The dynamic with social is you tend not to have products with 30% market share. It's all or nothing. Email works because we have open standards that let you communicate across any email client.
I tend to not discriminate when it comes to people I can learn from. Basically, if someone has built a meaningful business in software, technology or media, faced disruption and adversity, and overcame underdog status, I want to know how they did it.
I actually don't invest in anything that is social, mobile, deals or ad networks simply because those are areas where there are so many players and so many other smart people in the space, I feel like I don't have a competitive advantage. So I tend to go after things that are e-commerce, like healthcare.
I knew that I tend to always gravitate to the indie side of things.
As a kid, I was always pretending to score the goal in the FA Cup final, and I managed to live my dream.
When I was in school with my friends and stuff, you always used to put yourself in the situation of footballers of the time and pretend to be them.
I used to pretend to be Ryan Giggs.
The biggest misconception people have about me is that when they see how young I am, they think, 'Oh, this guy must have always wanted to be in politics; his parents must have been politically connected.' I'm a finance major and always intended to go into business.
Your belief system tends to be a function of how you were raised. Being raised in the Midwest and in a relatively conservative household, my views were shaped by my upbringing, by my Christian faith.
But HBO is less interested in how many people are watching than in how much the people who are watching are liking the show. They didn't set up their business model to make writers happy. It's just a nice unintended consequence.
