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00:00The culture at Google was very unusual at the time. Others have emulated it but it's a culture of kind of do what you want a bit where what you want. Sleep in the office if you want. We don't have a dress code. You have a dress code. You have to wear something OK. We had problems where engineers would move in and put cots on the floor. We would explain that you can do anything you want to a Google but you can't live here. You have to have a bed somewhere else. We famously encourage people to bring pets right. And we would have we had lots of rules about the pets. We didn't have any rules about the people. But you know if your pet was over here you had to keep your pet over here and give you another example. Larry Page was looking at our ads just as they came out and he he studied them and he put a big sign on the wall and he he wrote these ads suck and he this one and this one and this one and I was looking at this. I said this is another stupid Google thing right. Nothing's going to happen. We have an ads team. We have a manager we have a plan. So this was Friday afternoon. I come in Monday morning in a completely different set of teams had seen the sign and it invented over the weekend. What today is the underlying ad system of Google and delivered on Monday morning that could not have occurred without such a culture 20 percent time. Have you gone to the businesses that came out of the 20 percent time . Well the most interesting examples are maps. Many of the ad system components most people believe that the 20 percent time is the source of real creativity and now what is a very large company. So one time I think you told me previous occasion that you were out of the office and then you came back to your office and somebody had occupied your office. It's important to remember that at the time Google's culture was seen as very unusual. And I knew this and I was always careful not to commit a faux pas if you will in the in the culture. And so one morning I walk in and my assistant has this look on her face like something bad has happened. And I walk into my office which is eight feet by twelve feet. And here is my new roommate Amit. And he's moved himself in. He's working and so forth . And I didn't know that I had a new roommate. And after all I am the CEO someone should tell me these things. Right. So I said Hello Who are you. Hello I'm Amit and I go OK. And he goes. Nice to meet you. And I said well kind of why are you here. And he goes well your office was not occupied you're never here. And I was in a six person office it was too loud. And I thought what to say to this because this is a career limiting moment. If I say get out of my office you or they're going to fire me or something. So I thought OK. Did you ask permission. And he goes yes I asked my boss. And he said it was a great idea. And I said OK so we sat next to each other and he would program and I would do my work literally next to each other for a year and we became best friends .

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Eric Schmidt on Google's Unique Culture

Alphabet Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt discusses the company's culture. Schmidt speaks in episode five of "The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations." (Source: Bloomberg)

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