I think anything that requires real global breakthroughs requires a degree of intensity and sustained effort that cannot be done part time, so it's something you have to do around the clock, and that doesn't compute with our existing educational system.

Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.

The zero-sum world [the movie The Social Network] portrayed has nothing in common with the Silicon Valley I know, but I suspect it's a pretty accurate portrayal of the dysfunctional relationships that dominate Hollywood.

Most people are average. Founders are not. Founders' traits seem to have an inverse normal distribution to them.

You want to be the last company in a category. Those are the ones that are really valuable.

I think markets are often not thinking on a long-time horizon, I think that our government structurally is doing even less so. When we have a government where we have people who are up for election at most once every six years for a U.S. senator, that's a time horizon that is much shorter than in a market that a company is looking at 10, 15, 20 years which is a time horizon over which a stock price is typically valued.

Twitter is hard to evaluate. They have a lot of potential. It's a horribly mismanaged company — probably a lot of pot-smoking going on there. But it's such a solid franchise it may even work with all that.