'Founder' is a state of mind, not a job description, and if done right, even CEOs who join after day 1 can become founders.
If performance management were a movie, it will become less 'Gladiator' and more 'Moneyball.'
I think I have a good track record, both in commercial investing and in philanthropic investing. I don't have any interest in creating a named foundation; I have an interest in really good impact for capital. I think I'm pretty good at doing it, so I'm going to apply myself to doing it in my lifetime.
One of the metaphors that I use for start-ups is, you throw yourself off a cliff and assemble your airplane on the way down. If you don't solve the right problem at the right time, that's the end. Mortality puts priorities into sharp focus.
I would have volunteered to work at Netscape. It was the center node of this new technology and the commercial ecosystem of the Internet.
The opportunity to build an enduring product far outweighs the cost of alienating a few users along the way. And the sooner you internalize that trade-off, the faster you'll move along the path to scale.
No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you're playing a solo game, you'll always lose out to a team.
The death penalty and the arguments it inspires don't only involve ethics, morals, and justice. There are bureaucratic and economic aspects to it as well. All these different aspects commingle in ways that convince me we should take whatever steps we can to abolish the death penalty.
Most often I am only interested in an idea if it's going to get hundreds of millions of users. That's the scale that I am always trying to play to.
To have your parents get divorced at a young age, there's a lot of turbulence. We all grew up together, in some way. It was not idyllic. It was intense, vibrant, sometimes oppressive. I felt I was very much in a world of my own. I didn't meld much in school. I was kind of a loner.
Sometimes freedom from normal rules is what gives you competitive advantage.
The best ideas make you want to say 'yes' and 'no' in the same breath.
We want to be inclusive. We want to have our shareholders, our employees, our customers, whether they are Democrat, Republican, Green or Libertarian, to feel comfortable with how we're doing business. And so that tends to be apolitical. People say, 'No, no, I just simply shouldn't get involved in politics.'
Any effort to make the death penalty speedier and less costly - more 'efficient' - will inevitably make it less just.
Each year, I ask, 'Now that I have this knowledge, these resources, what can I do?'
One of the challenges in networking is everybody thinks it's making cold calls to strangers. Actually, it's the people who already have strong trust relationships with you, who know you're dedicated, smart, a team player, who can help you.
The reason the social-networking phenomenon is something that I invested in early and massively - I led the Series A financing for Friendster; I founded a company called Socialnet in 1997; I founded LinkedIn; and I was part of the first round of financing in Facebook - it sounds trivial, but people matter.
The key thing is to invest in the future, and what that means is - when you're deploying technology or you're a technology business - is to make sure that you're keeping on the innovation cycle, where you're both creating and adopting the new business practices and the new techniques in order to drive your business the right way.
As an entrepreneur and investor, I prioritize construction and collaboration. Whether it's a five-person start-up or a global giant, the companies that are most productive are the ones whose employees operate with a shared sense of purpose and a clear set of policies for responding to changing conditions and new opportunities.
Starting a company is like throwing yourself off the cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.
My belief and goal is that every professional in the world should be on a service liked LinkedIn.
Many employer-employee relationships are built on a lie that starts from the first interaction: neither party automatically conceives of the relationship as something that will last a lifetime, but both interact as if it is. This lie of omission bases the relationship on distrust.
We need to invest in technologies that amplify human capacity, not replace it.
As a child, I wondered often, 'Why are we? What is the meaning of life?' These questions made me realize that life is what has meaning - not just individual lives, but all of our lives.
Trump often says he needs to keep his tax returns private until the IRS finishes auditing him. But the IRS itself has said this isn't necessary. And recently, Trump changed his tune, saying he'll release his returns as soon as Hillary Clinton releases the 33,000 emails she deleted from her email server.
Simply writing a Ph.D. or academic book was unlikely to play much of a role in helping shape people's lives as I wanted.
And people who take risk intelligently can usually actually make a lot more progress than people who don't.
I actually think every individual is now an entrepreneur, whether they recognize it or not.
Over the last 20 years, I've worked on or invested in many companies that scaled to 100 million users or more. But here's the thing: You don't start with 100 million users. You start with a few. So, stop thinking big, and start thinking small.
LinkedIn allows professionals, including the middle class, to invest in themselves in order to find the right jobs. That essentially can help make them prosperous.
The world's better off the more Silicon Valleys there are and the more scaled companies there are.
Silicon Valley tends to be very myopic - to be focused on one or two things - which has some strengths as well as weaknesses.
A startup, to a some degree, is a set of those challenges of, 'If you don't solve this, you're dead.'
So benevolent, enlightened, wise dictators are the most efficient form of government. The problem is what comes afterwards, right?
Our elected officials must understand that we, the American people, expect them to perform the duties of their office, even when that means working with other elected officials from different parties.
Your network is the people who want to help you, and you want to help them, and that's really powerful.
I think 'Settlers of Catan' is such a well-designed board game - it's the board game of entrepreneurship - that I made a knockoff called 'Startups of Silicon Valley.' It's literally - it's the same rules but just a different skin set to it.
Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location.
If you could train an AI to be a Buddhist, it would probably be pretty good.
The key thing for me has always been how we realize the mission - enabling every professional in the world to change their own economic curve by the strength of their alliances and connections with other people.
PayPal was disruptive, it was democratizing, and it had universal appeal. It gave power to millions and millions of individuals and reduced monopolist control from nations, banks, and other huge corporations.
One of the things that happens that's challenging within the democratic process is that people say, 'Look at this failure, so we should totally change this whole thing.' And then you add in tons of bureaucratic process and checks and balances, and all of a sudden, it doesn't work that well.
Zynga is about fun. Fun is important. Fun is good. And to have the ability to do something fun for 10 or 15 minutes that's right at your fingertips and involves your friends, well, that's better than television in terms of social connectivity.
Even by Silicon Valley standards, PayPal's vision was massively ambitious.
The same instincts that make us good students can make us lousy entrepreneurs.
What happens during recessions, is you have less windfalls just helping you cover mistakes. You have to be more careful about not making mistakes.
I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture - I'd write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be.
I get energy from one-on-one conversations most often, and I lose energy from group conversations most often.
