I think it's very comforting for people to put me in a box. 'Oh, she's a fluffy girlie girl who likes clothes and cupcakes. Oh, but wait, she is spending her weekends doing hardware electronics.'
Communications is the biggest driver of frequency of use of anything. Think about how many times a day you check your email on your phone or text someone or message someone.
I think what's really amazing is that given the scale of the web and getting the compute power we have today, we're starting to see things that appear intelligent but actually aren't semantically intelligent.
Eric Schmidt from Google is one of my favorite mentors. And Eric would always say this very humbling thing that's really true, which is, he would say, 'Good executives confuse themselves when they convince themselves that they actually do things.'
To me, speed is really about convenience.
Really in technology, it's about the people, getting the best people, retaining them, nurturing a creative environment and helping to find a way to innovate.
Search occupies this wonderful moment in a user's day where it doesn't even really break along demographics, right?
I think that there is a generational change, where new generations that have grown up always having access to the internet have a somewhat different view in terms of personal information and what needs to be kept private.
Management is defense. You basically say, 'This is the direction; this is where we're heading,' and then it's my job to get everything else out of the way. All the other things that can become a distraction keep us from executing well. Get those out of the way, because the team ultimately needs to run in that direction and execute well.
I really like even numbers, and I like heavily divisible numbers. Twelve is my lucky number - I just love how divisible it is. I don't like odd numbers, and I really don't like primes. When I turned 37, I put on a strong face, but I was not looking forward to 37. But 37 turned out to be a pretty amazing year.
I was Google's first woman engineer.
I'm a geek.
Geeks are people who love something so much that all the details matter.
I didn't set out to be at the top of technology companies. I'm just geeky and shy, and I like to code.
When you're coming into a company and, you know, have to do a transformation, what you really want to do is look at the company and say, 'Okay, here are the parts that the company does well. How do we get those genes to hyper-express? The genes that are getting in the way, how do you turn those off?'
I think Google should be like a Swiss Army knife: clean, simple, the tool you want to take everywhere.
For many people, Google is the most important tool on the Web.
The turning point for me was realizing that I would learn more at Google, trying to build a company, regardless of whether we failed or succeeded, than I would at any of the other companies I had offers from.
The interesting thing is when you look at what people want to do on their phone, it's mail, weather, check stock quotes and news. That's Yahoo's business. This is a huge opportunity for us because we have the content and all the information people want on their phones.
There are probably industries where gender is more of an issue, but our industry is not one where I think that's relevant.
