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.

What valuable company is nobody building?

The debt austerity would not be problems if we had technological progress. If you doubled the debt in the U.S., and the size of the economy doubled because of technological progress and growth, the two would roughly cancel out and it would all be a totally manageable situation.

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.

You'll attract the employees you need if you can explain why your mission is compelling: not why it's important in general, but why you're doing something important that no one else is going to get done.

Every university…seem[s] to reassure you that ‘it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it well.’ That is completely false. It does matter what you do. You should focus relentlessly at something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.

If you have technological progress, that will encourage more capitalist system. On the other hand, if you don't, if things are stalled, you end up with much more of a zero sum type thing, where there's no progress and basically everybody's gain is somebody else's loss.