Thinking about how disturbingly herdlike people become in so many different contexts - mimetic theory forces you to think about that, which is knowledge that's generally suppressed and hidden. As an investor-entrepreneur, I've always tried to be contrarian, to go against the crowd, to identify opportunities in places where people are not looking.

EVERY MOMENT IN business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.

If you think about basic science or coming up with new theories of mathematics, these are not the kinds of things which are necessarily a well-defined market to pay people.

I think China thinks information technology is less important than we think it is in the US, economically, and more important politically. And so Chinese internet companies are extremely political, they're protected behind the great firewall of China, and investment in Alibaba is good as long as Jack Ma stays in the good graces of the Chinese communist party. Alibaba is largely copying various business models from the US; they have combined some things in interesting new ways, but I think it's fundamentally a business that works because of the political protection you get in China.

Education needs to be rethought. Education does not just happen in college, but it also happens in developing skills which will enable people to contribute to our society as a whole.

I do tend to think that things that have incredibly long time horizons often do involve market failures.

Customers won’t care about any particular technology unless it solves a particular problem in a superior way. And if you can’t monopolize a unique solution for a small market, you’ll be stuck with vicious competition.