Quotes from Sebastian Thrun

It's sad that we never get trained to leave assumptions behind.

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

I love to throw myself into situations where I don't understand everything yet.

Almost everything interesting hasn't been invented yet.

The idea of 'interview-less hiring' is new and a trend we will see in the changing global job market.

Many students learn best by doing. But because classrooms force the same pace on all students, they limit the degree to which students can truly learn through trial and error. Instead, lectures still force many students to follow material passively and in lockstep pace.

I had been an academic all my life. As academics, you tend to believe the smartest people are in academia.

We need to make education so much fun that students can't help but learn.

There are already robotic journalists. Sure, they aren't very good, but they're getting better faster than human journalists are.

Few ideas work on the first try. Iteration is key to innovation.

The bar to get entry into the labour force is rising faster than people expected, and the ability to stay there is falling.

I have learned, if you give a team a budget, then the team tries to maximise the budget so that they get the same next year.

Top notch Indian employers such as Flipkart have hired Udacity Nanodegree graduates based solely on their performance in our programme, without any in-person interview.

I am a really impatient person who wants to see many issues fixed with solutions that don't yet exist.

You don't lose weight by watching someone else exercise. You don't learn by watching someone else solve problems. It became clear to me that the only way to do online learning effectively is to have students solve problems.

There's almost no problem that can't be solved. That's important as a premise. History has proven it over and over again.

Honestly, the average American spends about 52 minutes a day in commute traffic. And as much as I love driving my car and many people like driving their car, commuting has never been fun for me.

Can we text twice as much while driving, without the guilt? Yes, we can, if only cars will drive themselves.

I ultimately got into robotics because for me, it was the best way to study intelligence.

Larry Page, co-founder of Google, is an unbelievable big thinker, and there was a saying in Google that if you wanted to know the future, go to Larry.

If you look at the ability of a self-driving car to stay in the lane and not to speed and keep a good distance to the car in front of you, it actually does better than me.

I take all day to climb mountains and then spend about 10 minutes at the top admiring the view.

I like to put myself in the most uncomfortable position.

Every time I act on a fear, I feel disappointed in myself. I have a lot of fear. If I can quit all fear in my life and all guilt, then I tend to be much, much more living up to my standards. I've never seen a person fail if they didn't fear failure.