Exclusive Interview With Google's Eric Schmidt

Bartiromo: And for a long time, people were saying, `Look, you know, Google
has this incredible campus, and, you know, spending money, and really
showering employees, making sure that people are happy there.' Are you
beginning a new process of managing employee growth right now and managing
expenses more aggressively than you have in the past?

Schmidt: Well, certainly not our benefits, per se. Every day I turn
around, there's some new benefit that we've come up with for our employees.
It's part of our culture; we're happy to do that. And, of course, we have
gross margins to afford it. So higher gross margins is one of the
explanations. We have slowed our head count growth for a couple of reasons,
but the biggest reason is it began to feel like we really didn't have a good
sense of what people were doing. The systems in the company, literally who's
doing what, what are they doing, seemed to lag our ability to hire these great
people. So we slowed it a little bit. But we're still going to hire some
number of thousand people this year.

Bartiromo: Let me--let me go back to something on the DoubleClick
acquisition. Are you seeing any pushback from some of the advertisers who
say, `Look'--the ad agencies who say, `We're already spending a ton of money
on Google. Why do we need to spend more on all this other stuff away from
search?' How are you going to get them to devote more money to display, to
audio, to print and TV ventures, which are--and everything else you're--and
the display ads, obviously.

Schmidt: Because we earn it. Because you can measure it. We never want
people to give us--give us money that we don't earn and that we can't prove
that they--that they--that it really provides value. That's not a good
business for us. So as we enter these markets, we hope to say, `We have the
tools that can show you that if you put this display ad out there, you really
will get the sale.' And we have ideas, we have new research in how to do that
in a closed loop way that is phenomenal. So our innovation model is in very
category of ads, not just text ads, to show real return, real sales, and we
think we can do that. And if we do that, we'll get the business. And if we
can't do it, we shouldn't get the business.

Bartiromo: Right, because it's so measurable. That's why you don't really
see a real dry up in the advertising during a recession.

Schmidt: Which is...

Bartiromo: Would you agree with that?

Schmidt: That's our hope. Our hope is that, again, in a recession,
people would say, `Look, I'm going to put my money where I know my money's
being well spent.' Now, we don't know that we're in a recession, but if we
were, we hope that's what will happen.

Bartiromo: Now, earlier you said, `Look, growth levels have to slow,
obviously.' What's appropriate then? I mean, when you say--I mean, investors
are saying, `Look, is this company insulated? Is it not insulated?' So you
say of course growth levels have to slow. To what?

Schmidt: Well, we don't know, but obviously, we don't plan to a growth
level, we plan to an innovation level. Our idea is you just keep inventing
new stuff, and it grows as quickly as it can. And there's some capacity with
which we can deliver these to customers and that they can adopt them. And, of
course, they have to do work. They have to learn how to use new tools, we
have to talk to them, there's a lot of selling and marketing involved. It
just doesn't happen automatically. Here's a new idea. People have to be
comfortable with it. But once they are, we've found that growth rate is
quite...(unintelligible).

CONTINUED : The Most Innovative Thing Out There Today

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