Success Quote by Sergey Brin

At first blush, it sounds like the blandest Silicon Valley mantra: hire “great people” and let the rest take care of itself. That’s exactly why it works. Sergey Brin’s line is a masterclass in corporate understatement, framing Google’s ambitions as simple taste rather than raw power. “We” signals collective modesty, “just” shrinks the scale of the ask, and “great people” stays conveniently undefined. No talk of dominance, data, or disruption. Only talent. The language turns a world-shaping company into a team captain with high standards.

The subtext is more pointed: greatness is positioned as the primary product. In Brin’s universe, if you collect enough smart, driven engineers, innovation becomes inevitable and responsibility becomes diffuse. It’s a way of converting messy questions - about platform effects, labor, privacy, and cultural influence - into an HR problem. Don’t interrogate the machine; just keep feeding it exceptional minds.

Context matters. This is the voice of an era when Google could sell itself as an almost moral upgrade to the web: meritocratic, brainy, lightly utopian. The line flatters recruits (you, too, might be “great”) while asserting a selective gatekeeping ethos that became central to Big Tech’s self-mythology. It’s recruiting copy that doubles as ideology: the company doesn’t need to justify what it builds if it can justify who builds it.