Will Google Win Everything?
Musings on whether its ‘winner takes all’ and who’s in the fight
Not for the first time, @Jason Calacanis really got me thinking yesterday. In a provocative post shared with subscribers of his fantastic Launch Ticker (please don’t tell anyone you can subscribe here), he unfurled a bigger picture of the role Google could play in our world over the coming decades.
What does Jason know? Well, he’s a well-respected Valley entrepreneur with repeat successes and a unique insider’s perspective, who I’ve found to be one of the sharpest analysts operating in the tech scene. His thesis extrapolates Google’s moves in internet connectivity, quantum computing, wearables, venture capital, content funding, life extension and energy & transportation to assert that #googlewinseverything — part 1 of a multi-part story.
Much has been written about the Google creation story and the Google way but its future impact on our lives is a subject that doesn’t get the mindshare it deserves, given its world-shaping impact and importance. It also happens to be a subject I’ve always had a great interest in so I thought I’d break my duck on Medium with a response.
Google, to me at least, is a collection of brilliant minds like Larry Page. He said of Nikola Tesla
“I felt like he was a great inventor and it was a sad story,” says Page. “I feel like he could’ve accomplished much more had he had more resources.”
When we look back from the future, I think it will be clear that the smartest thing Larry, Sergey and Eric did was to over-invest in talent early on, building a portfolio of all the Teslas they could find and giving them the resources they needed to accomplish much more. Indeed, we may look back at Google and say that they bootstrapped an internet search business to create a mad scientist lab that spawned incredible breakthroughs that helped save the world.
That Page, Brin and Schmidt had the courage of their convictions to hire these folks regardless of whether they had clearly defined roles for them or their projects, is incredibly impressive to me. I remember how befuddling this strategy was to the market and to pundits who couldn’t join the dots between what seemed (to them) like a totally random set of initiatives with no revenue model or connectivity to each other, leaving them to helpfully point out that “Search is Google’s only revenue stream”.
Of course, many of these brilliant people were off executing their own grand visions before deciding that joining Google was the best way to actualize them on the grandest possible scale. I’m sure that in many cases the thing that distinguishes Larry Page from some of these other brilliant people working in the Google collective is the fact that BackRub happened to be a bigger goldmine with a shorter event horizon than Andy Rubin’s Android or Ray Kurzweil’s AI or John Hanke’s Keyhole or Sebastian Thrun’s robots or Mary Lou Jepson’s mind’s eye or Babak Parviz’s contact lens or Mike Cassidy’s travel guide.
Google Search, Larry’s first act, put him in a position to be able to hire these people rather than the be hired by them. His second act was helping assemble this collective and create Google’s culture of solving big problems. His third act is to optimize Google to enable these people to bring their most audacious visions to fruition.
It appears that he is well on the way to doing that: the likes of Rubin, Thrun, Hanke, Cassidy and probably many others are out of the business and back inventing & working on moonshots. A look through some of the 52 bio’s of that Google Ventures team reveals the likes of Joe Kraus (the Excite co-founder that Brin & Page first pitched BackRub to), Rich Miner (Android co-founder), Kevin Rose (Digg founder) and other seriously impressive people. Their portfolio includes some real game-changers like AngelList, 23andme, Uber and Nextdoor — more fun dots to join in the years to come. With GOOG at $1030, stock options are making these folks fabulously wealthy as well as giving them an unlimited R&D fund to support their big ideas. Most of them could leave and raise enough VC money to pursue their visions on their own but what they would lose is Google’s consumer audience, army of coders, computing power and its data.
And its all about the data, stupid. The last few years have been a slugfest between Google and Apple for dominance in mobile. Off the back of its incredible iPhone success and iPad follow up, Apple grew to become the world’s most valuable company. But it always felt to me that the beautiful hardware, operating system and integrated services were never going to be as valuable as the web itself and its the web itself that Google owns. Not all of it and not exclusively, but they have a copy of it,they’ve spent over a decade digitizing it, organizing it and understanding how to turn it into knowledge. Calling it a search engine is failing to see that what’s been built is the platform for accessing all human knowledge. It is this knowledge that will make us smarter and, hopefully, funnier and more empathetic.
It’s still incredible to me that no-one else has really made a fist of something that is so strategic to just about any service you can conceive in the future.
So what exactly are these big “Google Wins Everything” projects and how do they fit with Google’s core mission of organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful — (Jeez, didn’t that turn out to be a wondrously broad, yet focused articulation).
These are they:
I view some of these projects as enablers of Google’s core mission and a logical progression rather than a major new land grab:
Crappy expensive broadband -> Ubiquitous free internet: cut out the middle men; enable faster, richer Google services to more people in more places.
AI/ML/Quantum -> put a rocket under the knowledge graph. Be able to understand & respond to any question on any subject with a concise, correct answer.
Wearables -> more data for AI/ML/Quantum, fewer layers between user and services, faster access to knowledge, more queries.
VC funding ->access to talent, M&A pipeline for rounding out the portfolio.
Media -> more attention, more data, more ads, more revenue.
Life extension -> solving the existing information problem in medicine (records, shared knowledge, etc) would have a huge impact on life extension for the masses. Quantum/ML/AI capabilities could also contribute to aging cure.
Transport -> self-driving Tesla cars with a global network of solar charging stations
Energy -> Google is investing in power and apparently has an interest in acquiring spent nuclear reactors
These both feel tangential to the core mission. Will Google execute in these areas? They certainly are capable and I would not bet against them. I think the bigger question is should they?
In my view, the most impactful world changing contribution Google can make over the next 100 years is to really make humans smarter, more caring. This surely is the true mission — after all, you don’t organize the world’s information just for the hell of it.
