Harrison Ford invited me to fly on his private plane to Los Angeles, and he's great to work with. He's really down to earth, and we got to know each other quite well.
The idea behind a dish - the delight and the surprise - makes a difference. Great literature surprises and delights, and provokes us. It isn't just 'Here's the facts - boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.' It's how you tell it.
Americans understand that one of our great national strengths is innovation. Great innovators - Benjamin Franklin, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and others - are household names.
Certainly, we continue to bring in new people. We'll hire, net new, over 4,000 people this year, and attract great people into the company. I'm very bullish about the employee base and what it can accomplish.
The system is that there is no system. That doesn't mean we don't have process. Apple is a very disciplined company, and we have great processes. But that's not what it's about. Process makes you more efficient.
The reason we wouldn't make a seven-inch tablet isn't because we don't want to hit a price point, it's because we don't think you can make a great tablet with a seven-inch screen.
Forty-five years ago, when I was 18, I came to San Francisco by boat and took two weeks to get here. I had a great impression. I think San Francisco is the welcoming gate for people from Asia.
I think that building any product that has a lot of user loyalty is a bit like making a sequel to a great movie or video game - people generally want 'more of the same thing, except better and different.'
But typically for a project like the Mac, the size we had was pretty good. And it has different stages. The team grows as you have to write manuals and do testing... though the Mac had no formal testing.
In a literal sense, even a private company, of course, cannot do everything that it wants without some discussion with government. As a good corporate citizen, Severstal discussed the idea of a merger with Arcelor with the Russian government.
We are really very lucky to have so many fantastic brands. But to grow them we should not be too much in a hurry. They are growing fast, but they have to grow accordingly to the market and to the capacity we have to deliver good products.
In K-12, almost everybody goes to local schools. Universities are a bit different because kids actually do pick the university. The bizarre thing, though, is that the merit of university is actually how good the students going in are: the SAT scores ...
I really believe that if we were from another planet, and we sat down to put our heads together on torture experiments, the concept of sticking a needle into someone and sucking their blood out would probably qualify as a pretty good one.
I like the word 'autopilot' more than I like the word 'self-driving.' 'Self-driving' sounds like it's going to do something you don't want it to do. 'Autopilot' is a good thing to have in planes, and we should have it in cars.
If you are born into poverty, the chances are good that your children will be born into poverty. Find a way to give poor kids the same cognitive stimulus that rich kids receive, and they should end up with the same tools for success.
I suppose I arrived at my charitable commitment largely through guilt. I recognized early on that my good fortune was not due to superior personal character or initiative so much as it was to dumb luck.
Most people who end up being successful have good grades, but it's orthogonal - there's no extra information than if they put together a website and have bunch of fans who love coming and seeing what they're doing.
I know a lot of celebrities who are perfectly happy to put their name to something and then leave it at that because the money is good, but I need to have complete control over how something is going to look if my name is going to be attached to it.
'Restaurant Man' is kind of the story, an unabridged story of what happened in my life, the good bad and ugly. Some people might glean some life lessons. It is honest, not written as a press release.
When a country doesn't have a good economic infrastructure, that harms the country. With Stripe, the idea is that by providing better infrastructure, by linking the Internet economically, by making it easier for these online businesses to exist, it'l...
As a philanthropist, I give away a lot of money every year. Yet I thought there was a higher leverage to come in and create movies and TV shows that were actually able to do some good in the world.
