In spite of the many risks that Larry Page has taken with Google, what evidence does this news clip provide that he is risk averse?
As president of Google, Larry Page said that the risks that Google has taken has led to hot new applications like Gmail and Google Maps. In 2004, Page set out Google’s risk strategy: Google would do some things that would have only a 10 percent chance of making $1 billion over the long term, but not many people will work those things; 90 percent work on everything else. So that’s not a big risk. Many of Google’s new features come from the riskier investments. Before we began, we thought that Google might fail and we almost didn’t do it. The reason we started Google was probably Stanford’s decision that we could go back and finish our Ph.D.s if we didn’t succeed.