By Kim Young-won
Google chief executive Sundar Pichai urged Korean engineering students, would-be entrepreneurs and start-ups to shoot for the moon to achieve innovation.
“Outcomes do not matter as much as people think,” the CEO said in a meeting held at Google’s start-up incubation center Campus Seoul in Gangnam, Seoul, on Tuesday.
“If you look at stories and failures in Silicon Valley, it is important to understand that a journey matters much more than the outcome,” he added.
It was his first visit to Korea since he took the helm of the California-based Internet giant in August as the company restructured to create parent company Alphabet. Pichai visited Seoul last August as senior vice president of the firm.
Google, which has maintained close ties with Seoul-based smartphone-makers Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics, launched its start-up incubation center Campus Seoul in May.
The incubation center in Seoul was the third of its kind in the world following those in London and Tel Aviv.
Mentioning artificial intelligence and machine learning, Pichai said the two emerging technologies would become the mainstays of future computing as they will be applied to a wider range of sectors including personal health care services and self-driving cars.
Evolving from a Web search company to an IT behemoth, Google now serves the “users of scale,” with each of its services, including Google Search, Google Maps, Gmail, YouTube and Android, having more than 1 billion users.
When asked about Google’s plans to ride out the challenges in the fast-changing tech scene for the next decade, the CEO said Google would try to “take them (the products and services) to more fundamental levels and make them more intelligent, helping users in much more meaningful ways.”
(wone0102@heraldcorp.com)