I have a story about following dreams...

...or maybe more accurately...

...it's a story about finding a path to make those dreams real.

Do you know what it is like to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream?

And you know how if you don't have a pencil and pad by the bed...

...it will be completely gone by the next morning?

I had one of those dreams when I was 23.

When I suddenly woke up, I was thinking,...

...what if we could download the whole Web and just keep the links?

And I grabbed a pen and started writing.

Sometimes, it's important to wake up and stop dreaming.

I spent the middle of that night scribbling out the details...

...and convincing myself it would work.

Soon after, I told my advisor, Terry Winograd,...

...it would take a couple of weeks for me to download the Web.

He nodded knowingly,...

...fully aware it would take much longer but wise enough not to tell me.

The optimism of youth is often underrated.

Amazingly at that time, I had no thoughts of building a search engine.

The idea wasn't even on the radar.

But much later, we happened upon a better way of ranking...

...and we made a really great search engine, and Google was born.

When a really great dream shows up, grab it!