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.

Brilliant doesn't fit this mold. For one thing, he's sixty-three. For another, he's not sushi-sleek: He's a big man with a Buddha-like belly, silvery goatee and patient eyes. And for another, he's not an engineer or an MBA: He's a doctor. Not a typical doctor, for sure — in the Sixties, he dropped acid with Woodstock impresario Wavy Gravy; in the Seventies, he delivered a baby during the Native American occupation of Alcatraz, followed spiritual seeker Ram Dass to an ashram in the Himalayas and helped eradicate smallpox in India; in the Eighties, he led an effort to restore sight to blind people in the developing world and co-founded the Well, a pioneering online forum; in the Nineties, he flopped around as an entrepreneur and watched Star Trek reruns. Most of all, he knew suffering. During the smallpox scourge in India, babies died in his arms. He visited towns where the rivers were dammed up by dead bodies. That kind of experience changes your perspective on the world. Among Brilliant's favorite quotes is from Buddha: "Every person will suffer and die."

Acute awareness of suffering and death, however, has not turned Brilliant into another disillusioned ex-hippie wondering where all the flowers have gone. Nor has it left him with a grudge against the cruel nature of the universe. Instead, it has turned him into a hard-bitten optimist. He's seen the worst the world can do, but he's also seen how mankind can triumph. Global warming? No problem. Mass starvation? Let's figure out how to feed the world. In Brilliant's view, what the planet needs today is not simply the invention of a cleaner way to generate energy or better schools in developing nations but a transformation of human consciousness.