Google co-founder Larry Page "felt guilty for wasting time" on Android while it was still a minor side-project for the search giant.
However, Page, who was speaking at TED 2014, reflected he was "stupid" to think this way.
"Most businesses fail because they miss the future," he said.
"[Feeling guilty about Android] was stupid, it was the future," he added.
Page also took the opportunity to slam the NSA for snooping on civilians around the world through various electronic surveillance programmes, including PRISM.
"It is disappointing that the government secretly did this stuff and didn't tell us about it," he said.
"It is not possible to have a democracy if we have to protect our users from the government. The government has done itself a tremendous disservice and we need to have a debate about it," he added.
Nevertheless, Page said the world of open data is inevitable and that people must learn to embrace it, because sharing data can have enormous benefits.
Page, who developed a permanently hoarse voice after a cold 15 years ago, believes if patients consented to sharing their anonymised data with researchers and medical professionals, it could save lives.
"When I lost my voice I thought, wouldn't it be amazing if everyone's medical conditions were available anonymously to medical doctors? You could see what doctors accessed and why, and learn more about conditions you have," he said.
"We'd save 100,000 lives this year. We're not really thinking about the tremendous good that could come from sharing the right information with the right people in the right ways," he added.
Page also gave some insight into what Google intends to do with its recent AI acquisition, DeepMind.
He said the world is still in the early stages of search technology and described computing in its current form as "a mess".
"The computer doesn't know where you are, what you're doing, what you know," he said.
"Looking at search and really trying to understand everything, and trying to make computers not clunky and try to understand you, voice was really important," said Page.
"We started doing machine learning to improve that. We ran machine learning on YouTube and it discovered cats by itself. That's an important concept. What's really amazing about DeepMind is they're learning things in their own supervised way.
"We haven't really been able to do things like that with computers before. It's really exciting. Imagine if this kind of intelligence were thrown at your schedule or your information needs," he added.
