I'm not sure I knew what an entrepreneur was when I was ten, but I knew that starting little businesses and trying to sell greeting cards or newspapers door-to-door or just vending machine kind of thing is.. there's just something very intriguing to me about that.

So we believed that strategic alliances and partnerships were critical, and we did that for five years.

You can be entrepreneurial even if you don’t want to be in business. You can be a social entrepreneur focused on the not-for-profit sector. You can be an agriculture entrepreneur if you want to change how people think about farming. You can be a policy entrepreneur if you want to go into government. The idea of an entrepreneur is really thinking out of the box and taking risks and stepping up to major challenges.

You have to get along with people, but you also have to recognize that the strength of a team is different people with different perspectives and different personalities.

We need that same mentality in philanthropy, trying things, taking risks, recognizing the first try, maybe the second try, maybe the third try won't work. But if you stay at it and you're learning, you're talking to others, and you're learning together, eventually you'll break through and see the kind of impact you were hoping for.

I think it took us nine years to get one million subscribers to AOL, and then in the next nine years we went from one million to 35 million.

Think about this: It was illegal for most people to connect to the internet before 1992.