Sal Khan chats with Google CEO Sundar Pichai

It's huge treat to have Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, here. And you know I will give a little bit of a preamble more than I normally do. I think a lot of the team knows this, but it's always worth reminding the team we wouldn't be here on many levels if it wasn't for Google. Clearly, you know Khan Academy certainly got a first attention on YouTube. I don't think I would have been able to do what I did had YouTube not existed when it did.

Some of you all might not realize, but in 2005 we were on Java servlet web hosting, and that wasn't scaling. So in January, I was okay, there's this thing called App Engine, and we went on there and we have been ever since. So even from a platform point of view, but most importantly, in the early days when we were kind of not even clear that we could become an organization, Google and Google.org was one of the very first to step up and allow us to become a real organization. Ever since then, through LearnStorm and even existing grants, they are continuing to support this.

So first of all, just thank you. A lot of people are behind it, and I'm glad we're part of something that's great, so thank you. So let's just start. You know, you're not new to the job as CEO of Google anymore. It's been almost two years now, a year—I haven't counted—but something like that. So what's your view of the world? What are you hoping to do at Google?

First of all, thanks for having me here. You know, I have to confess there are times when I have to speak at things like this and on topics which I don't know much about. I may sneak into Khan Academy and see a video here and there, so I'm a user of the platform as well. You know, from a Google standpoint, in some ways, I think we share a lot of what your mission is as well. Our stated mission is to bring information and knowledge for everyone. We take the "for everyone" part seriously.

We have been working on it for a while, but you know, we again have this renewed sense of excitement within the company because of machine learning. We think over the next 10 years we can take a bunch of stuff we've been doing to a different level. We are still in the early days. You know, computers are just beginning to kind of get better at things like speech, engine, image recognition. That's what a lot of the excitement is about when we say we are making a lot of progress in machine learning.

Using that thoughtfully across everything we do and taking things to the next level is a big part of our focus. Closely related to that is, you know, building computing platforms for everyone. I think, you know, I'm personally very inspired by the old PC project at the time, you know, getting. I think that notion of being able to make computing accessible to everyone is very near and dear to a lot of us, particularly to me. You know, I didn't have access to computing growing up. I literally mainly got it at the end of my college.

I have a very discrete sense of how it changed what I was able to understand and what I was able to get out of it. So I think we are in this part where it's very exciting to see computing, which historically worked for a small percentage of the world, now is that penetration is getting better and better. You know, mobile is at 3 billion users now, and I can see science—we can scale it beyond that. So we are beat with platforms like Chrome and Android. We've always cared about making computing more affordable and reaching everyone.

I think there are others working on connectivity as well, so the combination of all that, I think we can get to a stage where pretty much sometime within the next 10 years, you know, for most people in the world, I think you'll be able to give them something which, with connectivity, you know, you have access to everything in your hands. So I think that's a pretty profound transformation.

And it serves us well and enables us to do well as a company too. I mean, wahoo! Haha! You know, as we go through this, so a lot of it is, you know, actually viewing these advances in machine learning and AI as an opportunity to bring it in an equal way to everyone. I think that that's largely what excites me, and it's incredible. I mean, Google is one of the few organizations in the world that are in the position to do this.

But on top of kind of all the, I would say, deep technical work that y'all are doing, education—I've heard—is a big interest area for you. Google has several initiatives in education, some of which we've been interfacing with. What's your view of Google's role in education, either globally or in the U.S.?

I can culturally—we've always identified in a pretty deep way with Academy or with education in general, and so we see this as a big area where, you know, I think, you know, as I said, our mission is complementary to it, and so we want to play a role to the extent we can. We've been fortunate in the sense that, you know, our products have gotten very popular in educational institutions all the way from K through 12, largely with Google Apps first.

We have done other things like Classroom and Chromebooks and so on. We'll also do, you know, not-for-profit initiatives in education as well. So we are investing more, and I think when I think about it, you know, education is obviously—most of you here understand better than me—but it's complex. We just think technology can play an enabling part. You know, it's talking with Sal about this a bit, but you know, when we look at it—when I look at approaching many problems in the context of Google, we try to do things we try to iterate now.

We see what works or doesn't work and then, you know, we do these things that way. That concept is hard to do in education, rightfully so, because you don't want to get things wrong. But I think it's important to figure out how to innovate more, and in that context, I think technology can play a part. So to play a part in hopefully helping people figure out what—many things to try when things work, be able to do more of it, scale it more.

You know, how do you bring educators and children all in a virtuous cycle together, which is what you all are working on? From a standpoint of providing technology, but a lot of people are interested in Google beyond just the products we build or the technology we provide. You know, Google is passionate; they want to volunteer a lot in education. For google.org, it's one of the important pillars on which we invest. So I think that's what makes it a bigger thing for us.

Yeah, and you know, here, kind of how you mentioned, you dabble a little bit. You're just telling me your daughter uses it, yeah, through her school sometimes. Where do you see ways that we can work together, how we can support each other's goals? It's been interesting to see which—China—from the first time I saw Khan Academy to actually, you know, my daughter, you know, I see her sometimes come, and she has homework, but it's part of like doing it in Khan Academy.