They could really focus on hacking the brain. Double down on neurotech. I’d love to see Google buy @TanTTLe’s Emotiv, team her up with Mary Lou Jepson and give her some serious firepower to build SecondBrain — a moonshot that joins the dots between the knowledge platform and the wearable/implantable tech they’re working on.
SecondBrain does what is says on the tin. It uses an EEG sensor built into the arms of Glass which rests gently against your temples (until its implantable). The EEG continually monitors your brainwave activity looking for query signals that it’s been trained to recognize. A query signal is detected when you think of a question you don’t know the answer to and in an instant that question “How old is Nelson Mandela?” is parsed and fed to the knowledge platform in the cloud returning the answer instantaneously, speaking it quietly through the earpiece into your consciousness.
That question/answer pair is cached locally so that in future the answer can be autocompleted with just a partial thinking of the question without needing to traverse the network.
To actualize SecondBrain there are still breakthroughs needed in the sensing & signal processing to improve the resolution from basic (left, right, up, down) to advanced (how old is Nelson Mandela?) — the kind of thing that an army of Glass wearers and Google’s AI/ML/Quantum capabilities could help jump start.
For SecondBrain to be great, Google must be able to answer more complex questions thought by users with concise factual answers and for that, the knowledge graph still has a long way to go:
What could stop the big G from pulling off that set of projects and winning everything? Loss of key talent. That roadmap is achievable if you have the best & brightest but not without them. Yahoo’s brain drain a few years ago shows that it can happen. Why would they leave Google? Poor leadership and/or better opportunities elsewhere.
But where else could they get access to consumer audience, computing power, data, unlimited investment dollars and rocketing stock options? Let’s start with Facebook.
If Larry is working on his third act, Mark’s just finished working on his first: the SocialGraph cash machine is to Mark what the PageRank cash machine was to Larry — but whereas Google made its fortune on the desktop Facebook will make its fortune on mobile — this has only just been put in place. He made it pretty clear in an interview last week that his own personal moonshot was connecting everyone.
Communities of people can channel their energies to do great things - and having connections between people is the infrastructure for the world to do that — Mark Zuckerberg (Oct ‘13)
Facebook doesn’t yet seem to have reached that phase where they broaden their focus and start to bring in the league of visionary geniuses to tackle whole new problem sets— the likes of Rubin, Kurzweil, Jepson etc. But when compared against each other as vehicles for these folks, Facebook ticks a fair few of those boxes already and could conceivably fill the other gaps:
We’ll find out over the next couple of years if Zuck has quite the same diversity of ideas and the ambition to go after them as do the Google guys. Certainly ubiquitous free internet is something Facebook could make a play at (and win) as well as media funding and VC/currency.
What does seem clear to me at this stage is that there are not enough teams playing in this league. I’m sure not even Larry Page would think its a good idea for Google to win everything — who wants that kind of hegemony/homogeneity in their futures? We need diversity and that means we need more people like Page stepping up. Elon Musk is playing in this league in terms of solving big problems but some of the big projects Google is working on, like content funding, he’d probably see as administrivia and of little interest. Certainly transport, energy, quantum computing and life extension are relevant problem sets for him and I’d back him in those areas.
I think Jeff Bezos is playing in this league.
His Washington Post buy, space project, 10,000 year clock are examples. I put a question mark against ‘solving big problems’ because it seems the space, clock and WaPo stuff are done in his own capacity rather than through Amazon. Where Musk could prevail in transport and energy, Bezos could well prevail in commerce, currency and media. I’d love to see Amazon buy Twitter and Pinterest to make the search/media landscape more of a three horse race.
On the matter of life extension, Craig Venter is playing in this league and that’s where I’d place my bet. He’s quietly sailed around the world collecting species and sequencing their genomes, created the first self-replicating synthetic cell, and is all geared up for, um, 3d printing some alien life.
One day we will be able to send digital information and then re-create biology at the other end—or, as I say, conduct “biological teleportation.” This could mean downloading medicine such as insulin from the Internet directly into a 3D printer in your home.
It could, for example, fill a prescription for insulin, provide flu vaccine during a pandemic or even produce phage viruses targeted to fight antibiotic-resistant bacteria. It could help future Martian colonists by giving them access to the vaccines, antibiotics or personalised drugs they needed on the red planet. And should DNA-based life ever be found there, a digital version could be transmitted back to Earth, where scientists could recreate the extraterrestrial organism using their own life-printing box.
We call it a Digital Biological Converter. And we have the prototype
He’s also taken $600m from Exxon to create algae-based biofuels so will be a player in the renewable energy space too.
Life extension is relative. Bill Gates‘ work in this area for millions of people who don’t live in Silicon Valley gives him a significant headstart if measured in cumulative days added to people’s lives.
In summary, I think Google has largely already won the knowledge/content battle and their efforts around wearables & media are largely about improving those services for more people. If they win at broadband, few will be crying for the incumbents as they close the accounts that cost them $150 a month for 10mbps. In a post-Snowden world, they will have to innovate to appease our privacy concerns if they want to provide end to end services.
I can’t see Google providing quantum computing power to their competitors or somehow preventing them from getting access to it so would expect the Facebooks, Msfts, IBM’s and Amazon’s to develop their own efforts in this space — it doesn’t seem to be a winner takes all area.
Energy and transport don’t scale like digital services that can be so comprehensively won in the way Google has with knowledge. These too don’t seem like winner takes all scenarios and I can’t see Google winning them outright in that sense.Venter’s 3d printed alien presents a total paradigm shift in the concept of medicine/life extension that could potentially be highly scalable — with Venter onboard, I’d back them in on that one 100%.
Here’s looking forward to hearing more from Jason in part 2 of his #googlewinseverything thoughtpiece.
