You've got to be willing to read other people's code, then write your own, then have other people review your code.

I don't think I would have spent time learning about the immune system if understanding vaccines weren't something I considered very important.

If I was down to the last dollar of my marketing budget I'd spend it on PR!

Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put three man-years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product, and distributing it for free?

And knowledge management is a means, not an end.

Software is definitely engineering. It's different in that we take on novel tasks every time. It's not like building a certain bridge that is virtually identical to some previous bridge or some previous building.

In the philanthropy game, you're going for different outcomes: saving childhood lives, having kids grow up - because they don't have malnutrition or disease - that they achieve their full potential. We take for Warren [Buffett] things that, because he's very intelligent about the world but doesn't get to go out in Africa and see what we see, we've taken and say to him where we stand and it's basically a very positive report that his gift has made a phenomenal difference.