It is sort of a bit of a caricature of capitalism, that it's always this zero-sum game where you have winners and losers. Silicon Valley, the technology industry at its best, creates a situation where everybody can be a winner.

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.

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.

By the time a student gets to college, he's spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he's ready-for nothing in particular.

Long-term planning is often undervalued by our indefinite short-term world.

If you invest in Microsoft or Oracle, or a number of other companies for that matter, you're fundamentally making a bet that there's going to be no innovation. So an investment in Microsoft is a bet that the operating system is going to stay the same, it won't be replaced by Linux, Google Docs, or a mobile platform like iOS or Android.

There are many more secrets in the world that are waiting to be found. The question of how many secrets exist in our world is roughly equivalent to how many startups people should start.