You can make a lot of mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient.
For me, the most fun is change or growth. There are definitely elements of both that I like. Launching a business is kind of like a motorboat: You can go very quickly and turn fast.
Every few seconds it changes - up an eighth, down an eighth - it's like playing a slot machine. I lose $20 million, I gain $20 million.
If you aren't playing well, the game isn't as much fun. When that happens I tell myself just to go out and play as I did when I was a kid.
First of all, in terms of investment in Internet-related developments, venture capitalists - once burned - are now very cautious and are investing in areas that actually make business sense.
The bottom-up, loosely-coupled, bilateral and multi-stakeholder practices that have created the network of networks we call the Internet allow for a broad range of business models.
In business, every phase of things counts. Companies that just yell out a low price today to win business aren't going to make money in the long term.
Youngsters have got to stop thinking about becoming the next Zuckerberg. It's a trillion-to-one chance. What they need is mater and pater to say, 'Get a job, son.'
There has been a huge advance in technology, which has improved the safety of the cars incredibly, but there are still some heavy crash impacts and in certain circumstances there is still the chance of fire today.
It was a chance encounter with a biotech entrepreneur from Ireland that got me started as an entrepreneur in India, because I partnered this Irish company in setting up India's first biotech company.
The book grew out of the introduction I did for Brady's Gates of Janus. I knew that the writing in that introduction had a better than average chance of being read by people involved in Brady's life - parents of victims, police, Brady himself.
The more we can do to create a better society, that benefits more people, the better chance we have that our society will continue to grow and prosper.
Anybody who thinks that getting a communication from a voter in your district is spam - that guy is pork. Roast pork unless he changes his point of view.
Without television and mass communication, that knowledge wouldn't exist. So I think it actually has the possibility of turning people into more understanding and more empathetic people.
My daughter emails me. When your daughter starts to email you instead of talk to you... It's horrible. You cannot forget human communication.
Most of the time, the things that really change the world exist for something fundamentally selfish and then the world-changing ends up being a side-effect of that.
My theory of change is that there are already millions of people working day in and day out on the ground to deliver on promises on global change. We need to strengthen those institutions and help those people in the field.
The culture at Valve is pretty much crowdsourced. The handbook is a wiki. One of the first things we say to new hires is, 'You have to change something in the handbook.'
Bill Gates is a relative newcomer to the fight against global warming, but he's already shifting the debate over climate change.
The License Raj in India was a time when, to set up an industry, you needed a license. Which made the government an omnipresent and sort of all-pervasive authority.
That's why it has to be a nonprofit, because a nonprofit is required to take monies it receives and use them for the purposes for which it's chartered by the government. It can't be pocketed.
