which has provided great economics that allows us to build the servers, hire the employees, create value.
Eric Schmidt
#32. There's nothing that cannot be found through some search engine or on the Internet somewhere.
Eric Schmidt
#33. In general in technology, if you own a platform that's valuable, you can monetize it.
Eric Schmidt
#34. Perhaps it's human nature, or just corporate nature, but most people tend to think incrementally rather than transformationally or galactically.
Eric Schmidt
#35. Washington is an incumbent protection machine. Technology is fundamentally disruptive.
Eric Schmidt
#36. Amazon has well passed any expectations of its ability to change distribution and marketing.
Eric Schmidt
#37. Smart creatives thrive on interacting with each other. The mixture you get when you cram them together is combustible, so a top priority must be to keep them crowded.
Eric Schmidt
#38. Keep in mind, from the outset, that the best way to avoid having to fire underperformers is not to hire them.
Eric Schmidt
#39. The coach doesn't have to play the sport as well as you do. They have to watch you and get you to be your best.
Eric Schmidt
#40. Android's great Sky Map is an astronomy application that turns a phone into a star chart. It was built by a team of Googlers in their spare time (what we call "20 percent time" - more on that later), not because they love to program computers, but because they were enthusiastic amateur
Eric Schmidt
#41. Countries that have the Internet already are not going to turn it off. And so the power of freedom, the power of ideas will spread, and it will change those societies in very dramatic ways.
Eric Schmidt
#42. You can attract the best smart creatives with factors beyond money: the great things they can do, the people they'll work with, the responsibility and opportunities they'll be given, the inspiring company culture and values, and yes, maybe even free food and happy dogs sitting desk-side.
Eric Schmidt
#44. I spend most of my time assuming the world is not ready for the technology revolution that will be happening to them soon,
Eric Schmidt
#45. In a networked world, trust is the most important currency.
Eric Schmidt
#46. In the Internet Century, a product manager's job is to work together with the people who design, engineer, and develop things to make great products.
Eric Schmidt
#47. We run the company by questions, not by answers.
Eric Schmidt
#48. There's been spying for years, there's been surveillance for years, and so forth, I'm not going to pass judgement on that, it's the nature of our society.
Eric Schmidt
#49. The rise of Google, the rise of Facebook, the rise of Apple, I think are proof that there is a place for computer science as something that solves problems that people face every day.
Eric Schmidt
#50. Around 400 million people in the last year got a smartphone. If you think that's a big deal, imagine the impact on that person in the developing world.
Eric Schmidt
#51. Do not be afraid to fail, but also, do not be afraid to succeed.
Eric Schmidt
#52. I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time.
Eric Schmidt
#53. The characteristic of great innovators and great companies is they see a space that others do not. They don't just listen to what people tell them; they actually invent something new, something that you didn't know you needed, but the moment you see it, you say, 'I must have it.'
Eric Schmidt
#54. This is why a venture capitalist will always follow the maxim of investing in the team, not the plan. Since the plan is wrong, the people have to be right. Successful teams spot the flaws in their plan and adjust. So
Eric Schmidt
#55. He showed a video of a seemingly crazy man dancing all by himself at an outdoor concert. The man stands on the side of a hill, shirtless and barefoot, gesticulating wildly and having the time of his life.
Eric Schmidt
#57. The thing that people seem to miss about not just Google, but also our competitors, Yahoo, eBay and so forth, is that there's an awful lot of communities that have never been served by traditional media.
Eric Schmidt
#58. (A frequent Eric aphorism during financial discussions: "Revenue solves all known problems.")
Eric Schmidt
#59. Half of Google's revenue comes from selling text-based ads that are placed near search results and are related to the topic of the search. Another half of its revenues come from licensing its search technology to companies like Yahoo.
Eric Schmidt
#60. I had a rule that I had to go to bed before the sun came up. So I used to look up the sunrise times because I thought it would be bad karma to be going to bed as dawn was arriving.
Eric Schmidt
#61. When things are running perfectly smoothly, with people and boxes on charts enjoying a one-to-one relationship, then the processes and infrastructure have caught up to the business.
Eric Schmidt
#62. One advantage of hierarchical, process-laden organizations is that it's easy to figure out with whom you need to talk: Just look for the right box on the right chart, and you've got your person. But the steady state of a successful Internet Century venture is chaos.
Eric Schmidt
#63. There's a set of people who are intrinsic oppositionists to everything Google does.
Eric Schmidt
#64. Scaling needs to be a core part of your foundation. Competition is much more intense and competitive advantages don't last long, so you have to have a "grow big fast" strategy.
