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Ehud Barak
Former Prime Minister of Israel
The war caught me at Stanford University. I was a graduate student maybe some six weeks. You know, I came to this --'73 year and just began, you know. And I was called from Yom Kippur in California, Yom Kippur was already -- you know, coming ten hours later than in Israel so we were just after the Yom Kippur ceremony in the kind of Hillel auditorium of Stanford University, when I woke up in the morning and was told that there is a war in Israel. I called the attaché in the embassy and said, "I'm a lieutenant colonel. I'm moving immediately." So the general told me, "Oh, I don't think we are missing a major war." I told him "What is--" I asked him, "What is we? You are here on official loan. I'm still a commander. I cannot afford being out of the country even if in a not very serious kind of war. I'm going there. I will call you from New York." And I went immediately to the airport, San Francisco airport. I kissed my wife. My eldest daughter was maybe two years old.
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Ehud Barak
Former Prime Minister of Israel
He (Yitzhak Rabin) called upon me and he told me, "Ehud, look, I cannot explain it, and I cannot prove it. It's not mathematics that you like so much, but in political life timing is everything. You can never, never predict what will follow. I need you now." And so I left it and after a legal kind of cooling off period of some 100 days, I came into his government. And no one of us even kind of contemplated or weighed in mind what really happened, that five months later Rabin was assassinated. I found myself immediately shocked but not out of balance and entering Peres's government as his foreign minister and a few months later Peres was defeated in the general elections, and Netanyahu took over and within another few months I became the leader of the Labor Party. And so it happened that I came somewhat like a storm through political life. It never happened in the political history of Israel that someone who was totally out of political life became a prime minister within four years, and a half or so.
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Timothy Berners-Lee
Father of the World Wide Web
The people who were crucial to the pickup of the web were, for example, people in companies who probably had day jobs, but were doing this out of interest, engineers who were picking it up. If there had been patents around it, their lawyers would have told them not to even read the code, not to download it, not to install it, not to read anything about it, in case they were tainted by something which would allow the company later to be sued. So similarly, somebody else in their garage or their basement, just doing it for fun, they're doing it because they think it would be really exciting. Because they share the twinkle in their eye, they understand what it would be like if everybody had a web server, or if everybody had a web page and everybody had a web browser. So they're some of the people who do it because it would be cool if everybody did it. Right?
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Timothy Berners-Lee
Father of the World Wide Web
Everybody realized that these new markets, these new spaces, these new ideas -- there will be new spaces of things in which other things will be built -- but they will depend on the basic web infrastructure being royalty-free. It's always been like that. Every now and again, we've had a hiccup when somebody didn't understand it, when somebody thought that maybe they'd try to make a quick killing by somehow getting a stranglehold on it, somehow finding a way to be able to limit your access -- everybody's access -- to the web, and then they would be able to charge for it. Yeah. You can see they had a different gleam in their eyes. But rapidly, they found that really people treated them with the utmost contempt and programmed around them, went around them, and left them, having learned a lesson, and generally picking up the pieces and moving on and joining this world of openness, of open standards, of royalty-free standards.
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Jeff Bezos
Founder and CEO, Amazon.com
We still have a tremendous amount of hard work ahead of us, but we have all the assets in place now. We have eliminated the necessity for the luck that a start-up company requires, and now our future is in our own hands as a team and as a company, and we have so many smart people. We have so many customers who treat us so well, and we have the right kind of culture that obsesses over the customer. If there's one reason we have done better than most of our peers in the Internet space over the last six years, it is because we have focused like a laser on customer experience, and that really does matter, I think, in any business. It certainly matters online, where word of mouth is so very, very powerful. You know, if you make a customer unhappy they won't tell five friends, they'll tell 5,000 friends. So, we are at a point now where we have all of the things we need to build an important and lasting company, and if we don't, it will be shame on us.
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