Where did the idea for Go come from?

Pike, Thompson and Robert Griesemer of Java HotSpot virtual machine and V8 JavaScript engine fame, decided to make a go of developing a new language out of frustration with the pace of building software. Said Pike:

"In Google we have very large software systems and we spent so long literally waiting for compilations, even though we have distributed compilation and parallelism in all of these tools to help, it can take a very long time to build a program. Even incremental builds can be slow. And we looked at this and realized many of the reasons for that are just fundamental in working in languages like C and C++, and we needed a different approach. We also decided the tools that everybody used were also slow. So we wanted to start from scratch to write the kind of programs we need to write here at Google in a way that the tools could be really efficient and the build cycles could be very short."