If you say you want to automate cars and save people's lives, the skills you need for that aren't taught in any particular discipline. I know - I was interested in working on automating cars when I was a Ph.D. student in 1995.

If you look at the people who have high impact, they have pretty general knowledge. They don't have a really narrowly focused education.

You treat people with respect, they tend to return the favor to the company.

We should be focusing on building things that do not exist.

If you ask an economist what’s driven economic growth, it’s been major advances in things that mattered - the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that.

Excellence matters, and technology advances so fast that the potential for improvement is tremendous. So, since becoming CEO again, I've pushed hard to increase our velocity, improve our execution, and focus on the big bets that will make a difference in the world.

Basically, our goal is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful.