Startups are unique animals. We take them pretty much for granted out here now, but they are still endeavors that require very different skills from the ones needed in established companies.

Anyone can sail with the wind to his back. Startups usually sail into a stiff wind, leaking like a sieve, in high seas, without food or water.

In the world of startups, angels invest in seed or early-stage deals, and with their money they lend a bit of advice. They pay for the privilege of helping the company.

Good entrepreneurs are passionate visionaries, usually with one or more exceptional talents, but rarely have they actually built a company from scratch.

It's not clear that being the first-mover will provide the rash of Internet startups a sustainable competitive advantage. Ultimately being right, or better positioned, may be more important than being first.

Deferred Life Plan: Step one: Do what you have to do. Then, eventually — Step two: Do what you want to do

Most business ideas do not find funding. Even the majority of those that are funded—that is, vetted by very smart people who think enough of the ideas to invest in them — ultimately fail.

It's the romance, not the finance that makes business worth pursuing.

Entrepreneurs, in my experience, don't like to be told they're wrong.

The business model can and should change over time, as the world changes.

Business conditions are forever changing. You need to reconsider your strategies and business models constantly and adjust them where necessary.

Business is about nothing if not people.

Silicon Valley veterans share a tacit understanding that what a startup needs isn't one CEO, but three —each at successive stages of the startup's development.

If you turn a visionary startup into an operating company too early, you throw out its birthright. It will never be as big, or as influential as it might otherwise be. It will be much harder, perhaps impossible, to expand the vision later, when performance is being measured, because then there's too much at stake.

Business failures are unfortunate but necessary steps in the search for those few huge successes.

If you're brilliant, 15 to 20 percent of the risk is removed. If you work twenty-four hours a day, another 15 to 20 percent of the risk is removed. The remaining 60 to 70 percent of business risk will be completely out of your control..

Work hard, work passionately, but apply your most precious asset — time — to what is most meaningful to you.

Time is the only resource that matters.

When I was in architecture school at Princeton, the worst thing you could say about someone was that they were eclectic.

I left Google after four years of working on Google Maps, search, and Google TV as a product marketing manager. I knew I wanted to do something on my own.

My parents divorced when I was young but I was brought up in two really loving households. I didn't have a contentious relationship with my mom or dad.

I've gotten very good at detaching whenever I have to go away for three months, which I realize is hard on friends and kind of selfish.

In the Scottish Orkneys, the little stone houses with their single large room and central hearth had an extraordinary range of built-in furniture.

The greatly anticipated 2009 Masters was like going to a Broadway hit and finding out that the star, Sir Tiger Woods, was off that night, and his replacement was the cab driver who dropped you off at the theater.

The views of the Earth are really beautiful. If you've ever seen a space IMAX movie, that's really what it looks like. I wish I'd had more time just to sit and look out the window with a map, but our science program kept us very busy in the lab most of the time.

It seems like they conflate Bruce and the Hulk. It's usually, 'Hulk!' as I'm walking across the street. But sometimes it's 'Banner!' If you go on my Twitter feed, you'll see it's mostly Hulk. I think it was pretty spectacular what we were able to accomplish with CGI with 'The Hulk,' and I can't take full credit for that.

And of course, we know that opportunity lies outside the reach of some of our people. We don't need flowery words about inequality to tell us that, and we don't need a party that has led while poverty and hunger rose to record levels to give us lectures about suffering.

People think I have courage. The courage in my family are my wife Pam, my three daughters, here, Nicole, Jamie, LeeAnn, my mom, who's right here too.

I've just grown a little disappointed with 'Muppets in the Old West', 'Muppets Under Water' and all these weird concept movies. I just want to go take it back to the early 80's, when it was about the Muppets trying to put on a show. That's what I'm trying to bring back.

And you can't complain about kissing Emma Watson. Isn't that what everyone in the world wants to do? I've known Emma for a few years. She's this amazing capacity of young and vibrant and brilliant, but also a bright, intelligent old soul.

The first sport I played was baseball. I remember being on the Little League team and someone pitching the ball to me for the first time. I was ready to no longer hit the ball off the tee, and an adult pitched it to me underhand.

A city becomes a world when one loves one of it's inhabitants.

We maintain and hold that Muslims and Hindus are two major nations by any definition or test of a nation.

Actually, my mother and Alfie came for three weeks' Christmas vacation and stayed for 21 years. I guess my mother never went back because she was lonely.

I'm not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I'm doing.

So much of the destruction on Earth has been wrought by men. Women are the ones who give life and try to pick up the pieces... What a great gender they are.

Be able to defend your arguments in a rational way. Otherwise, all you have is an opinion.

I got my family here and my career here and I'm sitting here in the middle, and I'm stuck. So I have to do something, you know, have to reach out and get some help.

The existing principle of selfish interest and competition has been carried to its extreme point; and, in its progress, has isolated the heart of man, blunted the edge of his finest sensibilities, and annihilated all his most generous impulses and sympathies.

Of course, it is always nice to poll well, but if you don't get representatives elected, then what is the point?

In a paper called 'The Economics of Matching: Stability and Incentives,' I showed that there were not any mechanisms that would always both produce a stable matching and make it completely safe for all firms and workers to reveal their true preferences.

To be gay is nothing to be proud of. It's in how you are gay that you have something to be proud of, considering the obstacles placed in your path if you are gay.