Facebook can be an accumulation of different intelligences.
I'm just focused on exploring new opportunities.
I have invested in four social networks. More than any other.
Social is a better way to interact with digital world. It is better than search. Implications for... everything. Total change.
We've only made three investments: Facebook, Groupon, and Zynga.
My background is in theoretical physics, and it's something very close to my heart.
Facebook can be an accumulation of different intelligences. Ask a question, translated into many languages and somebody, somewhere in the world, will have an answer.
When you have a few billion people connected with screens, not voice... screens are important. You can transmit a thousand times more information.
Story was that human civilization started to develop with first social network. Emerged where population concentration was high. Helped propel to where we are now. Facebook is next step of creating a huge human brain to embrace hundreds of million, possibly billions of people.
The company that creates one global social graph will be very important going forward. It will be Facebook, with maybe 2-3 local social networks able to sustain competition long term.
Russia is one of the places where significant presence of social networks are driven by domestic players right now.
We monitor close to 50 companies globally that can be potential investment opportunities. I'd like to see DST as a significant global investment company in the Internet arena.
You know among people who kind of travel a lot and have exposure to the United States and some other countries, they do have accounts, but you know, Russia is not exactly the place with multiple language skills so local networks kind of have an edge.
The problem is that modern fundamental physics is so far from you and me. The mathematics has become so much more complicated that you need at least 10 years to understand it. Fundamental physics has advanced so far from the understanding of most people that there is really a big disconnect.
One of the companies that we've invested in is called Facebook. In only two years, between 2009 and 2011, the information exchanged between people increased 28 times. And that cannot be explained by new people joining Facebook.
There is huge demand for artificial intelligence technologies.
You have to travel globally today to know what's going on and maintain an edge.
I think there's a time to be private and a time to be public, and I think that companies like Facebook and Groupon are basically transformational companies. You don't come across them very often, and I'm pretty sure that they can continue to grow for a long time even being public.
I'm trying to learn from various corners of the world.
