Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
ANNA PATTERSON: My dad was a NASA engineer, so he brought
us on a tour at Johnson Space Center, and they asked my
brother what he wanted to be, and he said an astronaut.
And then they asked me what I wanted to be,
and I said an astronaut.
And they said, what?
Girls can't be astronauts.
In their mind, they were right.
They just didn't realize that the future would be different.
GAYATHRI RAJAN: It's hard when you're young, when you're a
teenager, there's a lot of peer pressure to conform.
ANGELA LAI: There is a certain astigmatism to being a woman
in technology.
It doesn't seem to be something that you do.
JEN FITZPATRICK: I didn't want to be stuck as my desk
programming on a computer eight, 10 hours a day every
day for the rest of my life.
That's just not how I saw myself.
But so much of it is also collaborating with other
people and brainstorming and problem solving.
GAYATHRI RAJAN: It's working as a team.
It's building things together.
ANGELA LAI: It always feels like play.
It doesn't feel like work.
SUSAN WOJCICKI: I'm always surprised that there are not
more women going into tech, because I think it's growing,
and there are just lots of opportunities.
ANGELA LAI: There is no roadblocks being a woman in
technology.
PAVNI DIWANJI: There are a lot of naysayers.
They're like, don't do that, you're never going to be
successful.
And so one of the things I learned very quickly is you've
got to stay focused, and you just have to believe in
yourself and just make it happen.
GAYATHRI RAJAN: I come into work everyday excited about
the challenges and the possibilities.
JEN FITZPATRICK: It's incredibly satisfying to know
that you're doing something that has that type of impact
and that type of reach.
SHERRY LISTGARTEN: You really feel like you're doing
something that's helpful and that's making a difference.
PAVNI DIWANJI: I'm able to create something that most
universities in the world use.
How impactful is that?
GAYATHRI RAJAN: Five million businesses use the products
that I've been working on.
ANNA PATTERSON: Every time you type in a query,
you're using my code.
And that means that I'm reaching
billions of people a day.
JEN FITZPATRICK: You see the impact every single day on
real people and your friends and your family.
And that's just magical.
MEGAN SMITH: Hello, welcome to Women Techmakers live on
location at Google I/O. It's incredible to be here.
We have a fabulous lineup of speakers.
We've set up this session as a series of lightning talks.
So we want to ignite and inspire with that topics
around Search, of course, but also Google Glass, some
product insights, AI, knowledge, and other topics.
I've asked all of our speakers to tell personal stories as
they walk through these topics.
And we have a bit of a theme of past, present and future.
But before we start--
I don't know if my slide thing is advancing, so I'm going to
come over here.
No.
Sorry guys.
There.
So this is the lineup.
And before we start, I want to talk a little bit about why we
started Women Techmakers.
Last night, we had a fabulous gathering of the women, a
pre-gathering of the women who are here at I/O.
And we might be in the minority, but we're fierce.
And it was really fun, a good social experience.
And we want to build community amongst women with our male
colleagues.
We also are working on visibility.
And women are largely invisible in technology is
part of our feeling.
And so our goal is to increase visibility.
Our industry is probably 10% or 20% technical women,
sometimes a little higher.
We want to get to 50%.
We want to match the population.
Products are just better when they're built by diverse
teams-- companies are better, the world is better.
And that's part of our goal.
I wanted to give a shout out to real progress that's
happening this year.
Sheryl Sandberg, who is a fabulous colleague, Google
alum now, leading Facebook with Mark, has really driven
the national and international conversation up.
We need to be talking about these things.
I don't know if people are familiar with the "Maker
Series." Maker.com, AOL and PBS have launched this.
It's the modern women's rights movement's history
documentaries and really shining a light into actual
fabulous stories, the backstories, on women that you
haven't really heard before.
And you just saw a video clip, a montage, of something we've
done, which is called "MAKERS at Google" down here, which
you can get to on google.com/diversity/women.
We really want people to know the stories of the women who
build YouTube, the women who build Android, the women who
build Search.
And so we've launched this series starting today.
As part of celebrating what's going on and some momentum, we
have a long way still to go, but we've come a long way in
really upping the conversation.
I just want to shout out to some of the giants we stand on
the shoulders of.
This is Katherine Switzer, first woman to run the Boston
Marathon officially.
I encourage you to watch her story.
The race director tried to rip her numbers off.
It's on makers.com.
And this is Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and she's delivering
the Declaration of Sentiments in the mid 1800s at the first
women's rights convention, back when women weren't
allowed to go to university and were not allowed to do
many things.
How many people in this room have ever heard of the
Declaration of Sentiments?
There's one, two.
Looks like for people on Livestream, we're probably at
about 10%, which brings me to the point I want to make,
again, about visibility and invisibility.
We really have a problem with how visible
technical women are.
And so I want to jump into two things before we start.
There's symptoms of a problem, and sometimes
there's roots of a problem.
And I stumbled across this when I met Gina Davis, the
famous Academy Award-winning actress.
Gina was watching TV with her children when they were young,
and as an actress, she could see that TV was biased.
And she'd say in the industry, there's not enough women and
girls on children's television.
And people would say, yeah, of course, there's plenty, like
Dora, the "*** Doo" girls, lots of people.
But then she thought, no, there's not.
Let's measure.
You manage what you measure.
So she measured it together with USC Annenberg.
And the studies were showing-- and they had grad students
counting by hand--
it's actually three to one across all of children's
television, the corpus of children's television of men
and boys versus girls.
And so the girls aren't equally represented, and you
see amazing things that you wouldn't even notice.
But how many women in the whole ocean in the film
"Nemo?" How many Muppets were in "Sesame Street" who were
girls into the '90s?
That will be zero.
"Nemo?" One.
So we're not accurately depicting the world, and we're
skewing it.
So one of things we've been looking to do-- and also, one
more stat, the 80% stat.
80% of the jobs that were held by characters in the
television our children watched were held by male
characters.
So we taught our kids that girls and women don't do
stuff, which just doesn't happen to be true, as we'll
show in this session.
And so we really need to get in here.
We are now working with Gina on trying to automate some of
this, so that we can have a gender disparity measurement
ability to look at our media.
And I encourage everybody who has technical background, look
at ways we can use technology to count bias so we can
measure and see things.
The last thing I'll point out before we start about things--
oh, one more example.
This is so insidious, like our bias, that I was looking in a
catalog recently, and this was a dresser for a boy and a
dresser for a girl.
And the colors are different.
But really, the big difference to me that I saw because of
being aware of Gina's work was that the boy got the
microscope and the girl didn't.
So as you now know this fact, you're going to notice it
everywhere.
And it's something we need to work on.
And if we could use technology to help ourselves see it, we
could get out of this historic bias that we inherited.
The last thing I would say before we start is around
becoming visible, includes not only seeing the technical
women who are here today, but also the historic women.
