My father, who grew up picking olives on the Greek island of Lesbos, was a doctor. So my family expected me to become a physician.

The paradigm I want to change is that, you can have a car that is beautiful, manufacturable, affordable, safe, fast, and oh, by the way, does 100 mpg, or its energy equivalent. Why wouldn't you?

If you give people unlimited time and money, they'll do things the same old way. But if they have to achieve the goal in a brief time, they'll either give up or try something new.

If someone is always to blame, if every time something goes wrong someone has to be punished, people quickly stop taking risks. Without risks, there can't be breakthroughs.

If you believe that the developing world deserves the same standards of living that we do in the developed world, then to achieve that, they need resources. They need the metals and the minerals to build the industries and the buildings and so forth, and the energy.

What is grit? Grit is refusing to give up. It's persistence. It's making your own luck.

I founded a launch company called International Microspace when I graduated medical school in 1989. We were trying to build a microsatellite launcher.