I have to consider why Lena or—and make sure she is not just using YouTube generally. Like that outside of that small thing, yep, it's pretty amazing to see that. You know, teachers are using it, and it's been great to see. So you two are upset when your children are hooked on YouTube? Oh, it's a sign that something's working. Yeah, no, it's amazing the kind of stuff you learn on YouTube.

I almost miss it because they don't come to me with any questions. So, like, you know, they kind of figured out—they get their answers from YouTube, and later I'm like, oh, you could have asked me; maybe I would have known the answer! Like, you know, in terms of us working together, you know, I do mean it when I say we think of our role as enablers. You know, we participate in many ecosystems, and in that way, we approach it.

But I do think there are areas where we care about, you know—for you know, when I mentioned that for everyone part, I think it's important. We think one of the things that attracted me to Google and, you know, that Google search worked globally, right? And you know, it's kind of like if you had access to computing and connectivity—and that's a big if—but if you had access to computing and connectivity, you really didn't matter where you were accessing Google from. You kind of got the same thing, and that equality of access, I think, is important.

So hopefully, you know, I'm interested in, you know, our last round of efforts. You know, we were excited about your efforts to localize what you're doing more broadly. I think that's important to us, so getting these things to work even in places like Brazil, Indonesia, India, and, like, how do you scale it up? I think is something we deeply care about, and if there's a direction we can play a part in that, we want to do that.

You know, the other part is, I think, given we are working on things like not just our products, Classroom, you know, detection via feedback on how we can evolve what we do better, you know, to make all this work more effectively for teachers and students from for you all. You know, we are open to trading our products that way. You were mentioning that you need a plug in the Classroom and stuff; that's, you know, encouraging to hear.

We had also, in the early days of setting up teams internally at Google to do other things, which I'm not going to do with our products on education. So hopefully, we can align better and make some of them more complementary. Yeah, and just, you know, we importantly—we could talk for hours, but this is kind of an ending question. What advice—you know you've seen Google grow from a relatively small stage to now it's this thing that is, you know, actually delivering on its mission.

We have a huge mission: the free world-class education for anyone, anywhere. And we like to think we're already making a dent in that, but we are serious about delivering. What advice do you have to us as, you know, a relatively small team as we try to go and try to do that over the next five or ten years?

You know, you're doing this party, but you know, I wouldn't underestimate, you know, the change you do at the tip of the tree, how fast it can slow down. And you know, I think you've already—you know, the fact that you guys are approaching a space like education and have shown that you can innovate in the context of the space, I think that thing is a big thing. You know, we take it for granted being in technology companies—like anytime we face a problem, we think we can break it.

We fail, by the way, a lot, but you know, at least our attitude is that, you know, you can approach anything, however complex it is, with an engineering mindset. You know, you can try and understand how, you know, what are the various components of it, how you can iterate and make things better. It's kind of the default assumption a lot of us have, but I think it doesn't always translate to, you know, things like—you know, many outside things—be it education or healthcare. You know, when I deal with this, I, you know, realize, well, we take this for granted, and like that's not how it works.

I don't mean in a negative way; there are good reasons why those systems are the way they are. And you know, the cost of a mistake is exceptionally high in something like healthcare and so on. But I think figuring out how to, you know, innovate, you know, it’s just like I think an imperative. And I think—you know, I think hopefully you continue pushing what you guys are doing already, and I think you've changed already the conversation. I'm amazed at where all your name comes up.

So, you know, figuring out how to do that—I think because for every one thing you do, there is a multiplicative effect of how many other people get excited by it. So, you know, a hundred people organization here, effectively over time you're motivating thousands and tens of thousands of people to change their approaches and so on. I think I've always been, you know, the leveraged effect on top of a platform is always very counterintuitive to see.

Like, I can give thousands of examples—for the fact that everybody starts using phones and phones have GPS and location on them, you know, you assume that it would change transportation one day, but you kind of then, like, see, you know, ride-sharing take off and things happen. Like, you know, none of the people who were working on phones ever had any remote sense that people would use phones and hence because of that, how you get the car changes, right?

So anything you do at a platform level has nonlinear effects, you know, extraordinarily leveraged ways to change things. I had a lot of experience with this personally early on when we were working on the web. You know, a few people working on browsers made changes in the platforms so that you can asynchronously, you know—what is later called as Ajax—so that, for example, if you are doing email, just because you want to change something in the email or what you're seeing, you didn't have to reload the entire page, right?

And that small change led to things like Google Maps—you can scroll, you know, you can drag and look at maps, and you know how maybe YouTube works and how literally everything became interactive on the web. So anytime I think you work at a platform level, like you end up impacting a lot more over time than you think. So I think trying to platform eyes what you do, you know, so that, you know, others can take it, use it over time, rethink it, you know, I think is very, very powerful.

So hopefully, you know, hopefully, that's the way you impact a lot of how education works as well. Also, thank you so much for today, and let's do this again! All right, thank you guys! [Applause]