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.

But the idea that some day people would want to be able to interact and get stock quotes and talk with other people or all these different things, I just believed that was going to happen

In the entrepreneurial world, when you launch a company, you have a particular idea, a particular product, a particular service, almost always you pivot, you shift. The market reacts to your initial idea. You make some adjustments. It's only after making a few adjustments that you see the success.

The Internet will make every enterprise a publisher.

And what we did with this new company in 1985 is we did start focusing on PCs instead of video game machines, because we learned the hard lesson about bringing a product to market in a consumer world where it's very expensive to build a brand and get distribution and so forth.

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

My father and his brothers were all lawyers, so I think that the expectation was probably for me to grow up to be an attorney, but it never really fascinated me that much. I was more interested in building things.