Google's Larry Page Delivers Powerful Commencement Speech

Google’s co-founder Larry Page gave an inspiring commencement speech at the University of Michigan. He urged the graduating students to follow their dreams however impossible it may look like.

Larry Page has a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan. Thanks to his brilliant success with Google, University of Michigan honored him to be its commencement speaker and gave him an honorary doctor’s degree.

He was very happy to come back to the university where all his family, mother, dad, brother graduated from the same university.

Page thanked the University for giving him the honor to speak.

Larry Page talked about how he came up with the “Google idea” in the middle of the night at the age of 23. He said he had a big dream one night. Instead of forgetting about it the next morning, he woke up and started writing about the concept.

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.

Thanks to his advisor’s encouragement, he decided to keep working on the concept.

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!

Now that dream has become a big reality, Google made $16 billion last year and employs more than 19,000.

Page also talked about his father’s and India’s polio problems, he wants the graduates to find a cure and eradicate polio once for all.

The video has a slight audio glitch for one minute there is no sound between 1:30 and 2:30 minutes into the video. But for a full transcript click this link here.