The challenge here is to design a system where market incentives, including profits and recognition, drive those principles to do more for the poor. I like to call this idea creative capitalism, an approach where governments, businesses, and nonprofits work together to stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or gain recognition, doing work that eases the world's inequities.

There is a certain responsibility that accrued to me when I got to this unexpected position.

The early personal computers were not very powerful so the idea of feeding their program into a small amount of memory requires immense skill.

Take agriculture, where we haven't done much, or sanitation; saying, "okay, we will be able to make a really huge effort there." It really energized the foundation and half of what we've gotten done in this last decade is because Warren [Buffett] trusted us.

We make the future sustainable when we invest in the poor, not when we insist on their suffering.

The pace of progress in biology creates a foundation that naturally gets picked up by the biotech and pharmaceutical industry to solve rich-world diseases. This is attractive science. It's science that people want to work on.

In the same way that when the car got going, people thought it would be an electric car, people thought it would be a steam car.