“Global investors were awash in cash due to current account surpluses in emerging economies and easy monetary policies. Investors from emerging economies first invested their rapidly rising wealth in risk-free Treasuries, but once they had their fill of Treasuries they looked for higher yield in what they thought was the next safest thing, U.S. residential mortgages. Due to shrinking returns on less risky investments, other global investors began to search for yield by taking more risk investing in more complicated securities and derivatives.”— Mark Zandi
The quote archive
A growing archive of 3,000+ moments, drawn from every interview.
We don't currently have the accountability mechanisms in our digital life that we do in our physical life. Physical society has had tens of thousands of years to build cultures and norms, but we haven't yet figured out how this works online.
— Mitchell BakerCEO and Chairwoman of Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation
The systems we now use exist at a scale that's actually hard to comprehend as human beings. On Facebook, you are one of several billion people and at that scale, it's easy to become a number, or simply a wallet. At that scale, it's very hard to make any meaningful change as an individual.
— Mitchell BakerCEO and Chairwoman of Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation
It's shocking how quickly this innovation [the internet] has become woven into the foundation of everything that we do. In just 30 years, the internet and the world wide web have gone from being generally unknown to consumers to being involved in every aspect of life, and necessary for almost everything. There is no healthy society without a healthy internet.
— Mitchell BakerCEO and Chairwoman of Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation
Another hugely common mistake is optimising your business for investors, and not customers and employees. If you don't believe me, look at the fact that consulting businesses have a 5 year survival rate of 60% and venture backed businesses, less than 10%.
— Rand FishkinFounder of Moz, SEO software company and industry thought leader
When you're starting out, your ambition shouldn't be defined by someone else's success criteria. That's something I struggled with, and still do. I struggle to align my business objectives with my life and my own motivations rather than externally formed motivations that come from culture and society.
— Rand FishkinFounder of Moz, SEO software company and industry thought leader
There's a culture in Silicon Valley that believes that you should be obsessive and not be able to think about anything else other than your business. You shouldn't have kids… friends… just your company as a vehicle to make millions of dollars. That's the kind of founder that many investors want to back, but we need to kick those people out.
— Rand FishkinFounder of Moz, SEO software company and industry thought leader
If you are able to share the things you're scared people will find out? That's real transparency, and that's how you earn the trust that transparency can bring, but if it doesn't feel uncomfortable, it's just marketing.
— Rand FishkinFounder of Moz, SEO software company and industry thought leader
One of the biggest myths in startup-land is this idea that the pinnacle of startups is building a venture-scale company, backed by venture capital, growing exceptionally fast and being OK with high failure rates as a result; in other words, returning a significant amount of capital to an investor rather than any other outcome.
— Rand FishkinFounder of Moz, SEO software company and industry thought leader
A lot of people in society understandably want to feel important, and one of the ways you do this is to show people how busy you are… and one of the ways you show people how busy you are is to describe how little time you have for sleep.
— Matthew WalkerSleep scientist and author of "Why We Sleep
We are a dark-deprived society in this modern era, and we need darkness for the release of melatonin for healthy sleep. Without melatonin, we will not sleep sufficiently.
— Matthew WalkerSleep scientist and author of "Why We Sleep
In the spring, when we lose an hour of sleep, we observe a consequential 24% increase in heart attacks the following day. In the Autumn, when we gain an hour, we see a corresponding 21% reduction in heart attacks. It's a clear bi-directional relationship.
— Matthew WalkerSleep scientist and author of "Why We Sleep
Lack of sleep is like a broken water pipe in your home, it leaks water into every nook and cranny, and erodes the fabric of your DNA nucleic alphabet that spells out your daily health narrative.
— Matthew WalkerSleep scientist and author of "Why We Sleep
Limiting sleep to just 4-5 hours for one single night will drop levels of critical anti-cancer fighting cells, called natural killer cells, by 70%. That's a rather alarming state of immune deficiency, and it happens after just one night of short sleep.
— Matthew WalkerSleep scientist and author of "Why We Sleep
Even just 20 years ago we used to ask the question, 'why do we sleep?' It was one of the last great scientific mysteries; and the crass answer (at that point) was that we slept, to cure sleepiness. Much like saying we eat to cure hunger, however, this tells us nothing of the physiological functions that food and nutrition provide.
— Matthew WalkerSleep scientist and author of "Why We Sleep
When you're not in a geopolitical recession, political risk still matters, but it matters largely at a country level and primarily in emerging markets. But in a geopolitical recession, suddenly the biggest macro risks are by their nature political. And you focus less on growth and more on stability and resilience, and that's a problem because the free market model tells you 'don't focus on resilience and stability, focus first and foremost on growth and everything else will take care of itself'.
— Ian BremmerFounder of Eurasia Group & Political Risk Analyst
For the last 50, 100 even 200 years, almost all of the world's problems have been solved by a relatively small group of white men- and now we're bringing diversity to the challenge; we're opening out the future of our world to several billion people not just a few hundred million, and with that level of entrepreneurial thinking capacity I would see our civilisation growing exponentially, and that gives me hope.
— Ian BremmerFounder of Eurasia Group & Political Risk Analyst