One of my first investments was $100,000 in a Web-based calendar startup - and I lost every dollar.
As an undergraduate at Stanford, I started 'The Stanford Review,' which ended up being very engaged in the hot debates of the time: campus speech codes, questions about diversity on campus, all sorts of debates like that.
Monopolies are bad and deserve their reputation when things are static and the monopolies function as toll collectors... But I think they're quite positive when they're dynamic and do something new.
I do think there is this danger that our society has made its peace with decline. I'd like to jolt them out of their complacency a little bit.
I believe that people are too complacent about technology.
You don't want to just do 'me too' companies that are copying what others are doing.
We protect monopolies with copyright.
The core problem in our society is political correctness.
Credentials are critical if you want to do something professional. If you want to become a doctor or lawyer or teacher or professor, there is a credentialing process. But there are a lot of other things where it's not clear they're that important.
I always find myself very distrustful of intense crowd phenomena, and I think those are things that we should always try to question, especially critically.
The millennial generation in the US is the first that has reduced expectations from those of their parents. And I think there is something decadent and declinist about that.
You can achieve difficult things, but you can't achieve the impossible.
I spend an awful lot of time just thinking about what is going on in the world and talking to people about that. It's probably one of my default social activities, just getting dinners with friends.
A diploma is a dunce hat in disguise.
In a world where wealth is growing, you can get away with printing money. Doubling the debt over the next 20 years is not a problem.
I'm very pro-science and pro-technology; I believe that these have been key drivers of progress in the world in the last centuries.
'Perfect competition' is considered both the ideal and the default state in Economics 101. So-called perfectly competitive markets achieve equilibrium when producer supply meets consumer demand.
My hope is that we're going to end up with a far more tolerant society, where the erosion of privacy, to the extent it erodes, will be offset by increased tolerance.
Every American has a unique identity. I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all, I am proud to be an American.
Facebook succeeded because it was about real people having a presence on the Internet. There were all these other social networking sites people had, but they were all about fictional people.
