Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture - I'd write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be.
I'm not cynical or bitter in any way. Life's too short; you get ripped off, but if you hold a grudge, it's going to affect you. You take it on the chin, you learn, you try not to make the same mistakes.
Kai-Fu's Innovation Works is the top very-early-stage fund in China. We are proud to be an investor, and hope that IW will help to produce in China companies on the scale of Facebook, Zynga, or Groupon.
But if you can create an honorable livelihood, where you take your skills and use them and you earn a living from it, it gives you a sense of freedom and allows you to balance your life the way you want.
Recognize that it is natural and normal to fear rejection. The only thing wrong with it is if you allow the fear to dominate you so that it holds you back from fulfilling your potential in your business.
When I was a kid, we played a jump rope game called double Dutch - where you had to jump over two ropes swinging in opposite directions. Picking just the right moment to jump in was a practiced art form.
You got to like your work. You have got to like what you are doing, you have got to be doing something worthwhile so you can like it - because it is worthwhile, that it makes a difference, don't you see?
Cartoon Hangover has given us another place we felt we could find the most talented people around the world and give them a chance to make the films they want to make and match it up with their audience.
Ultimately, our ideas about robots are not about robots. The robot is a canvas onto which we project our hopes and our dreams and our fears... they become embodiments of those hopes and dreams and fears.
I even don't dare to watch our stock price, because this is what other people think who you are. I dare not watch it. I think, let the market take care of themselves; we should take care of the business.
Whether it's an ad or organic content, video provides a new creative dimension for storytelling on 'Instagram'. Video lets people convey the power and beauty in a moment through sight, sound, and motion.
For me, it always comes back to the blogger, the author, the designer, the developer. You build software for that core individual person, and then smart organisations adopt it and dumb organisations die.
I had been reading magazines a lot, and I love magazines, and so I was always asking myself why is it that these gorgeous articles just don't translate well to the web? Presentation was one aspect of it.
Humans have always used our intelligence and creativity to improve our existence. After all, we invented the wheel, discovered how to make fire, invented the printing press and found a vaccine for polio.
You'll attract the employees you need if you can explain why your mission is compelling: not why it's important in general, but why you're doing something important that no one else is going to get done.
In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now).
The opportunity to build an enduring product far outweighs the cost of alienating a few users along the way. And the sooner you internalize that trade-off, the faster you'll move along the path to scale.
If you are a big company, a big website, and lots of users come to your website, you will have attacks, and you have to deal with that. It just cannot be a reason to take actions to exit certain markets.
I realized that, after tasting entrepreneurship, I had become unfit for the corporate world. There was no turning back. The only regret I had was having wasted my life in the corporate world for so long.
A founder is the emotional energy aorta of a company. The energy that emanates from a founder attracts people and capital to the endeavor. When that energy goes away, it can feel impossible to do the job.
Because of the fact that we've been through so much, we're going to appreciate every step of being parents. I think we're going to savor it and cherish it and we're going to be the best parents we can be.
I surround myself with inspirational quotations. This easy-to-follow piece of advice has played a huge role in my being able to get past my own fears and insecurities throughout my entrepreneurial career.
If you were offered the opportunity to be TOTALLY happy tomorrow, would you take it? If yes, (and I suspect most of us would say yes) what are you doing TODAY to make tomorrow be a happier day than today?
If the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long!
As entrepreneurs, we must continue to ask ourselves 'What's next?' It takes humility to realize that we don't know everything, not to rest on our laurels and know that we must keep learning and observing.
I've come to learn that my initial investment is more about the person versus the product that I am buying into. I've also learned that I really do enjoy giving worthy people an opportunity of a lifetime.
I was always told yogurt had to be sweet to appeal to Americans. But when people go to Turkey or Greece, within 15 minutes of their return, they start talking about how much they enjoyed the yogurt there.
People sometimes think that a video pops out of my head with no more work than extracting a booger. Every video is a challenge (an exciting one, sure, but a challenge.) Every collaboration is complicated.
President Trump will release America's pent-up energy potential, get rid of foreign oil, trash punitive regulations, create millions of jobs, and develop our most strategic geopolitical weapon: crude oil.
The world is getting so small. Young people are mobile; they want to travel around the world. When you travel around the world, you exchange culture, you want to make friends, you want to exchange things.
Ultimately, what really matters is not just the experiences you have at a young age, but whether or not you are equipped-by your parents, by your genetics, by your education-to survive and deal with them.
Before I left for American University, my mother told me to sign up for everything I could: to take advantage of everything from on-campus lectures to sports and social events to the amazing D.C. culture.
Let's leverage the power of the Web - don't get rid of it, but make the Web beautiful again. We need to give the content room to breathe and give magazine-style advertisements the opportunity to flourish.
I'm a big believer in the Wii. I love the physicality of the Wii controller, and how you can get the feeling of throwing a bowling ball or swinging a golf club. Those are the kinds of games I really like.
I don't normally think of like most successful moments, because like most entrepreneurs, I tend to think that however how high of a mountain I've climbed, I'm always looking at the next mountain to climb.
I'm sure there are managers who have had far greater financial success. But my companies such as easyJet have changed the lives of many people. We haven't just made flights affordable for a lot of people.
[In school] I encountered authority of a different kind than I had ever encountered before, and I did not like it. And they really almost got me. They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me.
You will find that every successful entrepreneur has suffered many setbacks. These entrepreneurs just forget to mention these when they are doing interviews with the 'Wall Street Journal' or Bloomberg TV.
All we're really doing is repeating technologies that were tried 10, 20, 30 years ago... it's just that it was too expensive, too unusable, and we didn't have the enabling technologies to make it possible.
Being a founder is about being so driven to distraction by the world that you want to put something new in it. It's an act of creation, of irreverence, of defiance, of hope, and arguably one of narcissism.
It's now arguably over-written about and over-discussed how hard it is to be an entrepreneur. Of course it's hard. So is being a parent. Let's stop over-congratulating ourselves and let's just do our work.
Your earning ability today is largely dependent upon your knowledge, skill and your ability to combine that knowledge and skill in such a way that you contribute value for which customers are going to pay.
From activism to socialising to starting new bands, 99% of everything that happens on MySpace is fun and positive. But with that many people, theres going to be a few bad apples, which presents challenges.
An entrepreneur needs to know what they need, period. Then they need to find an investor who can build off whatever their weaknesses are - whether that's through money, strategic partnerships or knowledge.
You get that air of satisfaction from achievement. It makes you feel good. We are only here for a very short time, and so you're crazy if you don't go out and try to milk it to the greatest extent you can.
Originally the dream was about traveling and developing a job that would permit me to travel. And I decided to go into street performing because it was a traveling job; it would let me go around the world.
I'm just a purist. What is important in my life is that I can do something that can influence many people and influence China's development. When I am myself, I am relaxed and happy and have a good result.
The web and physical world is plagued with abundance - people need help sorting through all the good and bad stuff out there. The tyranny of choice is causing major psychic pain and frustration for people.
Lots of business owners spend their lives trying to land the whale - the single, massive, brand-name account that will fatten the top line and bestow instant credibility. But big customers make me nervous.
Customers buy Basecamp without ever having to interact with us. If they do have a question, we handle everything via email. We've been in the business of automation. We've never really valued full service.