With lower start-up costs and a vastly expanded market for online services, the result is a global economy that for the first time will be fully digitally wired - the dream of every cyber-visionary of the early 1990s, finally delivered, a full generation later

There was a point in the late '90s where all the graduating M.B.A.'s wanted to start companies in Silicon Valley, and for the most part they were not actually qualified to do it.

An awful lot of successful technology companies ended up being in a slightly different market than they started out in.

I know where I'm putting my money.

It was a joke, okay? If we thought it would actually be used, we wouldn't have written it!

Skype has a great engineering team, which I like to describe as 'all of Estonia.'

On the back end, software programming tools and Internet-based services make it easy to launch new global software-powered start-ups in many industries - without the need to invest in new infrastructure and train new employees.