Speculative spending

> It’s actually very difficult to spend meaningful amounts of money, relative to Google’s scale, on things that are speculative.

– [Larry Page](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/10/17/larry-page-google-should-be-thinking-even-bigger-with-its-rd/)

One of my favorite Larry moments was when he used to regularly ask the whole company to work on artificial intelligence [and no one would do it](http://money.cnn.com/2008/04/29/magazines/fortune/larry_page_change_the_world.fortune/index2.htm):

> My own experience within Google is that it’s hard to get people to work on those kinds of things because of the personal risk they feel they’re taking…

> I’ve told the whole company repeatedly I want people to work on artificial intelligence – so we end up with five people working on it. Guess what? That’s not a major expense. There’s a reason we talk about 70/20/10, where 70% of our resources are spent in our core business and 10% end up in unrelated projects, like energy or whatever. [The other 20% goes to projects adjacent to the core business.]

> Actually, it’s a struggle to get it to even be 10%.