Success Quote by Eric Schmidt

No one becomes a titan of Silicon Valley by treating the future like a prayer circle. "We weren't here to hope and hang on. We wanted to win" is Eric Schmidt boiling down the difference between a company that survives and a company that conquers: not optimism, but agency. The line rejects the passive Silicon Valley mythology that success is a matter of faith, timing, and benevolent disruption. "Hope and hang on" reads like an investor deck mantra turned inside out - a jab at founders who mistake belief for strategy.

The bluntness is the tell. Schmidt isn't selling inspiration; he's policing expectations. As a professional manager parachuted into Google during its adolescence, his job was to convert brilliant improvisation into repeatable dominance. "We" matters as much as "win": it frames ambition as a collective operating system, not a lone genius narrative. It also normalizes competition in an industry that prefers to describe itself as building tools for everyone, not beating rivals into irrelevance.

There's subtextual defensiveness, too. In tech, "winning" often implies network effects, lock-in, and the quiet violence of scale - outcomes that can clash with the idealistic self-image of engineers. Schmidt's phrasing gives moral permission to be ruthless while sounding like mere realism. It's corporate culture distilled into a single standard: don't endure the market; bend it.