How many people recognize some of the people on these slides?
I see a couple hands, but really probably these people
are pretty unknown to you.
Ada Lovelace is represented in the Doodle.
She's from the 1800s.
She's actually the first person in world history to
think of programming something.
She's the founder of our industry.
There's the women who were Astronaut Corps.
Nobody knew about them.
We know about the men.
Some of the most decorated Americans, of course, are the
astronauts from the Apollo and Mercury times.
They were there.
They just weren't allowed to fly.
Grace Hopper--
this is the Woman Project at MIT.
The Bletchley code crackers, the enigma code crackers from
World War II, more than half women, mathematicians.
Hedy Lamarr.
Hedy Lamarr helps you have your cell phone work.
Up on the top, there's a wonderful thing that
Singularity University launched last weekend.
I encourage all of us to help.
It's a crowdsourced history idea--
and so innovatingwomen.org.
Please go there, please help capture these stores.
And last, I want to point to this
picture down in the bottom--
University of Pennsylvania, World War II.
I want to bring Kathy Kleiman on stage.
She's going to share an extraordinary story from
history that I was lucky Brad Feldman alerted me to.
He's here.
Kathy.
[APPLAUSE]
KATHY KLEIMAN: Thank you so much, Megan.
I'm thrilled to be here with all of you today.
And I have an amazing story to share with you.
But first, I have two questions.
The first one is, does anybody here know who invented the
first sort routine?
It was Betty Holberton.
Another question--
who invented the first software application?
That was Betty Holberton, too.
We don't know about her, because she was never written
into formal computer history.
In fact, her story was almost completely untold
for a very long time.
I know, because I found it.
Can we go to the slide, please?
Thank you.
I know because I found it.
When I was an undergraduate and a computer programmer, I
felt very isolated.
I didn't see women around me.
I didn't see them in my classes.
I didn't see them as faculty in my
computer science classes.
So I turned to history to see if I could find role models.
And I found this picture.
This is of the ENIAC, the first all
electronic digital computer.
It was a secret project during World War II at the University
of Pennsylvania.
And when I found the pictures, the men were in the captions.
That's J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly on the left and
right front.
And they're the co-inventors of the ENIAC-- very famous.
But there are women in these pictures.
And I wanted to know who they were, and they
weren't in the captions.
So I took the picture, and I went to a
leading computer historian.
And I asked her who they were.
And she said the refrigerator ladies.
I said, a refrigerator lady?
She said they're models posed in front of this machine to
make it look good, like the Frigidaire models used to open
the new refrigerators with such a flourish.
Well, they didn't look like models to me.
These women look like they belong in this picture.
And they look like they know exactly what they're doing.
So I set out to find them, and I did.
That's Jean Bartik in the far back and Ruth
Lichterman-Teitelbaum in the front.
They were two of the original ENIAC programmers.
And I was thrilled to learn that all six of the original
programmers were women.
So now I'm going to take a pause.
Thanks to the wonderful Women Techmakers, I've been able to
bring you a short video of the ENIAC programmers telling you
a bit of their story themselves.
It's part of oral histories I've
collected over many years.
And I'm thrilled to be able to share this with you.
[APPLAUSE]
BETTY SNYDER HOLBERTON: From the very beginning, you're
going to a first in a lot of things.
JEAN JENNINGS BARTIK: I've never since, never been in as
exciting an environment.
We knew we were pushing back frontiers.
NARRATOR: In February of 1946, six months after World War II
had ended, America learned of a secret army
project called ENIAC.
It was the first
all-electronic digital computer.
Yet the tale of ENIAC's programming by a group of
young women has been all but erased from computer history.
During World War II, the US had assembled a crew of nearly
100 mathematically trained women whose
official title was computer--
women who were computing complex ballistic trajectory
equations by hand and using mechanical desktop
calculators.
In the spring of 1945, six were selected to figure out
how to program the ENIAC machine--
Fran Bilas, Betty Jean Jennings, Ruth Lichterman,
Kathleen McNulty, Betty Synder, Marlyn Wescoff.
MARLYN WESCOFF MELTZER: We were competing ballistic
tables on a hand calculator.
We were computing, and we were computers.
JEAN JENNINGS BARTIK: There were logical diagrams on the
ENIAC, and we were supposed to study them to figure out how
to program it.
The ENIAC was a son of a *** to program.
[LAUGHTER]
NARRATOR: ENAC [INAUDIBLE]
Eckert and Mauchly became famous.
However, the ENIAC programmer story, the story of these six
women founders who created the first sort routine, the first
software application, and became the first teachers of
modern programming, was never told.
Their work dramatically altered computing in the 1940s
and 1950s as they paved the path to
modern computer science.
JEAN JENNINGS BARTIK: At that time, the emphasis was on the
invention of the ENIAC, developing and the mechanics,
the hardware.
KATHLEEN MCNULTY MAUCHLY ANTONELLI: We were like
fighter pilots.
Here was this great, great machine, but you couldn't just
take an ordinary pilot and stick them into a fighter
pilot and say, go to it now, man.
That was not the way it was going to be.
BETTY SNYDER HOLBERTON: I had a fantastic life.
Everything that I did was the beginning of something new.
KATHLEEN MCNULTY MAUCHLY ANTONELLI: I really loved
working with those girls.
KATHY KLEIMAN: Aren't they amazing?
[APPLAUSE]
KATHY KLEIMAN: And their work didn't stop with ENIAC.
They became the first teachers of modern programming.
They became the first modern professional programmers.
And Betty and Jean went on to program BINAC and UNIVAC, the
first commercial computers.
And they created innovative tools that changed the face of
programming forever.
Absolutely amazing.
And in a very nice twist, Betty Holberton actually
interviewed Grace Hopper to invite her down to Eckert
Mauchly Computer Corporation, the first commercial modern
computing company.
And Grace, of course, accepted.
Thank you.
So now, today, I have an amazing announcement to make.
After so many years of recording their oral
histories, researching their accomplishments, and working
so closely with the ENIAC programmers, I'm thrilled to
tell you and I'm thrilled to announce here that final
funding has finally been put together so that I can produce
a documentary and finish my book on the ENIAC programmers
and share the story with all of you.
[APPLAUSE]
KATHY KLEIMAN: This is happening because Megan Smith
introduced me to two remarkable
technical women of vision--
Anne Wojcicki and Lucy Southworth Page.
And they're providing wonderful support through
their foundations, the Brin-Wojcicki Foundation and a
donor-advised fund on behalf of Lucy Southworth Page.
And I really want to applaud them, because this is amazing.
[APPLAUSE]
KATHY KLEIMAN: And thanks to this support, I will be in
production this summer with the Paul Freeman Film Group,
and we will be producing a documentary, and we'll have a
book for you very, very shortly.
I can't wait to share this story in its full form.
