Great leaders, like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, also focused on the long term.

Technological revolutions are very hard to predict. My favourite example is someone in 1850 taking care of horses as a farrier. They would have said, "Look, horses have been part of human existence for 5,000 years. We are horse people. It's permanent." But all of a sudden, the internal combustion engine comes along and, with it, oil fields and automobiles, which basically replace the horse completely. So we often have these long periods of stability and then a sudden inflection point.

But as an entrepreneur you have to feel like you can jump out of an aeroplane because you're confident that you'll catch a bird flying by. It's an act of stupidity, and most entrepreneurs go splat because the bird doesn't come by, but a few times it does.

In the U.S., HBO is a very aggressive service.

Companies rarely die from moving too fast, and they frequently die from moving too slowly.

Most entrepreneurial ideas will sound crazy, stupid and uneconomic, and then they’ll turn out to be right.

Taking smart risks can be very gratifying.