Today, National Geographic has a membership side with a magazine and some television side, and they generate about a billion dollars in revenue, and they're profitable. And so at the end of the year they have some bottom line profit which they can then reinvest, because they're running it as a not-for-profit in charitable endeavors.

From a relatively early age I got interested in business

It's not about how to get started; it's about how to get noticed.

I do think that a general liberal arts education is very important, particularly in an uncertain changing world

All great ideas start as weird ideas. What now seems obvious, early on, is not obvious to anybody.

I enjoyed high school and college, and I think I learned a lot, but that was not really my focus. My focus was on trying to figure out what businesses to start

And so the idea was, well maybe you can take an Atari video game machine, where people plug in a game cartridge, and plug in a modem, and tie that into a telephone, and essentially turn that game in the machine into an interactive terminal.