And now I want to share just a personal story about how I
learned firsthand what history and visibility can do to shape
our viewpoints.
Ten years ago, when my son was five, he came over to me with
a very confused look on his face.
He had grown up with my work on the ENIAC programmers, and
he had even met and actually played with four of the
original six ENIAC programmers.
And he looked upset.
And he said, mom, I know that women can be computer
programmers.
But can men be programmers too?
[LAUGHTER]
KATHY KLEIMAN: I assured him that, of course, women and men
could be programmers.
And in fact, technology was better when
we created it together.
And when I left him two nights ago, he was programming.
And so what I want to do and conclude is say stay tuned for
more about the ENIAC programmers.
And please join me in the quest to capture wonderful
stories of women in technology so we don't lose any more.
And on behalf of all of us, I want to thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
MEGAN SMITH: So now we're going to start into the
lightning talks.
And I have the honor of introducing Susan Wojcicki.
Susan has been at Google since the start.
She's actually our first landlord.
And I hope she's going to tell you a little bit about that.
But Susan is our senior vice president of advertising.
And she really runs all the products that make all of the
money that allow us to do all the amazing things that we're
able to do.
She's an extraordinary executive and extraordinary
visionary strategic leader.
One of my favorites is the personal stories.
My favorite experiences are--
Susan is always double and triple-booked.
And she adds a lot of value, so we get her everywhere.
And often, if you're in a meeting and there's a lot of
people debating ideas and ideas are flying around, but
you can't really get moving, when Susan walks in the room,
it just changes.
Within five minutes, people are focused on a screen and
narrowing in on where we're going to go.
She just knows how to lead.
She knows how to see the future, and she's an
extraordinary leader of Google and of our industry.
And I welcome Susan Wojcicki to the stage.
[APPLAUSE]
SUSAN WOJCICKI: Good evening, everyone.
It's really great to see such a wonderful turnout
for our talk here.
And since this is a developer conference, I thought I would
talk about a few key principles that we use when
we're developing Google's products.
And I've been involved for a long
time in a lot of products.
So I summarized this down to two.
But before I do that, I'm going to talk a little bit
about my personal story.
And since Megan talked about me being a landlord, I thought
I would start there.
And so when people ask me the question, well, how did you
decide to join Google, I sometimes have to say, well,
my story is kind of unusual.
It's not really like everybody else's story.
I actually lived with the company
Google for five months.
I don't think really anyone else can say that, expect for
my husband.
And so what happened was I was renting rooms in my house, and
Sergey and Larry had just gotten
funded for their company.
And they were looking for space, and I
was looking for renters.
We agreed on an amount, and they moved in.
And at first, I didn't really think that much about it,
other than they were renters.
But then people would read about it, and then they would
ask me questions.
And I would say, oh, yeah, I know them.
They're actually renting in my garage.
[LAUGHTER]
SUSAN WOJCICKI: So I started using the products.
And you have to remember, there were a lot of big
competitors out there that were much, much bigger than
this little company of three people at the time.
So I start using the product.
And it was pretty good.
And I had this realization at one moment, because the site
actually went down.
The servers were still running at Stanford.
And it was at that moment that I couldn't reach Google.
And that's when I really realized how important it had
become to me and my life.
And I realized the potential for the world.
And that's when I decided I really wanted to join Google
and be part of that future.
So that's my story on terms of why I joined Google.
So I joined, and I was there for one day.
And Sergey comes up to me and says, I have a mission for us.
It's to organize the world's information to make it
universally accessible and useful.
What do you think?
I was employee 16.
There are less than 20 of us here.
And you guys all just graduated from college.
So that's like a pretty ambitious goal right there.
But that brings me to my first point, which is that do
something important, think big, and have a big goal of
how you can change the world.
And I was really pleased to see that Larry talked about
that this morning in his keynote, where he said that
there's so many things that haven't been done yet.
It's important to focus on the great things that haven't
happened yet.
And that's really a focus that we have in
our development process.
And a lot of times, doing big ambitious things
sounds really hard.
In fact, they sound crazy, and they sound impossible.
But when you break them down into parts, a lot of times you
can realize they're actually doable.
And doing really hard, crazy things also has the advantage
that it's a lot less competitive, because there are
fewer people who want to do crazy things, like you.
So let me give a few stories.
So let me start with Street View.
So we have the beautiful imagery that comes from the
Bright Angel Trail in the Grand Canyon that we have been
working on.
In fact, here in the lobby, you can actually see the
camera that created it, and you can actually try on the
backpack and walk around and see how we did it.
But when I first heard about Street View, it was just the
idea, which is let's create a way to take pictures of all
the streets in the whole world.
[LAUGHTER]
SUSAN WOJCICKI: Right?
I'm like, OK.
And then you think about it, and these ideas
sound crazy at first.
But then you start thinking, well, how would you do that?
And you start thinking, well, you would have cars, and they
would have cameras.
You could have people, and they could have cameras.
And then you start talking, what kind of cameras?
And then you find people who actually
really want to do that.
And then you're on your way to making it happen.
So we just launched our 50th country with Street View and 5
million miles of Street View imagery.
So from a very simple idea, we have something that enables
people to see imagery from all over the
world, which is amazing.
[APPLAUSE]
SUSAN WOJCICKI: So going on to the next big idea, which we
are still working on, which are driverless cars.
Now, if you think about driverless cars and you hear
about this idea, it also sounds like this giant idea.
Is it really going to get done?
Are we actually going to be able to do this?
And if so, when?
And so there are many, many benefits, like it's probably
the most dangerous thing we all do, but yet we have to do
it, which is drive.
And you think about the benefits of
saving lives and emissions.
And it really could make a difference in the world.
So my goal is to have the people at Google do this
before my kids start driving.
So I have a personal OKR here.
But it's just an example of a really big idea that doesn't
sound possible that you can make have happen.
So let me move on to the second big principle that we
think about.
Now, when I'm working with teams, and they are telling me
they're going to create some new product or they have some
idea and they want to staff it and they want to build it, I
ask them, what is your insight?
Tell me something why you're doing something new, why
you've observed something in the world that's different.
And what's your insight that's going to make this product be
a big success?
And I found that if they can answer that, the product is
usually a success.
And if they can't, then it's often time to go back to the
drawing board.
And I think about the insights as, because there's so much
technology and the world that we live in is changing so
much, if we go around and we look really, really carefully
at how the world's changing, and we see new technology,
sometimes we can see glimpses of how the world will change
in the future.
And if we can see that glimpse, then we can build
around it, and we can plan for it.
And we can build those next generation solutions.
We can build that future.
So I'm going to give a few examples, actually, of
insights that have been really important to me and my product
development and that have guided me.
And again, a lot of times these are just one sentence.
But they're powerful, because it's a nugget that you can use
to build your products.
So I was working on Google Video.
And as you can see, we have the YouTube logo here.
