Google reaches out to UK VCs

Posted in Investors, Entrepreneurs by David Mott on Thu, 30 Jun 2011

Today Google announced Google+. But its Executive Chairman was not in the Valley or on Wall Street. Instead he was talking to a group of UK tech entrepreneurs and VCs. Some notes from the discussion.

Erich SchmidtGoogle is making focusing on the East London where a tech cluster is emerging with worldclass companies, like Songkick and Tweetdeck. The UK Government is trying to formalise this and has introduced Tech City with a vision of becoming a great global hub.

Eric Schmidt thinks the timing of this is good. ‘This is the beginning of the internet history, not the end’ he said, and then quoted John Gartner: 'History does not feel like history when you are living it.'

Consider the following.

The Web enabled people in the Middle East to communicate outside the region and raise money to support a cause, the Arab Spring. The fact that revolutions have been enabled by the Internet is pretty incredible.

www.703804.com is a Chinese version of wikileaks. You would think that the site would have been banned, but it has not been taken down as the senior leaders in China are focusing on fighting corruption. Governments are starting to see the potential of the Internet.

Moore's law remains true. Your phone will be 30 times cheaper and more powerful in10 years. Incredible advances continue to be made. Recently in Germany, a scientist successfully transferred 26TB of data in under a second. Fast.

But, Eric concedes that there are a lot of challenges which arise form the scale of the internet and the pace of technological progress. ‘If you wire everyone, you find out what they are doing. How do we avoid all the data. Huge amounts of new data are being created. How to handle this and avoid all the 'noise'? Lots of challenges’. He goes on to explain that ‘Transparency can live alongside privacy’.

There are some parallels in history. For example, the invention of the telephone was controversial. Immediately there were concerns about privacy as operators were acused of snooping on private conversations. The solutions were to make it illegal to listen in to private conversations and this was followed by the invention of the automatic switch to remove problem. ‘Yes there are challenges, but there are also technology solutions that can create solutions’.

Eric Schmidt on innovation

A lot of industries don't believe in innovation, they believe in the status quo as that is what they have learned. ‘If you can't say, why not, then you are not playing the innovation game.’

Moore's law has made new things possible by constantly challenging researchers and driving innovation. ‘Once you get used to new technologies, it is hard to go back. You can do more, new things. This is innovation’.

Computers are good at some things, humans are good at others. They will not merge. We are unlikely to see a computer based human brain. But with the Internet, 6 billion people's information is now available and can be shared. ‘Loneliness - that went out of the window long time ago’.

Some good news…Soon the car will drive itself. This is possible now. But it will take time to become reality. When it does, your car will drive itself better than you can, especially when you are drunk!

Google is adding $2bn per quarter to its cash pile, but its policy continues to be not to pay a dividend. Eric Schmidt intends to make acquisitions. Some large are planned, but a lot of them will be buying small teams, often in areas of interest to Google's strategy.

What about the UK? There are lots of reasons for the UK to do really well in the Internet. Education, language, talent pool, etc. But the UK needs to understand failure better. ‘Failure is a key component of success. There is nothing wrong with failure. Same with research. If we knew what research would fail, you would stop doing it’.

Share this page:

0 comments