The interview process tests not what the applicant knows, but how well they can process tricky questions: If you wanted to figure out how many times on average you would have to flip the pages of the Manhattan phone book to find a specific name, how would you approach the problem? If a spider fell to the bottom of a 50-foot well, and each day climbed up 3 feet and slipped back 2, how many days would it take the spider to get out of the well? .

If I'd had some set idea of a finish line, don't you think I would have crossed it years ago?

I'm sorry that we have to have a Washington presence. We thrived during our first 16 years without any of this. I never made a political visit to Washington and we had no people here. It wasn't on our radar screen. We were just making great software.

At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top - I'm afraid that's not quite right.

Energy is actually harder; it takes more time to get a product, but if you do it's a very, very big market and the constraints of doing that in a clean way are more obvious all the time.

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.

The most meaningful way to differentiate your company from your competition, is to do an outstanding job with information.