Google co-founder Larry Page returned to his family's alma mater to share the story of how Google was born from a vivid dream. At age 23, he woke up in the middle of the night thinking: what if we could download the whole web and just keep the links? He grabbed a pen and started writing. Page told his advisor it would take a couple of weeks to download the web. His advisor nodded knowingly, fully aware it would take much longer, but wise enough not to say so. The optimism of youth, Page noted, is often underrated. He had no thought of building a search engine at the time; that idea wasn't even on the radar. But much later, they happened upon a better way of ranking web pages, and Google was born.