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.Collection: Attitude
Computers ought to help people find their own best path through lots of textual information.Collection: Computers
Architecture is politics.Collection: Architecture
If information wants to be free, then that's true everywhere, not just in information technology.Collection: Technology
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.Collection: Computers
Inside every working anarchy, there's an Old Boy Network.Collection: Business
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.Collection: Medical
Technology advances at exponential rates, and human institutions and societies do not. They adapt at much slower rates. Those gaps get wider and wider.Collection: Technology
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.Collection: Design
If you look at the history of other movements, whether Civil Rights or environmental rights, these are all decades-long undertakings.Collection: Environmental
Human intelligence is a marvelous, subtle, and poorly understood phenomenon. There is no danger of duplicating it anytime soon.Collection: Intelligence
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.Collection: Computers
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.Collection: Computers
Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.Collection: Technology
Hackers are seen as shadowy figures with superhuman powers that threaten civilization.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
The more you eliminate the inefficient use of information, the better it is for productivity.
The kind of products you envision as an entrepreneur is a function of your life experience.
If you go back to the '50s and '60s... there was zero tech in S.F. It was all in the Valley... and it crept northward in early 2000s.
No, my family is Russian, Georgian, via Ellis Island.
I actually built a tiny computer as a junior high school project.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was not a student of Wall Street, but I was a quick study.
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.
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?'
Oakland's time is coming. In fact, Oakland's time is already here. Tech is coming to Oakland, and it's terribly exciting.
I had no fear of speaking to large audiences.
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.
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.
I'd been a great angel investor, but professional venture capital was clearly not the right thing for me.
I'd always wanted to live in San Francisco, and my circumstances never permitted it. I'm so happy I made the move.
Beware angel investors: they can be disruptive.
People are hungry for community. They're hungry for meaning in a society that is oriented around the production and consumption of consumer goods.
If only I'd stayed on the West Coast, I might have made something of myself.
My history is to find the next big thing early.
Everyone has a subconscious and automatic preference of this over that. Once you're aware of that, you can take steps to change.
I soon realized that the best thing I could do for the profession of human services was to get out of it.
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.
Bulletin boards are sort of the garage bands of cyberspace.
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.
The accomplishment of open source is that it is the back end of the web, the invisible part, the part that you don't see as a user.
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.
I don't think Silicon Valley understands the power of Wikipedia, how it works, or the opportunities it represents.