Name: Sergey Brin's advice to Marissa Mayer
Uploaded: 2015-05-19
Duration: 1 min 53 s
Description: Sergey Brin's advice to Marissa Mayer

Being an engineer, I think my tendency is to be more conservative, to be more iterative. Even on innovation and on everything I would rather bring out a very small early product and make it slowly better. And yeah I'd worked with Larry and Sergey, the founders of Google for 13 years when I left. And my last conversation, because now that we're imminent, I was going to have my conversation with Patty. I would end up having that conversation later that day. But, you know, Sergey gave me all kinds of advice and encouragement, said he would miss me but Also side note. Here are my ideas about Yahoo because obviously at Google we studied Yahoo a lot. He went into like immediate minutiae, change the logo, which we did. You know, da da da, all of these sort of things. But right as I left, I had my hand on the door, I said Soreyay I've gotta go and he said Marisa wait. And I turned around and I said. And he looks at me and said, don't forget to be bold. And I actually picture that in my head, every single day that I'm at Yahoo. Which is, if you really want to create something transformational, if you really want to make a difference in your life and other people's lives. Yes, it's always easier to take the safer incremental Choice and to iterate and I think that's sort of more instinctual to me. But Serge knew that probably the thing that I would need the biggest push on as I left was to remember to be bold. And that has helped me in so many different moments, be it to deciding whether or not to acquire Tumblr, deciding what to do with our Alibaba stake. It could have ended up being worth somewhere on the order of $ 30 to 40 billion. And so to have that as the refrain in the back of my head was actually really helpful. So hopefully those two pieces of advice help our mentees.