Everybody has a product to sell—no matter whether you’re an employee, a founder, or an investor. It’s true even if your company consists of just you and your computer. Look around. If you don’t see any salespeople, you’re the salesperson.

If they don't go to law school, bright college graduates head to Wall Street precisely because they have no real plan for their careers.

I think that markets classically fail in cases where there are public goods that provide benefits that people cannot capture. The big debate is how big these public goods are, where they exist, things of that sort.

I think we have a bubble in the US in government bonds, because of the quantitative easing and the negative real interest rates, and to some extent, that increases asset values across the board, including in startups.

If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.

People don't want to believe that technology is broken. Pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology - all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is why.

Now it’s either about technology that doesn’t work or about technology that’s used in bad ways. The anthology of the top twenty-five sci-fi stories in 1970 was, like, ‘Me and my friend the robot went for a walk on the moon,’ and in 2008 it was, like, ‘The galaxy is run by a fundamentalist Islamic confederacy, and there are people who are hunting planets and killing them for fun.’