I remember, as a kid, thinking more about, you know, watching the world go by and being amazed by how both complex but consistent and elegant it was. You know, why, you know, when you put that cold glass of water on the table, it kind of warms up at a very predictable way.
I don't want to think about how many people have thought or still think that I'm crazy.
In some cases, inventions prohibit innovation because we're so caught up in playing with the technology, we forget about the fact that it was supposed to be important.
Some broad themes brought me where I am today. At a very young age, my hobby became thinking and finding connections.
To me, innovations are the wheel, fire, language, movable type. There are not 3 million innovations; there are 3 million inventions.
Whatever the marketplace, if talented people are given resources, they're going to keep driving us to having better, simpler, cheaper solutions to problems.
As a kid, I was less interested in the physical tinkering than thinking about what we would now call the physics, as opposed to the engineering.
My biggest failure is I have too many to talk about.
We're working on ways to make potable water from polluted water, whether it has organics in it or salt from the ocean, at very low energy input.
I consider high-speed data transmission an invention that became a major innovation. It changed the way we all communicate.
Don't be irresponsible in your risks, but as long as the project can fail without it causing the person to fail, keep trying; keep taking the best shots. Learn from them; pick yourself up.
I've never had a business plan. Every project we've ever done was the intersection of somebody with a real need, a real passion to do something, and hustling.
Lots of people ask me for advice as if I somehow have found some easy way to create a solution to a problem, and there's no such thing.
I'm a human entropy producer.
You can't look at the problem and say, 'I want them to do more, better, faster miracles - and not invest in research, not invest in development, and have those miracles delivered to me free.' It's unrealistic.
An innovation is one of those things that society looks at and says, if we make this part of the way we live and work, it will change the way we live and work.
Most of the time you will fail, but you will also occasionally succeed. Those occasional successes make all the hard work and sacrifice worthwhile.
I started realizing that I wasn't so dumb; rather, most people simply didn't know the answers to the questions that I was interested in-or they didn't care.
I'd rather lose my own money than someone else's.
As we move towards 8 or 10 billion people on the planet, there's a little less gold per capita. Each one of us will continue to be fighting over an ever smaller percentage of total resources. This is not a happy thought.
