Sebastian Thrun Quotes

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Sebastian Thrun

Profession : Scientist

Birth : May 14, 1967

I've developed my passion for cars that drive themselves from being stuck in traffic for many, many, many hours of my life. I don't know what it adds up to, but I feel like I've lost a year or two just in traffic. That's big to me. That's a lot of time, a lot of money that I just lose on the road.

Sebastian Thrun

As a child, I spent a lot of time with things like Lego, building trains, cars, complex structures, and I really liked that.

Sebastian Thrun

I always love to be careful with my expectations so that life has pleasant surprises for me.

Sebastian Thrun

Access to high-quality education is way too limited. The United States has the world's most admirable higher education system, and yet it is very restrictive. It's so hard to get into. I never got into it as a student.

Sebastian Thrun

At the end of the day, the true value proposition of education is employment.

Sebastian Thrun

If you focus on the single question of who knows best what students need in the workforce, it's the people already in the workforce. Why not give industry a voice?

Sebastian Thrun

In my son's kindergarten, they're telling us how to get him into Stanford. By their advice, I'm doing everything wrong, because I'm trying to make him happy rather than putting him through as many piano lessons as possible.

Sebastian Thrun

You have to understand that teaching online is different, just like movies are different from the stage and TV is different from radio.

Sebastian Thrun

I am particularly surprised that certain outlets look at pass rates irrespective of student population. As if inner city high school kids are to fare as well as college students.

Sebastian Thrun

Even as a college professor at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford, I saw myself as an entrepreneur, and I went out, took risks, and tried to invent new things, such as participating in the DARPA Grand Challenge and working on self-driving cars.

Sebastian Thrun

I used to tell my graduate students at Stanford, 'Don't worry about what job you have to pick because your job picks you. Let your job pick you. Find something you are passionate about. Then when you are passionate, be persistent. Just keep doing it for a while because progress is always hard work. It never rests in ideas.'

Sebastian Thrun

You are going to fail, and failing, for me, is as joyful as succeeding. Failing means that there is something to learn, and we can improve and do it better next time.

Sebastian Thrun

It's important to celebrate your failures as much as your successes. If you celebrate your failures really well, and if you get to the motto and say, 'Wow, I failed, I tried, I was wrong, I learned something,' then you realize you have no fear, and when your fear goes away, you can move the world.

Sebastian Thrun

Google X is here to do moonshot-type projects. Not just shooting to the moon, but bringing the moon back to Earth.

Sebastian Thrun

I always felt that if countries knew each other better, there would be less war. Often, conflict goes with demonizing other countries and cultures.

Sebastian Thrun

Technology is synonymous for connection with other people.

Sebastian Thrun

We don't look at problems logically, we look at them emotionally. We look at them through the guts. We look at them as if we're doing a high school problem, like what is beautiful, what makes me recognized among my peers. We don't go and think about things. We, as a society, don't wish to engage in rational thought.

Sebastian Thrun

Giving education away for free is a really good idea, but it can't be the future of education. There has to be a business model around it that actually works.

Sebastian Thrun

I'd really love to see a business model for higher education going forward that is actually affordable, that uses modern technology to reach scale and quality and that really reimburses the services rendered in a way that's meaningful to everybody.

Sebastian Thrun

I really believe that we have to work hard to make online education better and better, and eventually it's going to be really great. But like most of these things, it takes time to improve, to understand and to make things really good.

Sebastian Thrun