Last night, I had a conversation with a guy that grew up in Los Angeles and he started his career there realizing that LA consisted of a lot of people who wish for better days or those that were trying to be stars or those that were dreaming of something more. He said that he moved to San Francisco because people are doing something with their ideas. The people in SF that have ideas somehow find a way to apply those dreams and make them into a reality that others can enjoy and use. I said, “so dreamers and doers?” and he agreed. I’m not from LA and haven’t spent a lot of time there and I feel the tech scene in LA is full of doers but maybe that principle doesn’t apply to just tech and I’m just repeating what he said.
I was reading Mashable and their coverage of Larry Page’s commencement speech at University of Michigan. He told a story about how Google started and I relate because I’m the same way. It’s great when you receive validation for how you life your life and turn ideas (dreams) into a reality. Here’s the quote from his speech and the video is embedded below.
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 to write it down, it will be completely gone 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 is 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 to download the web — he nodded knowingly, fully aware it would take much longer but wise enough to not tell me. The optimism of youth is often underrated! Amazingly, I had no thought of building a search engine. The idea wasn’t even on the radar. But, much later we happened upon a better way of ranking webpages to make a really great search engine, and Google was born. When a really great dream shows up, grab it!