When I was a door to door salesman, I learned a very valuable lesson. 1 in 10 people would talk to you, 9 out of 10 would slam the door in your face. Sometimes you would get 30 doors in a row slammed in your face, but that means that there are 3 yes' coming your way.

The reality is that most consumers aren't excited by incremental changes. To capture consumers' attention and make the market take notice, you need meaningful innovation—something genuinely new.

Look at something like Uber... on balance- it's still a taxi service! In the end, what they designed was a different way to connect customers and a service provider using technology, leading to a better experience for both.

If a company doesn't have a purpose, I think they are wasting their life. Making money should be the result of helping people to build businesses.

I often hear people say that everything that matters must be measured, and if it can't be measured, it doesn't matter. I believe the absolute reverse. Nothing that matters can be measured.

Skiing gave me purpose, and a goal. As a kid, there are so many distractions, and so many different paths to take. I saw a lot of my friends, who were perhaps more talented than I was, without the same goals and determination- and it caused them to veer off course.

Technology isn't a 'thing,' it's a social structure that people act upon the universe through. The social structure has incentives, roles and governance which determine the meaning and effect of the technology, not the engineering itself.

I remain a technical optimist… the problem is not artificial intelligence, it's natural stupidity.

The heart is a fascinating machine. It beats 3 billion times in a typical human lifetime, consumes so much energy, and does so much work that if you attached a heart to a typical swimming pool – the heart would empty the pool in about a week.

Music leads you to a greater understanding. Einstein said that relativity came to him through musical intuition- he was a great violinist, and was also Chair of the Princeton Orchestra. Bach had a phenomenal, and intuitive, understanding of mathematics too.

I believe one of the most important skills you need is the ability to recognize the right people to work with. Without a team you can trust to make things happen, it's physically impossible to manage all the different aspects of your job—a leader is only the tip of the iceberg.

Behind every free‑will decision there must be comprehension and intention—and that's where consciousness comes in: the capacity to understand the meaning of symbols. In science, 'information' refers only to the probability of symbols occurring, not to their meaning. Thus science's definition of information discards meaning from reality, but for conscious beings, meaning—not the symbol itself—is what truly matters.