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To have your parents get divorced at a young age, there's a lot of turbulence. We all grew up together, in some way. It was not idyllic. It was intense, vibrant, sometimes oppressive. I felt I was very much in a world of my own. I didn't meld much in school. I was kind of a loner.
Many employer-employee relationships are built on a lie that starts from the first interaction: neither party automatically conceives of the relationship as something that will last a lifetime, but both interact as if it is. This lie of omission bases the relationship on distrust.
When I was 5 years old, we had nothing in the village. One day, in front of my house, some soldiers in a big Cadillac started to do a picnic. I looked at them like they were coming from the moon. I remember they gave me a box of rice pudding - that, for me, was the American Dream.
My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits were the motivation.
Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it's this veneer - that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
And I sort of look at us as two of the luckiest guys [Bill Gates the other] on the planet because we found what we loved to do and we were at the right place at the right time and we've gotten to go to work every day with super bright people for 30 years and do what we love doing.
Since the market tends to go in the opposite direction of what the majority of people think, I would say 95% of all these people you hear on TV shows are giving you their personal opinion. And personal opinions are almost always worthless … facts and markets are far more reliable.
Science is one of a handful of things that defines us as a very special species. It is amazing how far we have been able to get and how accurate our predictions are. I think understanding how the universe was born is very important. It really gives us a perspective on many things.
I think there's a time to be private and a time to be public, and I think that companies like Facebook and Groupon are basically transformational companies. You don't come across them very often, and I'm pretty sure that they can continue to grow for a long time even being public.
I've been a runner a long time. When I first got into it, I started doing small triathlons in Chicago, and I just did it to get in shape. When I got out of college, I put on a few pounds like everybody does. I did it when I was in my early 20s, but I never really did any long runs.
This (scanning project) is our chance to one-up the Greeks! It is really possible with the technology of today, not tomorrow. We can provide all the works of humankind to all the people of the world. It will be an achievement remembered for all time, like putting a man on the moon.
Truly wealthy people develop the habit of "getting rich slow" rather than "getting rich quick." To assure this, they have two rules with regard to money. Rule number one: Don't lose money. Rule number two: If ever you feel tempted, refer back to rule number one, "don't lose money."
Focus very clearly on a few small things. The purpose of a business is to give someone something that they want. Have a product or service that's really excellent. [...] What can you offer that no one else can offer and will satisfy them at a higher level than what anyone else can?
Write while the heat is in you. The write who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience. To achieve something you've never achieved before, you must become someone you've never been before.
You know how mountains get moved? Everyone who can move a couple, move a couple. Those who can move rocks, move rocks. Those who can move boulders, move boulders. That's how mountains get moved. If every one of us did everything we could, I believe we would be in a different world.
Education, actual learning - it is hard work. It's very personal. Your parents don't teach you anything. Your teachers don't teach you anything. The government doesn't teach you anything. You read it. You don't understand it; you read it again. You break a pencil and read it again.
The art of phlebotomy originated with bloodletting in 1400 B.C., and the modern clinical lab emerged in the 1960s - and it has not fundamentally evolved since then. You go in, sit down, they put a tourniquet on your arm, stick you with a needle, take these tubes and tubes of blood.
We are in a position of financial and social power, and we could be agents of change in our society. Without pretension, I believe we could be a nice little gardener who takes care of the garden, and hopefully our neighbor will do the same. Then, maybe we'll achieve a better world.
I believe that the profits will come from the quality of your creative products. Since the beginning, I've always wanted to develop a self-feeding circle of creative productions: the positive financial returns from one show would be used to develop and create a new show, and so on.
I faced a number of challenges whilst I built Biocon. Initially, I had credibility challenges where I couldn't get banks to fund me; I couldn't recruit people to work for a woman boss. Even in the businesses where I had to procure raw materials, they didn't want to deal with women.
Tiles, the best furniture, fabrics, bath fixtures, bronze - just leaf through any design magazine and you immediately understand they're all 'Made in Italy.' We have the premier opera house in the world, La Scala, and behind the Nobel given to CERN is the research of many Italians.
Where I grew up, we had the three TV networks, maybe two radio stations, no cable TV. We still had a long-distance party line in our neighborhood, so you could listen to all your neighbors' phone calls. We had a very small public library, and the nearest bookstore was an hour away.
I believe every person has the ability to achieve something important, and with that in mind I regard everyone as special. A manager should feel this way about people, but it's an attitude that can't be faked. You've got to be honestly convinced that every human being is important.
Instead of five hundred thousand average algebra teachers, we need one good algebra teacher. We need that teacher to create software, videotape themselves, answer questions, let your computer or the iPad teach algebra... The hallmark of any good technology is that it destroys jobs.
Compared to developed countries, or even to some major emerging countries, burdened by aging populations, financial crises, widening budget deficits, faltering faith in politics and growing social demands, Africa has become the world's last 'New Frontier:' a kind of 'it-continent.'
