Conversation

We hang on their words because they're (very) rich and famous, but most of them got that way because they are in the top 0.0001% of talent and/or intelligence. That's why a conversation between billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page is worth a few minutes of our time. Excerpts:

LP on why big companies can't solve big problems: What are you doing in the next four years, which I think is about the average tenure of a Fortune 500 CEO. So if you're being measured quarterly-- obviously, it's good to have some pressure so you actually do things, make money and improve things. But I think the four-year horizon for leaders is pretty difficult. It's pretty difficult to solve big problems in four years. I think it's probably pretty easy to do it in 20 years.

VK on automation:There are people replacing farm workers, so you can weed plants and provide plant-by-plant care. People who are doing machines to make hamburgers automatically, all the way up the chain to people who are replacing law clerks or even doctors, psychiatrists, ENT specialists, you name it. So the whole span, from very simple work to very large work, is being replaced in a way that is a little bit scary....But I do wonder if the vast majority of jobs that we know today, more than 50-percent might be replaced by machines that can do that human judgment piece better.

SB on possible changes from self-driving cars: I think the bigger changes can come to the community, the lifestyle, the land use. So much of our land in most cities, about 30 to 50-percent is parking, which is a tremendous waste. Also, the roads themselves, which are both congested and take a lot of space are just unpleasant. So with self-driving cars, you don't really need much in the way of parking, because you don't need one car per person. They just come and get you when you need them.

SB on why Google doesn't become "a health company": Generally, health is just so heavily regulated. It's just a painful business to be in. It's just not necessarily how I want to spend my time. Even though we do have some health projects, and we'll be doing that to a certain extent. But I think the regulatory burden in the U.S. is so high that think it would dissuade a lot of entrepreneurs.

LP: It's a difficult area. I can give you an example. Imagine you had the ability to search people's medical records in the U.S.. Any medical researcher can do it. Maybe they have the names removed. Maybe when the medical researcher searches your data, you get to see which researcher searched it and why. I imagine that would save 10,000 lives in the first year. Just that. That's almost impossible to do because of HIPPA. I do worry that we regulate ourselves out of some really great possibilities that are certainly on the data-mining end.

LP on the difficulties of improving government: the complexity of government increases over time. So, just looking at all our democracies around the world, in modern regulation and in law, we have increases without bounds. I was trying to reduce the complexity in Google. I was thinking, "We're getting to be a bigger company. Let's take our rules and regulations. Let's make sure they stay at 50 pages, so people can actually read it." But the problem that I discovered about that was that by reference, we include the entire law and regulation of the entire world, because we're a multinational company. We operate everywhere. Our employees, what they do affects everything. In some sense, we'd have to read the hundred million pages of law and regulation that are out there.

As they approach middle age, even billionaire once-wunderkind appreciate the wisdom of the Serenity Prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.