Larry Page's Speech at University of Michigan
A long time ago, in this cold September of 1962,
there was a Steven's co-op at this very university.
That co-op had a kitchen with a ceiling
that had been cleaned by student volunteers
probably every decade or so.
Picture a college girl named Gloria,
climbing up high on a ladder,
struggling to clean that filthy ceiling.
Standing on the floor,
a young boarder named Carl was admiring the view.
And that's how they met.
They were my parents,
so I suppose you could say
I'm a direct result of that kitchen chemistry experiment,
right here at Michigan.
Everyone in my family went here to Michigan: my brother,
my Mom, my Dad-all of us.
My father's father worked in the Chevy plant in Flint, Michigan.
He was an assembly line worker.
He drove his two children here to Ann Arbor,
and told them: That is where you're going to college.
I know it sounds funny now.
Both of his kids actually did graduate from Michigan.
That was the American dream.
You know what it's like
to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream?
And you know how,
if you don't have a pencil and pad by the bed,
it will be completely gone by the next morning?
Well, I had one of those dreams when I was 23.
When I suddenly woke up, I was thinking:
What if we could download the whole web,
and just keep the links?
And I grabbed a pen and started writing!
Sometimes it's important to wake up and stop dreaming.
I spent the middle of that night scribbling out the details
and convincing myself it would work.
Soon after, I told my advisor, Terry Winograd,
it would take a couple of weeks for me to download the web-
he nodded knowingly,
fully aware it would take much longer
but wise enough not to tell me.
The optimism of youth is often underrated!
Amazingly, at that time,
I have no thoughts building a search engine.
The idea wasn't even on the radar.
But, much later we happened upon a better way of ranking
and we made a really great search engine,
and Google was born.
When a really great dream shows up, grab it!