And when I was working on Google Video, we were working
with studios who had great content.
And we were working to bring this online.
But at the same time, after we had just gotten it online and
users were starting to be able to see it, we had this other
video that became very, very popular.
In fact, the numbers were significantly larger than what
we were seeing from this studio in the
studio deal we had done.
And it made me realize the power of
user-generated content.
So do you guys want to see that video?
Yes?
Let me show you a few, just like 15 seconds of it.
But it was this video that really gave me that insight
and that inspiration.
[YOUTUBE CLIP]
[APPLAUSE]
SUSAN WOJCICKI: What I love about that video is that the
roommate is doing his homework in the background the entire
time and doesn't notice.
But this was an insight.
I realized, wow, this user-generated content, it can
be really, really powerful.
And today, we all know that, because that's what the world
has become-- user-generated content.
It has its place it's very valuable.
There's also all kinds of other content that's produced
professionally that's really, really important to the
ecosystem, too.
But it was that video that really gave me the confidence
in thinking that we should acquire YouTube.
And I was a big advocate of it.
And Google spent $1.65 billion.
So sometimes you have one little insight, and from that
little insight, you make a really big decision.
So I want to talk about another insight that's near
and dear to my heart, which is ads.
I'm responsible for Google's ads business.
Now , we created an ad system when Google had not very many
people at the company--
I would say probably like 30 people at the company.
And we didn't really have enough people even to build a
search engine, let alone to try to build and ad system
where nobody knew anything about advertising--
nothing.
None of us had ever worked in it.
But we had an insight.
And that insight is something that I still use today when I
think about the ad products that we build.
And the insight is very basic.
But it's ads are information.
Now, if you think about ads being information and you
think about them just being commercial information, then
the ads need to be relevant, and the ads need to be useful.
The ads need to be shown to the right person at the right
time, just like we think about that for our search results.
And so that meant we had to build our own ad system.
That meant that if you typed in flowers, you had to see ads
about flowers.
That if you typed in the name of any book, you had to see
all the ads had to be about the book.
Not just for a bookstore, but for that actual book.
And so that's a principle that we use that caused us to build
an ad system.
And if I think about things today,
sometimes I'll get questions.
Like when we first went into display, people would ask me,
how do you feel about image ads?
How do you feel about video ads?
Do you think an image ad could not be a good ad?
You think about that.
Well, an image is information.
Are images useful to you?
Yes.
Then an image ad can be useful, provided its served at
the right ad at the right time to the right user.
All of it, at the end of the day, is about serving the
right ad and making it useful.
So that's an insight that we've used across our ad
business from beginning till present.
And just going forward, moving really quickly to the present,
if you look at today, and you say, what do
you see about today?
What are things that you're focused on?
I would say we have to be thinking a
lot more about location.
We have all these phones.
The phones know where we are.
How do we make all the services that we have
super-relevant to us?
So you think about, all of you having traveled, probably come
from all different places and staying in hotels and looking
for places to eat.
How many of you have actually gotten some kind of offer
related to where you are right now that would
be useful to you?
I'm looking, but I see a few people.
They're the brave souls who--
or the people who have special technology or
have special insights.
But it's something that doesn't really happen yet.
But there's no reason it shouldn't and couldn't.
We should all be getting useful information based on
where we are right now.
And the reason we haven't is just because the systems
haven't been built out yet.
And so it's just an example of an insight and the way we
should think about things in the future.
So just to sum up, those are my two insights.
That's how we think about building.
We think about doing things that are really important,
things that haven't been done yet, things that will be used
by billions of people.
And to think about insights and what the future will look
like, get an insight into that future, and then build for
that future.
And by building for it, that will become the future.
So I'm very excited about the future of technology and how
it's changing our world.
I think there are so many opportunities for us and for
all of you.
And I'm looking forward to that future.
And now I'd like to invite Anna Patterson
to come up on stage.
Anna Patterson has worked on some of the biggest, most
ambitious projects I've seen at Google.
And she's going to tell you a little bit about them.
Anna is vice president of engineering and artificial
intelligence.
What an amazing role and opportunity.
So let's please welcome Anna onto the stage.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
ANNA PATTERSON: So I'm here to tell a little bit of hacker
stories from the trench and I think with a main theme of
perseverance.
I saw that the ENIAC programmers, how they got a
circuit diagram in order to program.
My first programming job out of school was for the F15E.
And we would test our software the best you can on something
that wasn't flying.
And then we'd invariably need to put in patches.
And just like the ENIAC, you had to toggle in the program.
So it was very scary, since people's lives were
depending on it.
But also, I was thinking about how
source control has evolved.
[LAUGHTER]
ANNA PATTERSON: Of course, my first programs in high score
were on punch cards.
But at home, I was really fortunate that my dad brought
home a Commodore pet computer.
And he encouraged us to experiment and write
a program on it.
And I wrote a really, really horrible, terrible video game.
And it only had 8K of memory, so I stored the program state
in the corners.
So they were flashing weirdly.
[LAUGHTER]
ANNA PATTERSON: And I guess it was a standard trick.
I found out much later.
But I was from the suburbs of Saint Louis, so I wasn't
really part of a burgeoning hacker community.
I eventually got my PhD in computer science at the
University of Illinois, Champaign.
And then I became a research faculty member for John
McCarthy, the founder of AI.
And I see several people here who know me really well.
And so you'll appreciate when I say that John McCarthy made
me do something, how hard that must have been.
So he made me look into this area called phenomenal data
mining, where you're given facts and relations, and
you're given a big data set.
Big was very small in those days.
And then when you learn new correlations, you can explain
these new correlations in terms of underlying phenomena.
So that's where it got its name.
And that technique is still in use.
But everybody was leaving the department to start companies.
So we were pretty much like the last ones out when the
lights were turning off.
And I co-founded in 1998 a web mining company.
Because the web was so big at 5 million pages, we thought,
how are people going to be able to get around this thing?
And so we had an idea to make an automatic taxonomy and kind
of lead people to what questions were answerable on
the web and what ones weren't.
Because in those days, trust me, there weren't really
recipes on the web.
But the taxonomy around Linux was deep.
So we got angel-funded to do this just in time
for the dot com crash.
And so I tried to figure out what my other passion was, and
I said mobile is just about to take off.
So I moved into the mobile area in 1999, just in time for
the Telco crash.
[LAUGHTER]
ANNA PATTERSON: So after killing two industries, I had
a one-year-old, and I was four months pregnant.
And of course, I was unemployed, and I was actually
living in [? Pogne's ?]
guest room, who is in the front row.
And so the doctor said, you need to be on bed rest.
And I said, have you ever heard of programming?
And he hadn't.
And I said it's a lot like bed rest.
[LAUGHTER]
ANNA PATTERSON: So I volunteered at
the internet archive.
And they have snapshots of the web over time.
