When you are starting a new business you don't want to go after giant markets. You want to go after small markets and take over those markets quickly.

Competition is overrated. In practice it is quite destructive and should be avoided wherever possible. Much better than fighting for scraps in existing markets is to create and own new ones.

Luck is like an atheistic word for God.

One of the reasons I think people are increasingly nervous about U.S. debt is because they think that we are not actually digging ourselves out of the hole, but instead are digging ourselves into a deeper and deeper hole and will not be able to pay it back because we're not actually creating the new technologies that will enable us to pay back and the money somehow is not really being invested in the future or in progress.

In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.

We need more pessimism that the future might be a lot worse, and we need more optimism that the future might be better.

People working on bigger ideas on a more protracted timeline will be more on the stealth side. They aren’t releasing new PR announcements every day. The bigger the secret and the likelier it is that you alone have it, the more time you have to execute. There may be far more people going after hard secrets than we think.