Education needs to be rethought. Education does not just happen in college, but it also happens in developing skills which will enable people to contribute to our society as a whole.
If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now?
People don’t want to believe that technology is broken. Pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology – all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is why.
The value of failure is greatly over-rated. It’s a preposterous myth.
I think that markets classically fail in cases where there are public goods that provide benefits that people cannot capture. The big debate is how big these public goods are, where they exist, things of that sort.
Customers won’t care about any particular technology unless it solves a particular problem in a superior way. And if you can’t monopolize a unique solution for a small market, you’ll be stuck with vicious competition.
My own answer to the contrarian question is that most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more.
Anti-aging is an extremely under-explored field.
Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.
The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.
For Hamlet, greatness means willingness to fight for reasons as thin as an eggshell: anyone would fight for things that matter; true heroes take their personal honor so seriously they will fight for things that don’t matter.
The something of somewhere is mostly just the nothing of nowhere.
We cannot take for granted that the future will be better, and that means we need to work to create it today.
You want to be the last company in a category. Those are the ones that are really valuable.
Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
Luck is like an atheistic word for God...
Beginning with brand rather than substance is dangerous.
Moving first is a tactic, not a goal.
As you craft a plan to expand to adjacent markets, don’t disrupt: Avoid competition as much as possible.
The road doesn’t have to be infinite after all. Take the hidden paths.