So as such, especially in 2001, it was much
bigger than the web.
It had 30 billion web pages.
And the live web at the time maybe had five billion.
So I did a history-based search engine that launched
at, like, 12 billion pages.
And you could look at how terms change over time.
So you could dial back to 1997 and searched for a term like
Clinton, and you'd see all these co-occuring terms in a
graph and how they changed over time.
And it was very presidential.
Dialing it up to 1999, it wasn't quite as presidential.
And then moving forward to today, everything is about
Hillary Clinton if you search for Clinton, when you look at
the popularity of the things on the web.
So it was a really interesting project.
And I was doing it as a volunteer.
And four days after it launched, various companies
wanted to talk about acquiring it.
So I go from volunteer stay-at-home mom to the world
of corp dev.
So that was really fun.
So that's how I wound up at Google.
And at Google, I really wanted to unlock some global and
local information.
One of our examples was about these small towns in Germany
with their local Octoberfests and how that information was
really important to them.
And we weren't quite big enough to get
everything to everyone.
And so at Google, we evolve our systems.
So just when one system launches, we
would start a new one.
So when one such system just launched, I came up with the
idea for TeraGoogle.
And speaking of thinking big, probably 95% of people said,
why would we ever need a search system
for a trillion pages?
And of course, the founders were like, is that all?
[LAUGHTER]
ANNA PATTERSON: So at the time, it was very
cost-efficient.
When it launched, it was about 50 times cheaper than our
mainline index.
And at the same time, some of my web ranking team went off,
and they shipped one of our early deep learning projects,
which was around ads broadening.
Like once you bid on one keyword, what other keywords
might be interesting?
So after having my fourth child, I did what everybody
does when they have four kids and they're
on maternity leave.
I decided to start a company.
[LAUGHTER]
ANNA PATTERSON: So I started a company, Cuil.
And we really want to bring a really high res, rich
experience to people with high bandwidth and a really low
bandwidth experience to people who had feature phones.
And so what we did around the low bandwidth experience is we
summarized things so that a fact that appeared on tons of
web pages was on top in paragraph format with a bunch
of references, down to much rarer facts that had much
fewer references.
So after Cuil, I returned to Google, where I became one of
the first 100 engineers at Android, because this time, I
was pretty sure the mobile revolution
was going to happen.
But it wasn't a sure thing.
At that time, Android had sold 40 million phones.
And of course, today it was announced that Android now has
900 million.
I was part of the team that helped launch Google Play on
Play tablets.
And very recently, like two weeks ago, we shipped a native
search architecture onto the phone to index all the local
data, so that when you're offline, you can
have access to it.
And some data never leaves your phone.
So a lot of people say, wait, Google is so good at search.
Why didn't you just compile the thing and
put it on the phone?
Well, the phone is kind of like my early
Commodore pet computer--
not quite as bad, but compared to a data center, it is.
And each of the programs can only have 20 meg resident in
memory, and the executable is 500 meg as hard constraints.
So trust me when I say that Google's search system, it's
executable, it's bigger than 500 meg.
So when we look at this system, because the success of
Android as a compute cluster, it's actually over 500
exahertz of computing power, which is way more powerful
than the human brain.
So last autumn, I moved over to our new AI area, where
recently, Ray [INAUDIBLE] joined us.
And he says that the AIs that humans create are going to
leave the earth at light speed and populate the universe.
So we're not just working on the most important project on
planet Earth, but in the universe.
So I do want to encourage the tech makers out there, women
and men, to really reach for the stars and use technology
to help shape the world.
Technology is a very powerful platform in order to help
people and enable change.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
ANNA PATTERSON: Now, I want to introduce Johanna Wright.
She's the lead product manager of Search for many years,
launching such innovations as Universal Search, Instant, and
the Knowledge Graph.
And now she's leading up Search at Android, including
Google Now Voice Search and Speech.
[APPLAUSE]
JOHANNA WRIGHT: Let's step back to January, 2003.
At this point in time, I'm living in my
father-in-law's house.
He's put a nice curtain up for my section of the living room
where my husband and I share an air mattress.
The sun streams in, 6:00 AM, we wake up every morning
because of the unbearable Orange County heat.
The air mattress has popped, and I'm unemployed.
Just six months earlier, I was a young tech exec in New York,
first, during the dot com boom and then bust.
But my company that I worked at had finally shut its doors.
And my husband and I decided to get on our bicycles and
ride across the country to lovely sunny LA.
Riding across the country with your new
husband is a lot of fun.
Showing up in LA, a new city, with no job, not so much fun.
Then the rejection letters from business schools started
pouring in.
And it's January, and there's only one business school I
haven't heard back from.
But I'm not feeling too optimistic, because they're
supposed to interview all of their candidates, and they're
going to mail out their verdict two days later.
And they still haven't interviewed me.
But then I got an email from UCLA, It said we want to
interview you.
And since my confidence had been shot, my
response was, you do?
I was fortunate enough to get to go to UCLA
for business school.
And then I got a job at Google.
And today, I'm going to talk about my career starting now
to Google and what it was like to be a product manager at
Google and give some bits of advice about product
management.
But my first piece of career advice is that your career is
not going to be linear.
Expect to be disrupted.
This is a disruptive industry.
And you, too, may someday be unemployed on your
father-n-law's couch.
What's really going to matter is the energy and the tenacity
with which you pick yourself up and take
on your next adventure.
So let's jump into Google.
I was hired to be a product manager working in Search.
My boss gave me two options of jobs.
One was something called Universal Search.
Universal Search was the project where we took all the
content from our different backends--
Maps, Videos, Images--
and we put them in the main search results pane.
The other option she gave me was to do something called
Premium Content Search.
This is where we searched all the content behind pay walls
and put it in the search results.
Both of these things seemed pretty interesting.
And I was so new to Google I didn't have any context or
judgment to make a decision.
Fortunately for me, I'd gone to the same business school as
Susan Wojcicki, my fellow panelist.
And so I asked her for some advice.
Susan looked at me like I had two heads.
What?
Of course you should do Universal Search.
That's our business, Johanna.
So this leads to another piece of career wisdom.
What does a good opportunity look like?
A good opportunity looks like something that's strategic.
If you're doing something that's in line with a
company's mission and has not been done before, then it's
very likely to be a good opportunity.
So let me jump into Universal Search.
This was 2005 at Google.
Google was growing like crazy.
It was very chaotic.
And for me, it was hard to know how projects got
assigned, what you were working on.
And I got paired up with an infrastructure team while I
was working on Universal Search.
This was a great team, but a team that was very focused on
building infrastructure, and they didn't want
to build any features.
And I was a product manager, and I was being judged on the
features that I launched.
And so it was pretty stressful, because I wasn't
delivering anything.
And so what I ended up doing was creating a set of mocks, a
series of mocks of what Universal
Search could look like.
