The good news about building a company during times like this is that the companies that do succeed are going to be extremely strong and resilient.
Ten to 20 years out, driving your car will be viewed as equivalently immoral as smoking cigarettes around other people is today.
The difference between a vision and a hallucination is that other people can see the vision.
If you think you can execute a previously failed idea, you just have to be able to show that now is the time.
When I talk to entrepreneurs today, I feel like the grandfather who was in the Civil War.
If there’s been a crisis in a market, you don’t tend to have a new crisis in that market until the people who went through the last crisis aren’t in the system anymore.
The advantage of the consumer businesses is they tend to be much broader-based, much larger number of customers, that tend to over time be a lot more predictable. The advantage of the enterprise companies is they are not as subject to consumer trend, fad, behavior.
I enjoy not being a public company.
If you’re the village blacksmith and a model T comes along, you better become a mechanic. People’s lives are better when they get news online versus having to wait for the morning paper. It’s a lot more efficient, a lot more real time, a lot less waste.
China is very entrepreneurial but has no rule of law. Europe has rule of law but isn’t entrepreneurial. Combine rule of law, entrepreneurialism and a generally pro-business policy, and you have Apple.
People tend to think of the web as a way to get information or perhaps as a place to carry out e-commerce. But really, the web is about accessing applications.
At a certain point in your career – I mean, part of the answer is a personal answer, which is that at a certain point in your career, it becomes more satisfying to help entrepreneurs than to be one.
Whatever you’re selling, storage or networking or security, you’re going head to head with the incumbent players.
Newspapers with declining circulations can complain all they want about their readers and even say they have no taste. But you will still go out of business over time. A newspaper is not a public trust – it has a business model that either works or it doesn’t.
I am bullish on the global development. I am bullish on billions of people getting out of poverty.
Innovation doesn’t come from the big company. It never has and never will. Innovation is something new that looks crazy at first glance. It comes from the 19-year-olds and the start-ups that no one’s heard of.
At Microsoft, they all rock back and forth like Gates, they wear the same glasses, they have the same hair style. Maybe they grow them in tanks.
When you’re dealing with machines or anything that you build, it either works or it doesn’t, no matter how good of a salesman you are.
There will be certain points of time when everything collides together and reaches critical mass around a new concept or a new thing that ends up being hugely relevant to a high percentage of people or businesses. But it’s really really hard to predict those. I don’t believe anyone can.
Working for a big company is, I believe, much risker than it looks.