Eric Schmidt
#65. If you believe that the qualities defining you are carved in stone, you will be stuck trying to prove them over and over again, regardless of the circumstances. But if you have a growth mindset, you believe the qualities that define you can be modified and cultivated through effort.
Eric Schmidt
#66. People assume that computers will do everything that humans do. Not good. People are different from each other and they are all really different from computers.
Eric Schmidt
#67. Google Maps are phenomenal. Yep, ask an Apple user.
Eric Schmidt
#68. If you think about YouTube, YouTube is a 'searching the world's videos' problem, right? They all have to be there, but how do you find them? What I guess I'm trying to say is that search is still the killer app.
Eric Schmidt
#69. There are some people who actually enjoy firing. Beware of them. Firing instills a culture of fear that will inevitably fail, and "I'll just fire them" is an excuse for not investing the time to execute the hiring process well.
Eric Schmidt
#70. I believe that this notion of self-publishing, which is what Blogger and blogging are really about, is the next big wave of human communication. The last big wave was Web activity. Before that one it was e-mail. Instant messaging was an extension of e-mail, real-time e-mail.
Eric Schmidt
#71. And the more broadband we can get globally, the better. It's better for the world; it's better for our advertisers; it's better for Google.
Eric Schmidt
#72. I think it's pretty clear that the Internet as a whole has not had a strong notion of identity. And identity means, 'Who am I?' Fundamentally, what Facebook has done has built a way to figure out who people are.
Eric Schmidt
#73. Bitcoin is a remarkable cryptographic achievement and the ability to create something which is not duplicable in the digital world has enormous value
Eric Schmidt
#74. As Sun cofounder Bill Joy noted, no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.
Eric Schmidt
#75. Supercomputer pioneer Seymour Cray used to deliberately hire for inexperience because it brought him people who "do not usually know what's supposed to be impossible.
Eric Schmidt
#76. To innovate, you must learn to fail well. Learn from your mistakes:
Eric Schmidt
#77. Steve Jobs told the Macintosh team that real artists ship.
Eric Schmidt
#78. As Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spake Zarathustra: "You must be proud of your enemy; then your enemy's successes are also your successes."87 Be proud of your competitors. Just don't follow them.
Eric Schmidt
#79. The Internet of things will augment your brain.
Eric Schmidt
#80. At the most senior level, the people with the greatest impact - the ones who are running the company - should be product people.
Eric Schmidt
#81. People are good at intuition, living our lives. What are computers good at? Memory.
Eric Schmidt
#82. We say we're stubborn on vision and flexible on details.
Eric Schmidt
#83. Google is very much a not-invented-here, build-it-ourselves culture.
Eric Schmidt
#84. Steve Jobs was one of the greatest business divas the world has ever known!)
Eric Schmidt
#85. The solution to government surveillance is to encrypt everything,
Eric Schmidt
#86. Success is really about being ready for the good opportunities that come before you. It's not to have a detailed plan of everything that you're going to do. You can't plan innovation or inspiration, but you can be ready for it, and when you see it, you can jump on it.
Eric Schmidt
#87. The self driving car is not self-aware. It's just driving; it's not thinking.
Eric Schmidt
#88. if the past is any indicator of our future, today's big bets won't seem so wild in a few years' time.
Eric Schmidt
#89. If you're going to make a law, make a law that actually works. It's extraordinarily difficult.
Eric Schmidt
#90. The tendency of a CEO, and particularly (speaking from experience) of a new CEO trying to make an impact in a founder-led company, is to try to make too big an impact. It is hard to check that CEO ego at the door and let others make decisions, but that is precisely what needs to be done.
Eric Schmidt
#91. Be very generous with the resources they need to do their work. Be stingy with the stuff that doesn't matter, like fancy furniture and big offices, but invest in the stuff that does.
Eric Schmidt
#92. People who bet against the Internet, who think that somehow this change is just a generational shift, miss that it is a fundamental reorganizing of the power of the end user. The Internet brings tremendous tools to the end user, and that end user is going to use them.
Eric Schmidt
#93. Your default mode should be to share everything
Eric Schmidt
#94. If you have a child, you'll notice they have two states: asleep or online.
Eric Schmidt
#95. I've come to a view that humans will continue to do what we do well, and that computers will continue to do what they do very well, and the two will coexist, but in different spaces.
Eric Schmidt
#96. In many countries adult pornography legislation is an attempt to legislate something else.
Eric Schmidt
#97. dissent must be an obligation, not an option.
Eric Schmidt
#98. The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.
Eric Schmidt
#99. How many meetings have you been in where the first dozen or so slides are full of words, and the person stands up there and repeats the words?
Eric Schmidt
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