A brand is really an emotional connection you have with a product or service. It's so emotional in fact that you become fairly irrational in the way you try to justify why you're using it. If you split our brain into a rational and irrational side…. a brand is what is operating at the irrational side.

The adjustment to life post-hostage varies significantly from person to person. Some adapt swiftly, while others may take years, and a few, unfortunately, never fully recover from the trauma—though they are the minority.

We don't change the world through opinions, we change it with examples. So I've been putting myself out there, reaching out and connecting.

Talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not. Technology is a great equaliser, and an enabler of opportunity. I saw this first hand and through my work now – whether that's investment or philanthropy, that's the work I want to promote.

The hardest part of the job is telling those players that they are not playing, I remember from my playing days how that felt. This is when compassion is an important tool as well.

We are born creative and often seek to transform our surroundings to suit our existence. Everything around us constantly changes and so creative options for adapting to this change become the only guarantee we have for a meaningful existence.

Never was wealth the driver for me. – it was always hey, there's a cool idea here, let's make something of it. It was nice to be well rewarded, but the interesting part was working the problem, thinking about new things and how to bring them forward from being ideas to being products or new ways of doing things.

The government turned a profit on the financial market aspects of TARP- a profit! People still think these measures cost American taxpayers a huge amount of money and did no good. The facts are exactly the reverse.

I should be just as excited to find out I was wrong as to prove I am right. Perhaps I should be even more excited about being wrong, because if I am always proving myself right, I'm just affirming my beliefs and not evolving them… and that's not learning at all, is it?

A model that's really strong at mathematical reasoning is likely to be strong at coding. And a model that's excellent at both math and code is often very good at analysing the nuts and bolts of legal reasoning as well. The third and deepest reason this matters is the ability to bridge different levels of abstraction. All of these domains involve multiple layers of abstraction, and the ability to move fluidly between those layers is likely to be extremely commercially valuable.

I believe it boils down to confidence and fearlessness—believing in yourself and your own perspective. When you fail to follow your vision and instead listen to the consensus, it dilutes your vision. Consensus tends to pull everything towards mediocrity.

The business plan is about management not exposition, it shows commitment to milestones.