Part of his 2009 commencement speech: 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 adviser, 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 Web pages to make a really great search engine and Google was born. When a really great dream shows up, grab it.
