The Guru of Google

Larry Brilliant, the man anointed by Google to give away hundreds of millions of dollars of the company's money in the next few years, admits that he's a deeply flawed human being. "I make a hundred mistakes a day," he says. "I am, and have been, and will continue to be, wrong about almost everything." When Brilliant speaks of his personal failures, he is not talking just about his late-1990s turn as the head of a couple of Silicon Valley companies that vaporized $100 million or so.

And he's not talking just about his failure, which he knows was not his alone, to keep his friend Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead from killing himself with drugs and excess. He's talking about deeper things, like the mismatch between what he wants to do for the world and what he can do for the world. He is talking about our tendency as human beings to be distracted by money, glamour, sex and personal glory.

Such philosophical musings run throughout Brilliant's professional life, often with uncomfortable results. Last February, Fortune magazine invited Brilliant to a round table of top business executives at a swanky restaurant at the foot of Mission Street in San Francisco. The purpose of the dinner, according to one insider, was to "create a high-level salon to give people a chance to share thoughts on what's happening in the tumultuously changing technology and Internet business." Most of the executives were in their midthirties to midforties, venture capitalists and CEOs who had spent their lives surfing the ever-cresting wave of progress in the Valley.