Part of the reason Jeff and Sanjay invented half the tech at Google is that they're incredibly smart. The other part is that they were there very early on, and

Part of the reason Jeff and Sanjay invented half the tech at Google is that they're incredibly smart. The other part is that they were there very early on, and basically have had free reign to spend their time however they want. Of course they spend it all inventing things, which means they output a lot of awesome stuff. Certainly not just any hacker can produce the kind of quality work they do, but I think there are a lot of other very smart people at Google and elsewhere who could be doing similar things if given the same deal. But, most of those other people didn't bet on Google as early as Jeff and Sanjay did, so...