I was trying to figure out what to do next, I'd been accumulating ideas for productivity tools - software people could use every day, particularly to help organize their lives.

No, my family is Russian, Georgian, via Ellis Island.

I actually built a tiny computer as a junior high school project.

That's why it has to be a nonprofit, because a nonprofit is required to take monies it receives and use them for the purposes for which it's chartered by the government. It can't be pocketed.

The culmination of all of that was the decision to start a company, which became Lotus, to do a product, which became 1-2-3. By the time I reached that point it had been four years, and it felt like a lifetime, but really it was kind of evolutionary.

We've already gotten a significant grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and a university consortium. I think the whole sector of Foundations, potentially with government support, is promising - more than promising, I think, it's substantial.

Well, I had a lot of help from my father with the soldering and so on, and he was very good at math and was fascinated with computers, and so I was fortunate enough to have a bunch of exposure going all the way back to high school - this was in the 1960s.

I was trying to figure out what to do next, I'd been accumulating ideas for productivity tools - software people could use every day, particularly to help organize their lives.

'Silicon Valley' has come to mean the Bay Area, not just down the Peninsula.

A typical medical practice is like an old-fashioned business which keeps all of its records on paper. It can probably track down any individual transaction if it needs to, but it's basically helpless when it comes to overall measurements of performance. And that's the big problem.

Before I started a company, I was an employee with a bad attitude. I was always felt like, bosses are stupid, and people weren't well treated.

Beware angel investors: they can be disruptive.

Both VisiCalc and MultiPlan were available when the IBM PC shipped in October 1981. 1-2-3 didn't hit the market until January 1983.

Bulletin boards are sort of the garage bands of cyberspace.

Computers ought to help people find their own best path through lots of textual information.

Diversifying our tech talent pool is an imperative for the tech sector. More diverse engineers and entrepreneurs will bring about a new type of innovation that Silicon Valley has yet to see.

E-mail is a victim of its own success.

Even though I had the talent, programming just didn't feel right. I never considered it very seriously. Some people get gratification from bending a machine to their will. I didn't.

Everyone has a subconscious and automatic preference of this over that. Once you're aware of that, you can take steps to change.

Failing to continue to support the public higher-ed system in California will have devastating long-term consequences.

For people who know both New York and the Bay Area, it is a complement to say that Oakland is San Francisco's Brooklyn. It's a complement both to Oakland and to Brooklyn. And, if you look at Brooklyn, Brooklyn is hot; Brooklyn is cool.

Fundly is at the dynamic intersection of high-growth technology startups, social entrepreneurship, and the exploding world of social media. Kapor Capital is proud to back this passionate team, their product, and Fundly's impressive customer base.

Hackers are seen as shadowy figures with superhuman powers that threaten civilization.

Human intelligence is a marvelous, subtle, and poorly understood phenomenon. There is no danger of duplicating it anytime soon.

I don't think Silicon Valley understands the power of Wikipedia, how it works, or the opportunities it represents.

I give Bill Gates an A for vision because, as a business person and a strategist, he's brilliant. His flaw is that his view is not informed by a humanistic or compassionate vision of how to make computers work for people.

I had no fear of speaking to large audiences.

I originally invested in Dropcam because I foresaw what the company and their products could do for consumers and the industry. I've been deeply impressed with what they've done in such little time, and I'm confident that they'll continue to exceed my expectations.

I soon realized that the best thing I could do for the profession of human services was to get out of it.

I tell people that the history of Mozilla and Firefox is so one of a kind that it should not be used - ever - as an example of what's possible.

I was not a student of Wall Street, but I was a quick study.

I woke up nights, worrying that Lotus was out of control - that no one would know what to do.

I'd always wanted to live in San Francisco, and my circumstances never permitted it. I'm so happy I made the move.

I'd been a great angel investor, but professional venture capital was clearly not the right thing for me.

I'm an inveterate note taker - I scribble all these things down on pieces of paper. I wanted to create some way of organizing all of them.

I'm fascinated by management and organizations: how organizations get things done and how successful organizations are built and maintained, how they evolve as they grow from start-ups to small companies to medium companies to big companies.

I'm like George Lucas, bringing together a creative team that will come up with a unique, well-crafted product.

I've been around long enough to know that empires come and empires go, and I can't tell how long the Google empire is going to last - but I'm pretty convinced that the answer is less than forever.

If advertisers want to decorate their ads to increase their conversions by showing what users think, that's a good thing.

If information wants to be free, then that's true everywhere, not just in information technology.

If only I'd stayed on the West Coast, I might have made something of myself.

If we're not creating an educated and skilled workforce, there is just no conceivable way that were going to be economically competitive.

If you can command a lot of attention, that's what is valuable, and many in the commercial ecology would like to have a piece of that attention.

If you go back to the '50s and '60s... there was zero tech in S.F. It was all in the Valley... and it crept northward in early 2000s.

If you look at the history of other movements, whether Civil Rights or environmental rights, these are all decades-long undertakings.

In an economy where more and more value is in information - is in the bits, not the atoms, where bits can be copied essentially for free - any time you have that situation, economic schemes that rely on existing models of intellectual property laws for protection are going to do less and less well.

In my case, having knocked around at different jobs helped me get a sense of what the world is actually like and also helped me get out of a cocoon.

It became clear to me by 1984 that Microsoft was likely going to be the big winner in the PC software apps and operating system category, partly because of the dynamics of owning and controlling the operating system: that gave you enormous power, and I came to see Bill Gates was fierce competitor.

Linden Lab's technological breakthroughs have made 'Second Life' a truly revolutionary experience.