If you can run the company a bit more collaboratively, you get a better result, because you have more bandwidth and checking and balancing going on.

Lots of companies don’t succeed over time. What do they fundamentally do wrong? They usually miss the future. I try to focus on that: What is the future really going to be? And how do we create it? And how do we power our organization to really focus on that and really drive it at a high rate? When I was working on Android, I felt guilty. It wasn’t what we were working on, it was a start-up, and I felt guilty. That was stupid! It was the future.

Our goal is long-term growth in revenue and absolute profit - so we invest aggressively in future innovation while tightly managing our short-term costs.

For a lot of companies, it's useful for them to feel like they have an obvious competitor and to rally around that. I personally believe it's better to shoot higher. You don't want to be looking at your competitors. You want to be looking at what's possible and how to make the world better.

The moments that we have with friends and family, the chances that we have to make a big difference in the world or even to make a small difference to the ones we love, all those wonderful chances that life gives us, life also takes away. It can happen fast and a whole lot sooner than you think.

We chose it because we deal with huge amounts of data. Besides, it sounds really cool.

The ultimate search engine would basically understand everything in the world, and it would always give you the right thing. And we're a long, long ways from that.