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My smartest move was joining Google. It wasn't obvious at the time that it would be a good decision. A lot of people, many of my friends, advised me against it.

As a big user of public libraries, I deplore the cutbacks they have had to sustain.

Google is fascinating, and the book isn't finished. I'm creating, living, building, and writing those chapters.

An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.

There's this open question of what Google is going to be a decade or more from now. Google X isn't the only answer to that question, but it was built as a place to do some of the exploration to find some great new problems for Google to tackle.

We don't take on Google Glass or the self-driving car project or Project Loon unless we think that on a risk-adjusted basis, it's worth Google's money to do it.

I wish there were a hundred services with which I could easily look at such a book; it would have saved me a lot of time, and it would have spared Google a tremendous amount of effort.

Libraries are at a cultural crossroads. Some proffer that libraries as we know them may go away altogether, ironic victims of the information age where Google has subverted Dewey decimal and researchers can access anything on a handheld device. Who needs to venture deep into the stacks when answers are but a click away?

In the early days, I promoted the idea of spending time in libraries to gain facts that other investors didn't have. Not many people did that kind of research, so it worked.

If Google teaches you anything, it's that small ideas can be big.