Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm an inveterate note taker - I scribble all these things down on pieces of paper. I wanted to create some way of organizing all of them.
Before I started a company, I was an employee with a bad attitude. I was always felt like, bosses are stupid, and people weren't well treated.
I tell people that the history of Mozilla and Firefox is so one of a kind that it should not be used - ever - as an example of what's possible.
If you can command a lot of attention, that's what is valuable, and many in the commercial ecology would like to have a piece of that attention.
People are hungry for community. They're hungry for meaning in a society that is oriented around the production and consumption of consumer goods.
On a personal note, I was born in Brooklyn. My folks moved out to Long Island when I was quite young, but once a Brooklynite, always a Brooklynite.
In my case, having knocked around at different jobs helped me get a sense of what the world is actually like and also helped me get out of a cocoon.
Technology advances at exponential rates, and human institutions and societies do not. They adapt at much slower rates. Those gaps get wider and wider.
The Internet, the network of networks, is growing at an exponential pace. It's growing so fast, in fact, nobody really knows how many people use the Internet.
Reversing the escalation of health care costs is going to need more than legislation, yet it can be done without imposing rationing, as critics of reform fear.
There's an admirable belief about the virtues of meritocracy - that the best ideas prove the best results. It's a wrong and misguided belief by well-intentioned people.
Managerial and professional people hadn't really used computers, hadn't sat down at keyboards, until personal computers. Personal computers have a totally different feel.
What is design? It's where you stand with a foot in two worlds - the world of technology and the world of people and human purposes - and you try to bring the two together.
When regulations restricting competition are relaxed, nobody's market share is protected. If telephone companies can offer video programming, cable revenue will surely drop.
I was trying to figure out what to do next, I'd been accumulating ideas for productivity tools - software people could use every day, particularly to help organize their lives.
Few industries have the ability to transform society like tech, yet too few companies are asking the questions or working on the problems that would create meaningful social change.
Even though I had the talent, programming just didn't feel right. I never considered it very seriously. Some people get gratification from bending a machine to their will. I didn't.
The critical thing in developing software is not the program, it's the design. It is translating understanding of user needs into something that can be realized as a computer program.
The computer environment is radically different today. In the 1980s, it was like the Wild West, with a lot of open territory. Now, the cowboys have moved out and the farmers have moved in.
Diversifying our tech talent pool is an imperative for the tech sector. More diverse engineers and entrepreneurs will bring about a new type of innovation that Silicon Valley has yet to see.
Today, in the Internet gold rush, so many people go into dot-com jobs right from school or even before finishing. Their motivation is understandable, but sometimes they just lack experience.
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.
Life in cyberspace seems to be shaping up exactly like Thomas Jefferson would have wanted: founded on the primacy of individual liberty and a commitment to pluralism, diversity, and community.
Successful entrepreneurs develop products that inspire their passion. They have to. It's that passion that gets them through the long, arduous, uncertain and frightening early days of a start-up.
The widespread adoption of broadband and the continued advances in personal computing technology are finally making it possible for the collective creation of an online world on a realistic scale.
Every year we are greeted by a host of new apps that will 'change the way we think' about ordering takeout, 'fundamentally transform' our shoe purchases, or 'revolutionize' the way we edit photos.
I've been around long enough to know that empires come and empires go, and I can't tell how long the Google empire is going to last - but I'm pretty convinced that the answer is less than forever.
StumbleUpon has humanized the Web and mastered a way for people to discover online content by incorporating an individual's personal preferences and recommendations of friends and like-minded people.
When new technology in the classroom starts happening, some people get very excited and think of it as a panacea. It attracts very high amounts of money; it raises expectations, and those expectations aren't met.
I give Bill Gates an A for vision because, as a business person and a strategist, he's brilliant. His flaw is that his view is not informed by a humanistic or compassionate vision of how to make computers work for people.
There's a great deal of suspicion and misunderstanding about IT among practicing doctors. One hears things like, 'I don't want to be turned into a data entry clerk, and I don't want some machine between me and my patients.'
It's illegitimate to talk about a post-scarcity Utopia without talking about questions of distribution. There have always been these Utopian predictions - 'electricity too cheap to meter' was the atomic promise of the 1950s.
It is possible to take a population of students who are failing and whose schools are failing them, who are being written off as not being college material, and if they have the right support, they can all go to college and succeed.
For people who know both New York and the Bay Area, it is a complement to say that Oakland is San Francisco's Brooklyn. It's a complement both to Oakland and to Brooklyn. And, if you look at Brooklyn, Brooklyn is hot; Brooklyn is cool.
I'm fascinated by management and organizations: how organizations get things done and how successful organizations are built and maintained, how they evolve as they grow from start-ups to small companies to medium companies to big companies.
Fundly is at the dynamic intersection of high-growth technology startups, social entrepreneurship, and the exploding world of social media. Kapor Capital is proud to back this passionate team, their product, and Fundly's impressive customer base.
We've already gotten a significant grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and a university consortium. I think the whole sector of Foundations, potentially with government support, is promising - more than promising, I think, it's substantial.
The culmination of all of that was the decision to start a company, which became Lotus, to do a product, which became 1-2-3. By the time I reached that point it had been four years, and it felt like a lifetime, but really it was kind of evolutionary.
We have a responsibility to give people opportunities to do what they can do. It's a fundamental tenet of democratic society. Libertarians who believe in a completely minimalist state, and don't feel we have that responsibility, are harming humanity.
Startups, in some sense, have gotten so easy to start that we are confusing two things. And what we are confusing, often, is, 'How far can you get in your first day of travel?' with, 'How long it is going to take to get up to the top of the mountain?'
There are a lot of similarities between cyberspace and the frontier. It's pretty raw and primitive. I mean, you have to churn your own butter in cyberspace. You can't go down to the 7-Eleven and buy a stick of butter because it's not that well developed.
Well, I had a lot of help from my father with the soldering and so on, and he was very good at math and was fascinated with computers, and so I was fortunate enough to have a bunch of exposure going all the way back to high school - this was in the 1960s.
I originally invested in Dropcam because I foresaw what the company and their products could do for consumers and the industry. I've been deeply impressed with what they've done in such little time, and I'm confident that they'll continue to exceed my expectations.
The main languages out of which web applications are built - whether it's Perl or Python or PHP or any of the other languages - those are all open source languages. So the infrastructure of the web is open source... the web as we know it is completely dependent on open source.
A typical medical practice is like an old-fashioned business which keeps all of its records on paper. It can probably track down any individual transaction if it needs to, but it's basically helpless when it comes to overall measurements of performance. And that's the big problem.
It became clear to me by 1984 that Microsoft was likely going to be the big winner in the PC software apps and operating system category, partly because of the dynamics of owning and controlling the operating system: that gave you enormous power, and I came to see Bill Gates was fierce competitor.
In an economy where more and more value is in information - is in the bits, not the atoms, where bits can be copied essentially for free - any time you have that situation, economic schemes that rely on existing models of intellectual property laws for protection are going to do less and less well.
Life in cyberspace is often conducted in primitive frontier conditions, but it is a life which, at its best, is more egalitarian than elitist and more decentralized than hierarchical. It serves individuals and communities, not mass audiences, and it is extraordinarily multi-faceted in the purposes to which it is put.
Physicians today, as human beings, are not exempt from the perverse economic pressures created by fee-for-service regimes to see more patients for shorter appointments and order more tests and procedures. If the incentives were changed to pay to foster better health outcomes, I am convinced physician behavior would change over time.