Success Quote by Sergey Brin

Brin’s sentence is doing reputational judo: it pretends to nod at the banal hunger for “success” only to pivot toward the harder, more fragile currency of legacy. The adverb “Obviously” is a tell. It waves away the profit motive as if it’s background noise, clearing space for the more flattering self-portrait: innovator, steward, moral actor. That trio - “innovative, trusted and ethical” - reads less like a personal manifesto than a preemptive defense brief, the kind that makes sense when your work sits at the nerve center of information, advertising, and surveillance.

The subtext is Silicon Valley’s recurring dilemma: scale makes impact inevitable, but it also makes harm plausible. Brin isn’t just saying he wants to do good; he’s specifying the terms by which history should grade him. “Looked back on” frames the audience as future judges, not current users. It’s a long-game appeal to legitimacy, especially for a founder whose products became infrastructure: search as gatekeeper, data as asset, algorithms as policy.

The line also reveals how tech leaders borrow the moral vocabulary of public service while operating with private power. “Trusted” is the giveaway word - trust can’t be engineered the way features can, and it’s the first thing to evaporate when platforms feel extractive. By insisting on ethics alongside innovation, Brin is acknowledging that invention alone no longer earns applause; at Google’s scale, the world demands accountability, and the founder wants to be remembered as the rare titan who deserved it.