Ev Williams on what he admires most in founders like Reed Hastings, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page

Who do you look up to? Like, who inspires you? I was in this realm, like Reed Hastings, as a CEO, I find very impressive. I will say just go back a little bit. When I got to Google after Blogger, so the original title of my talk, think Big, I was going to reference this. I was basically scrapping and scraping by for many years with Blogger and way before Blogger, and just like always, just kind of looking for change in the couch cushions and trying to figure out how to pay rent the next month. And I was always coming from the scarcity mindset. Even though I was creative and wanting to do big things, I was like, you know, I can't do much. And I think that's a habit that you can get into no matter how many resources you have. And when I think about a commonality of the companies and leaders I admire, it is those who come from, whether they have a bunch of resources or not, they come from a position of confidence and an abundance mindset. And so what I was going to say is, when I got to Google, the thing that most struck me is that they thought so fucking big. And yeah, they were rich and they were smart, but they did that when they started and they're just like, web search. No one indexed the whole Internet before they did. Why wouldn't you index the whole Internet? And I got there, they were working on this thing called Google tv and they were recording all the shows that were being broadcast and no one had ever done. Why wouldn't you record all the shows? Everything they did, why don't we map the whole Earth? It was just like, oh, you can do that. You can think that big. Why don't we scan all the books? It didn't all work, but it was just their approach to everything was just, we can do this better. And sometimes it was arrogant and sometimes it didn't work. But it was just like, that imprinted me a lot. And I still am impressed by Larry and Sergey and a lot of the Google folks who think that way. And so that's part of what I'm impressed with, with Reed and obviously Bezos and some of these people who think that way. That's something I'm still working on.