And then I created a little PowerPoint deck, and I walked
around Google, and I introduced myself to anyone
who looked like they might want to be a features tech
lead to see if they wanted to join my project.
And I was fortunate enough to meet a person named David
Bailey, who wanted to join on and lead the features side of
the effort.
And then the project really started to get legs.
So here's the beginning of my product
management specific advice.
And that is to paint a vision.
Once you paint a vision and you share your vision, people
will follow.
It'll be a lot easier to follow once you have a vision.
OK, so David and I started.
There was a big mountain in front of us.
We didn't really know what to do.
This project had failed a number of times before.
We didn't really know why it had failed.
And I had this idea that we should do a user study.
I was trying to figure out what to do, so I said, let's
just do a user study.
So we pulled together a prototype
to do our user study.
And once we had this prototype, the people around
us at Google started to be able to imagine that this
product might come to life and that something might happen.
And so this brings me to my second piece of product
management advice, which is that if you don't really know
what to do, you should just do something.
Do something to move the ball forward.
I was very fortunate, though, that a user study was what we
decided to do, because people loved it.
And it was so awesome.
We learned that the project and the product had legs.
So I remember sitting in the labs, and it was in the spring
of 2006, for our user study.
And one of the searches we ask people to do was Barry Bonds.
This was a long time ago.
This was the Dark Ages.
YouTube was just starting out.
But there was a home video that someone had uploaded of
Barry Bonds tying Babe Ruth's home run record.
And the participant in our study, she
clicked on the video.
She watched the ball sail out into the field.
And there was this big smile on her face.
It wasn't unnatural at all that she saw this video in the
search results.
So we knew the project had legs.
And it was just a great moment.
So my final and most important piece of product management
advice is to listen to your users.
And even more importantly, use your products yourself.
Just this weekend, when I was using Android Search, I
noticed that speech recognition is slow, like
maybe one in seven times.
I don't know why.
But I'm really glad that we're investing in speed.
And then I also had some magical experiences with
Google Now.
So I was invited to go to a birthday party in Burlingame,
and Google Now reminded me about the party.
And it even told me that Burlingame was 30 minutes from
my house, which I didn't know.
And it was super helpful.
The more you use your products, the easier it is to
make decisions and to have an intuitive feel for what you
should be doing.
So I'll summarize my product management advice.
One, paint a vision.
Two, when you don't know what to do it, just make mini
milestones.
Roll that ball forward.
And three, use your products.
Since this is a Women's Techmakers event, I thought
I'd close with my very own lean-in story.
So back when all this Universal Search stuff was
going on, I ended up getting pregnant.
And when I was eight months pregnant, my boss, Marissa
Mayer, suggested that I lead a team of senior engineers to
come up with the Search strategy for the next year.
Now, the Search strategy, the normal process was to set this
meeting in mid-November.
But my baby was supposed to be born at the end of October.
And so they were like, hey, no problem.
We'll just move the date up, which didn't give me very much
time to prepare.
And my baby was something that you call transverse.
So he's lying on his side.
And I had to have a C-section.
So they moved the date up.
I moved my C-section to the very last possible date, and
we met in the middle.
And on Wednesday, I gave the strategy presentation.
On Thursday, I had my baby.
[LAUGHTER]
JOHANNA WRIGHT: Now, this might be horrifying to some of
you, but to me, it was invigorating.
And it set me up to have a leadership role in Search when
I returned from my leave.
And the point I want you to takeaway is not that you need
to sacrifice your family for your career.
I feel fortunate enough that I haven't had to do that.
You see, there was no question in my mind that given that
opportunity, I would want to give that presentation.
And it was really huge that my manager believed in me.
So the takeaway that I'd like us to take is that as
managers, we shouldn't assume people's abilities or desires.
We should ask.
As managers, it's our job to enable greatness in our teams.
[APPLAUSE]
JOHANNA WRIGHT: So now I'm so excited to
introduce Diane Greene.
Diane Greene is the latest member of
Google's board of directors.
She's also a board member for Intuit and MIT.
Diane is probably most well-known
for founding VMware.
VMware went on to define the visualization industry.
Diane was the CEO of VMware from 1998 to 2008.
She took the company to $2 billion in revenue, and she
took the company public.
When I heard that I got to be on the same panel as Diane
Greene, I was flabbergasted and so excited.
Despite how intimidating her resume sounds, Diane Greene is
actually quite approachable.
I heard her speak last year at a Google event, and I went up
and introduced myself afterwards.
And she was very friendly and nice.
So if you get the opportunity afterwards, I would encourage
you to shake her hand.
Diane is also a national champion sailor.
With that, Diane.
[APPLAUSE]
DIANE GREENE: Thank you for that introduction.
She went further than I suggested she go.
So how did I manage to do these things?
What I thought I would do is take you on a whirlwind tour
of my life and try and highlight where I thought I
learned valuable things.
And I grew up sailing, racing sailboats.
And when you race a boat, first, you
have to build a team.
And you have to get your team all aligned on a single goal,
which is to win the race.
And then you need your strategy to win the race.
You have to understand what the wind is doing, understand
what the currents are doing, and pay attention to your
competitors.
And if your competitors surprise you or you get a wind
shift, you have to immediately react and handle that and
continue winning the race.
And the last thing is the engineering around sailing.
You have to prepare your boat.
It has to be ready to go fast, and you have to tune it while
on the race course to keep going fast.
And I think that's what led me to train.
I trained as a mechanical engineer and
then a Naval architect.
I came out to the Bay Area to San Francisco
for my first job.
And the first thing I was given to do was analyze some
mooring for an offshore oil platform that was used for
firefighting.
And there was a big Fortran program that looked like it
was the way to model this.
And so that's when I learned how to program.
It was just this incredibly powerful tool, software.
You could do anything with it.
I got pretty excited about it.
Was not very excited about sitting inside behind a desk.
I really came to the Bay Area for the wind surfing.
And so I quit that job, and I moved to Hawaii, where I think
I had perhaps one of my favorite periods of my life.
I lived sort of in a commune where we were exploring
windsurfing.
It was sort of an early
microcosm of the tech industry.
We were just inventing all kinds of things--
new sails, high aspect sails, new shapes
of boards, new materials.
And all we did was build and test this equipment every day.
It was really tremendous.
And from there, I went and ran engineering for Windsurfing
International.
That was the company that had the patent on the windsurfer,
which also taught me how abused patents can be, because
they tried to control a very rapidly expanding industry
with their patents.
I left that, and all this time, I
continued to study software.
I went back up to the Bay Area and enrolled in a graduate
program in computer science at UC Berkeley.
Berkeley was a pretty happening place at that point.
The grad students had a lab full of brand new Sun
workstations that were based on this Unix, a relatively new
open operating system.
Richard Stallman, who wrote the GPL license,
was hanging out there.
I got to see the first graphical user interface.
