We have technology, finally, that for the first time in human history allows people to really maintain rich connections with much larger numbers of people.

In order to access private capital, you have to provide competitive return on investment. In order to give competitive returns to investors, you've got to operate on a profitable basis and be thinking of yourself as a business.

I've been asked before, "Who are your heroes?" and these types of questions. I always find it hard to identify a single person or a single book or this sort of thing. I've always been forward looking. I was raised with the notion that you can do pretty much anything you want. You're able to accomplish anything you set out to accomplish. I was given a sense of confidence and I never really felt the need to - or I've never had the benefit, I should probably say - of being inspired by outside heroes.

A lot of people don’t just go ahead and try things. They’ll have an idea and they’ll say — they’ll convince themselves or other people will convince them that it can’t be done. You know, one or the other. Actually I think that the first is even more dangerous and more serious. It’s convincing yourself that it can’t be done.

I never had it in mind that I would start a company one day and it would really be successful. I have just been motivated by working on interesting technology

What we say here every day is that our success is really based on our members' success, our community's success. We've created an infrastructure and laid some basic ground rules to create this marketplace.

In 1991, I co-founded my first start-up, Ink Development, which made software for an early tablet computer.