From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I don't care about legacy, it's an old idea because we don't consume time like we did before. Time is now simultaneous – before, it was linear. Today it is a wall in front of us. When time is a wall, there is no place for legacy.
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.
The role of a chef today is not just to feed people, but to be a storyteller, an educator, a guardian of traditions while pushing boundaries.
Comedy delivers the cerebral and the hyperbole, it can be funny and serious. You can see that ability for the pendulum to swing both ways when you watch the best comedians perform.
Be a curious explorer of other people's emotions. Don't approach people as if you know how they're feeling. We often make mistakes when reading other people's emotions because we bring in our own cultural values and belief systems.
Our entire civilisation is a manifestation of the complex inner worlds we carry with us. Everything around us, our buildings, cultures, politics, economies, statues, art and music are reflections of who we were, are and want to be.
The mythology tells us that you come to the valley and forge your own path, but in reality young people come here and are asked to essentially create careers that are a daisy chain of gigs on mini-innovation projects within large corporations.
I can't look an African-American parent in the eye for thinking about what they must tell their sons about what can happen to them on the streets of their country.
The world of celebrity offers an escape from the real world, and offers different things to different people. To many, the celebrity world is aspirational, they imagine themselves living that lifestyle and dream of how it would be to go to that premiere, have that fancy house, or that expensive vacation. For others, the world of celebrity is like watching a car-wreck.
We formalized making sure that the company culture and the employee happiness was priority number one, and everything else — including profits, revenue growth, and so on — was a byproduct of getting the culture right. Because our whole belief was that if we get the culture right, then most of the other stuff, including building our brand to be about the very best customer service, will happen naturally on its own.
One of the things I love most about my job is the diversity in the pace of work across the organization. I truly enjoy being with people from different parts of the world and working with individuals who operate on completely different approaches.
People think that life inside Silicon Valley firms is like life under an orange tree, where you suck on the oranges and everyone treats each other perfectly – but that's not quite right… people are ruthless, competitive… human.