And it was just very exciting.
And I knew it's what I wanted to keep doing.
I did still yearn for adventure.
I've always really loved adventure.
So I took a brief interlude and went to use my computer
skills to be the computer expert on a marine archaeology
expedition in Sipan, where we excavated a Spanish galleon
and found gold.
And then I came back to the Bay Area, and I went to work
at a succession of companies in the tech industry.
The first one was Sybase, where I really got hit over
the head with the value of having engineers across
companies work together.
I made friends with an engineer at Sun.
It turned out he was a windsurfer, and we spent a few
months windsurfing and writing software.
And we were able to get sort of an order of magnitude
performance increase in the Sybase system running on Sun.
And I really used that when I built VMware.
All three companies were quite an education in how important
it is to embrace change and always go forward and invest
in the future.
Sybase didn't want to rework their system to support
symmetric multiprocessing, and that's sort of why Oracle
eclipsed them.
I went to work at Tandem that had the world's best database
management system, but it ran on proprietary hardware and
proprietary operating system.
And it was too hard to see the business model for moving to
commodity open systems.
And they sort of sailed into oblivion, getting bought by
Compaq and then by HP.
And then I went to work for SGI, which was a pretty
aggressive tech company at that point in time, and worked
on interactive television, which was a
really exciting project.
But again, as the internet was happening, and it was starting
at SGI, but instead, the founder of SGI, Jim Clark,
left and founded Netscape.
And a number of us left and started companies.
And that's when I finally just decided
to stick with startups.
And so I did two successive smaller startups.
They both had great visions.
I would say they maybe executed too early--
nice financial outcomes.
The first one was streaming video over the internet-- low
bandwidth, because there wasn't much bandwidth.
And the second was internet ad serving, interestingly enough.
At that point, I took a little time off and decided to found
VMware, which was based on some work my husband was doing
at Stanford around virtualization.
And there's a few things I can relate to what we did at
VMware to what I had already learned.
For instance, Sun Microsystems introduced these workstations.
People loved these workstations and then brought
their servers into the companies.
And at VMware, we used the same strategy.
We had a workstation software.
People loved our workstation software.
And then when we came out with the server product, were
pretty quick to adopt it.
Our engineers worked with the hardware vendors.
They worked with the chip vendors.
They worked with the storage vendors.
And then we worked with all of those vendors
to take it to market.
And I'm just a huge believer in
collaboration in the industry.
And it was really effective for VMware, but it was always
hard to convince other companies to trust us and
partner with us.
But I think we always won jointly together.
And then the last thing was just how to adapt, how to
embrace change.
My job changed considerably from zero to the sort of
6,000, 7,000 people the company was when I left.
And it's just recognizing, OK, this isn't working, and
constantly sectioning out parts of my job that I just
didn't have time for anymore and hiring
someone to do those things.
VMware was just a totally fun adventure, building it with
all those people and seeing the impact that it had.
And what I would say is, it's not so important how.
There's just sort of an infinite number
of ways to do things.
But when you see something that you're very interested
in, that you think it can have some real impact, the thing
that's important is to codify that vision, see that vision,
enjoy the adventure of building that vision.
And if you do enjoy it, it makes it fairly easy to be
fearless about it.
So now we're going to shift, and we're going to hear an
amazing talk by a hardware lead at Google.
Jean *** has a PhD In electrical engineering.
In Photonics, she worked in the optical communications and
then came to Google.
She's the hardware lead on Google Glass.
As a board member, I have Google Glass.
I love it.
It's so much more natural than a phone.
And now you get to hear about how she did this.
[APPLAUSE]
JOHANNA WRIGHT: Thank you.
JEAN ***: Hi, everybody Smile.
So I'm very happy to be here with you today.
I'd like to share with you my Glass journey.
It's a three-part story that spans across multiple domains.
And while it is yet unfinished, I hope you share
my enthusiasm for what is yet to come.
Before diving in, I'd actually like to float this number
briefly and plant it in your minds.
It has significance to me and the story.
And in the meantime, please [INAUDIBLE]
the number base that I'm using.
So Glass, like many ideas, started as a blank canvas.
As part of the initial team, we came into the project
largely inexperienced in the field of
head-mounted displays.
Instead, we had the ability to divide and conquer through our
ability to learn and adapt.
While some of us focused on optics, like myself, others
worked on cameras, sensor systems, electronics.
And so we also came in with the fundamental belief that
technology had ripened to the point where we can make a
significant impact and create something of significant use.
And that has led us into the discovery phase and to find
out just what it was that could be done to basically
minimize the barrier to information access and to make
us connect with each other in terms of
accessing our social sphere.
As part of the discovery process, we looked at existing
products in the mobile space and wanted to really
understand where it was that we can make an impact in terms
of form factor.
For example, whether it was bulky and had to fit into our
pocket or carry around a bag for it.
Ease of access-- whether we had to pull it out of our
pocket or a bag to actually engage with it.
And also, ease of use-- whether we were blocked when
we were using the device, or whether we could look straight
ahead and talk with people and not be distracted.
So to push on these pain points, we did a number of
technical experiments.
Here's a helmet-mounted display that did not allow us
to be hands-free or wires-free.
And in the bottom, you can see here is an early optical
experiment to help us understand the technical
complexities in terms of how optics sizes actually impact
the performance and the image quality.
So with these considerations in mind, we dived into
selecting components that we can use and
make a viable solution.
So in the vast array of options, we looked at what it
was we could just reuse and customize.
Or was there something that we had to invent for ourselves?
So we played around with a bunch of pico projectors and
projectors.
We looked at optic components such as lenses and prisms, as
well as interface devices--
touchpads, microphones, speakers.
And underpinning the whole system was electrical
components and board design.
So in this huge selection of choices and huge array of
options, how do we down select?
And so we filtered using two key criteria.
One was power consumption, and the second was weight.
So these two are basically factors in enabling us to
first, wear a system all day, and second, actually allow us
to want to wear a system all day.
So we headed into the second phase of prototyping.
Here are six example generations of glass
prototypes.
Starting at the very top left, we took the lowest hanging
fruit of simply putting mobile phones to the side of the
head, and a pico projector shining directly into the eye
to ride the image.
And so this was a bit bulky, as you can imagine.
It came in at 167 grams.
And we wisely decided that we could lighten the load by
taking the mechanicals off the phone.
And that's our second proto shown right up there in the
middle of top.
And so as you can see, over time, we shifted from using
off-the-shelf components, such as safety shields and frames,
into 3D painting our own frame.
And that's shown here in the third.
And you can also see that we migrated into making our own
optical design architecture, which is something we carry
thorough today.
And as you gradually evolve to the very end, you see that
more and more, we use customized components.
And we look at making our own plastics and metals to get to
where we are today, which is essentially the essence of
what Glass needs to be.