Engaging in social business is beneficial to a company because it leverages on business competencies to address social issues, involves one-time investment with sustainable results, and produces other positive effects such as employee motivation and improved organizational culture.
Sir Richard Branson is probably the best communicator ever. He was an inspiration for me - contrary to some reports, we've never done business together, although we did discuss an aviation venture very early on. I don't think easyJet competes with Virgin - we're in different areas.
We all have a short period of time on this earth-We probably only have the opportunity to do a few things really great and do them well. None of us has any idea how long we're going to be here nor do I, but my feeling is I've got to accomplish a lot of these things while I'm young.
I told [Bill Gates] I believed every word of what I said but that I should never have said it in public. I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.
The largest newspaper in the United States is only reaching 1 percent of population. We are kind of assuming that 'Wall Street Journal,' 'USA Today,' and other newspapers are very important. Yes, they're extremely important, but only to 1 percent of the population on a daily basis.
I always have my journal with me. It was handmade by a guy at the San Telmo market in Buenos Aires. If you go there he can make you one. It's leather and bronze and I'm able to replace the paper when it runs out. It has a lion on the cover that I say is there to protect my thoughts.
'Flappy Bird' was one of those phenomena. If we could all build one now, we would. Probably a bunch of us are trying. Those kinds of games are interesting. Rumor has it he was making $50,000 a day just from advertising, which is great, especially given the cost of living in Vietnam.
I realised that you can never legislate away from piracy. Laws can definitely help, but it doesn't take away the problem. The only way to solve the problem was to create a service that was better than piracy and at the same time compensates the music industry - that gave us Spotify.
You don't need anyone's approval and in fact, you probably won't get it, so don't even try. Build, release and iterate. Make a list of the features you want to create over the next six months and get going! For small companies, once a week; for larger companies, maybe twice a month.
I want to make sure that our bio-similars capture a huge market share and help cancer patients around the world, which we are already doing in the developing world because we didn't have access to these drugs. Biocon enjoys a large reputation of giving them high-quality cancer drug.
What separates sports from entrepreneurism, however, is that in business we constantly have to overcome undefined and unpredictable challenges. Athletes train for specific events and conditions, whereas entrepreneurs generally have little idea what they will encounter along the way.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it.
At Uber, we say, 'Always be hustling.' Even if you are an introvert and you haven't got hustle in you, you better get a co-founder who does. And if you haven't got enough hustle to find a co-founder who's got hustle, it's going to be tough. You've got to have a little hustle in you.
I know a lot of people love applications on their phone, but I'm like, 'Yeah, I understand the nice experience, but there's something about it that doesn't flow well.' Opening an app, closing it, moving to something else. There's something about the open web that's very free flowing.
The sad fact is that people are poor because they have not yet decided to be rich. People are overweight and unfit because they have not yet decided to be thin and fit. People are inefficient time wasters because they haven't yet decided to be highly productive in everything they do.
As an entrepreneur, I knew that if my company failed, I could always try again. So I often felt that the only real risk of true financial ruin came from the possibility of a serious illness that either exceeded my insurance plans lifetime limits, or was not covered due to rescission.
I'm inspired every day by the great captains of industry and enlightened entrepreneurs like my great-great-grandfather and founder of Fiat, Giovanni Agnelli, who personally knew all his workers and gave so much to this country, or Adriano Olivetti, unique and innovative in every way.
Historically, WordPress has been purely focused on the writing side. However, we're thinking about mobile completely differently, and I think there's a big opportunity to take the community of creators that loves WordPress and deliver an audience to the amazing things they're making.
EVERY MOMENT IN business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.
University administrators are the equivalent of subprime mortgage brokers selling you a story that you should go into debt massively, that it's not a consumption decision, it's an investment decision. Actually, no, it's a bad consumption decision. Most colleges are four-year parties.
There is a sort of genre of optimistic science fiction that I like, and I don't think there is enough of. One of my favourites is a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, 'The City and the Stars.' It's set in this far future on Earth in this somewhat static society and trying to break out.
The death penalty and the arguments it inspires don't only involve ethics, morals, and justice. There are bureaucratic and economic aspects to it as well. All these different aspects commingle in ways that convince me we should take whatever steps we can to abolish the death penalty.
You can get a good handle on a company's culture before you even get inside the building. For example, when companies say, 'We value our employees' but have reserved parking spots, a private cafeteria, and over-the-top offices for the executives, that tells you more than any PR spin.
There were never as many big businesses as people were piling money into in the late 90's or early 2000's. This is really a lesson to institutional investors about how much capital the market can absorb, and it's a 10-year adjustment cycle, and we're only beginning to wake up to that.
I made advances towards multiple women in work-related situations, where it was clearly inappropriate. I put people in compromising and inappropriate situations, and I selfishly took advantage of those situations where I should have known better. My behavior was inexcusable and wrong.