There is a sort of genre of optimistic science fiction that I like, and I don't think there is enough of. One of my favourites is a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, 'The City and the Stars.' It's set in this far future on Earth in this somewhat static society and trying to break out.
I suspect Obama did not know he was recording Angela Merkel's cell phones.
Is there something about the gay experience, being gay and the gay experience, that pushes us even more than other people toward competition?
A conventional truth can be important - it's essential to learn elementary mathematics, for example - but it won't give you an edge. It's not a secret.
One of my first investments was $100,000 in a Web-based calendar startup - and I lost every dollar.
An entrepreneur must deal with more uncertainty than a professional with a well-defined role.
If you have a business idea that's extremely easy to copy, that can often become something of a challenge or problem.
I always find myself very distrustful of intense crowd phenomena, and I think those are things that we should always try to question, especially critically.
If you're trying to develop a new drug, that costs you a billion dollars to get through the FDA. If you want to start a software company, you can get started with maybe $100,000.
I believe that people are too complacent about technology.
College gives people learning and also takes away future opportunities by loading the next generation down with debt.
One of my friends started a company in 1997, seven years before Facebook, called SocialNet. And they had all these ideas, and you could be, like, a cat, and I'd be a dog on the Internet, and we'd have this virtual reality, and we would just not be ourselves. That didn't work because reality always works better than any fake version of it.
You will never build a company on the scale of a Facebook or a Google if you sell it along the way.
The millennial generation in the US is the first that has reduced expectations from those of their parents. And I think there is something decadent and declinist about that.
Anti-aging is an extremely under-explored field.
People are spending way too much time thinking about climate change, way too little thinking about AI.
I suspect if people live a lot longer they would be retired for a somewhat longer period of time. Just the financial planning takes on a very different character.
I believe, basically, that individual freedom is very important.
I spend an awful lot of time just thinking about what is going on in the world and talking to people about that. It's probably one of my default social activities, just getting dinners with friends.
If the whole U.S. was like Silicon Valley, we'd be in good shape. But now, the entire U.S. is not driven by technology, is not driven by innovation.
