The opening quote in the book appeared in a presentation Rob Pike gave at the 2012 Splash conference:
Go is a programming language designed by Google to help solve Google’s problems,
and Google has big problems. [...]
The language was designed by and for people who write – and read and debug and
maintain – large software systems.Two years before, at OSCON 2010, in his public static void talk, he had
explained his observations on existing languages, and how they had led him to
create Go.