This provides the core and provides a very minimalistic
system that allows us to run around and be happy when we're
playing with the system.
And in addition to prototyping with our hardware, Glass
derives its use from an easy-to-follow UI.
And this is, by definition, actually easy to make.
Along the way, we experimented with a number of different
interaction concepts, for example, head gestures.
That recent "SNL" skit was not too far from our previous
truth, if you've seen it.
Also, we experimented with porting the keyword
functionality to the touchpad.
But we found that it was a bit too complex, even when running
the predictive word mode.
We also tuned the number of lines of text, the font, the
size to basically optimize for readability.
So through all of these things, we found that
minimalizing and stripping down to the very core allowed
for the best use case and experience.
We also found that minor head tilts and voice commands
allowed us for hand-free experience, which is very
important when we're busy dancing or
riding that roller coaster.
On the flip side, having the touchpad and the camera button
allowed us for more quiet modes of interaction.
So with the hardware and software solutions converging
into a viable state, the team actually turned to the
question of production.
It is possible to manually tweak and baby one device to
get it to be close to ideal in terms of cosmetics and
functionality.
However, we like to share Glass more broadly.
And so that, to us, quickly turns into
the question of scale.
How do we build not 1,000, 100,000, but upward towards a
Google of devices?
Layering in automation is key to this.
And that means that not only do we have to build Glass
itself, but we have to build the
infrastructure that builds Glass--
the floor space, the equipment, the
whole kit and caboodle.
And to add a bit more complexity, we'd like to honor
individuality and human preferences.
And that, to us, has meant color options.
And that leads to color complexity.
How do we make sure that on the device itself, part to
part, the colors match?
And how do we make sure that, between
devices, the colors match?
So production requires the solutions to all these
questions and beyond.
Through these three phases of discovery, prototyping, and
production, I have found that Glass is both an innovation
and a reinvention.
By integrating highly compact and new components, we've been
able to extend far beyond [INAUDIBLE]
displays, beyond the last several decades of
individualized movie players, game consoles,
and aircraft systems.
On the other hand, I think that Glass is a way in which
we can examine and develop new fields that we can push beyond
and learn to be better connected to each other, as
well as share a perspective and have access to
information.
And all of this will allow us to better emphasize as people
and synthesize.
So coming back to that number at the very beginning, it's
been exactly, as of today, 1,111 days since I joined.
And this is a picture I would not be able to
take without Glass.
I am paragliding over Coronet Peak in New Zealand.
And just by looking at it, I can recall what it was like to
soar with the birds and to take in the
beauty of the landscape.
I've often been asked what the "aha" moments have been the
project thus far.
And while I have a few, I'm more excited about
what is yet to come.
There is a first here.
For example, barcode, QR code scans, where we can get
[? just time ?] reviews of movies, books that [INAUDIBLE]
were just about to take, but we're not quite sure yet.
Then there's also never getting lost and not bumping
into things while you're looking at directions.
And then there's a whole other level.
Recently one of my colleagues exchanged his wedding vows
while wearing the device.
And I get goosebumps when I imagine him reliving that when
he's old and gray and seeing the reflection of a future
from his wife's eyes.
And then there's also a physics instructor who
recently toured Cern with the device.
And he did a Hangout back to his classroom in Michigan.
And he was riding his bike down the tunnel of a Large
Hadron Collider, showing his classroom just how cool it was
while taking live questions on the spot.
Then there's also another example where Glass can mean
life or death.
It can help you translate to a medical doctor in a foreign
country that you're allergic to penicillin.
So through this process, I think that there's just so
much potential in what is yet to come.
That in pushing towards a new perspective on information
sharing and perspective sharing, we've come upon a new
environment in what Glass can engender.
And when I have time to pause and think about how far we've
come, I feel privileged to be part of such a dynamic team.
Together we're striving forth to bring forward this new
perspective.
And I count you, as developers, as part of this
growing group.
There's just so much potential and positive impact in keeping
in the moment, where information is just at your
fingertips, and knowledge is a twinkle in your eye.
And with that, I look forward to your "aha" moments.
And we are back to discovery.
[APPLAUSE]
JEAN ***: Thanks, everyone.
I'd like to hand it back to Megan, one of my colleagues at
Google X, where she is spearheading an idea for solve
for X to get us to more moonshots.
[APPLAUSE]
MEGAN SMITH: Thank you.
Thank you, Jean.
And first off, thank you to all of our
amazing lightning speakers.
You guys were incredible.
And also to Stephanie and Phoebe and Mimi and Sinead and
Tara and Judith, who helped us put all this together with the
amazing I/O team.
Just quickly, Larry talked about thinking big.
We've been talking about the idea of moonshots--
going 10x instead of 1x.
And so my colleague Astro and I have launched this site and
this goal to have the meme of moonshot thinking be something
that more of us do.
So solve for X is this idea, there's a big
problem in the world.
There's some kind of crazy technology that is there.
It feels like science fiction, or there's a reuse of
something old that we just might be able to use as a
radical solution to solve big problems in the world, be they
self-driving cars or poverty or water or just
more fun for everybody.
And the main thing about this is that it's on the web.
It's open.
And so there's lots of proposals already up, and
we've partnered with the X PRIZE and TED and Arizona
State University, Singularity, this great set of movies from
GE Focus Forward about moonshots
that people are taking.
And so we're just trying to get the conversation going and
really celebrate people who are starting or who are in
process of moonshot.
Because we always celebrate the people who made it.
But we really want to get more about
collaborating and teamwork.
Bill Clinton calls the 21st century the century of
creative collaboration.
And really, the web and all the things we already know
about, we already feel that.
So that's what solve for X is about.
And along those lines, there's an idea that we
have as part of--
my clicker's not working--
about your X Like X is a problem in the world or
something you're passionate about.
So I was really lucky, as a student, to get to take
acoustics at MIT from Professor
Bose, as in Bose Speakers.
He was an extraordinary professor.
And at one point during our classes, he paused, and he
went into a lecture about life.
And one of the key things that he said is, you guys are
really talented.
You're doing great things.
You're going for it.
The key thing now for you is figure out what are you
passionate about?
In some ways, what's your X?
What do you care about?
What do you want to work on?
Because if you find that, you're going to be
unstoppable, and you will do extraordinary things to help
people and make things great in the world.
And I think that the women who we've heard from have found
their X. And I hope that everybody will be
thinking in that way.
I welcome everybody to stay afterwards.
I think Susan has to catch a plane, but
everybody else is here.
There's a bunch of great websites up, like the
makers.com site.
And in fact, today, somebody just told me that Susan's
story is up on the home page of AOL.
So she's one of the Makers, and she's there.
And again, we've launched Makers at Google.
And we hope that other companies and other
organizations will start telling the stories, which
leads me back to visibility.
And let's make people visible.
Help us do it.
And thank you so much for being here.
[APPLAUSE]