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Sir Timothy Berners-Lee
Father of the World Wide Web
I got a job working in a sawmill over the vacation to get money to go around Europe. And in the sawmill, there was a big dumpster, an empty dumpster, empty except for an old calculator which had these rows of buttons. I had this dream of putting together a computer terminal. So I heaved it out and took it home and removed those buttons and then relabeled them with a QWERTY keyboard and then put sort of diode matrices on the back to produce the right code, binary code for each number. So that gave me the keyboard. Then I went down to the TV store and asked the guy whether he had any TVs which he could give me for cheap which had a working monitor, but where the radio frequency tuner had broken. He rolled his eyes and said yeah, he sure did have lots like that. I could take my pick. I actually got two.
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Sir Timothy Berners-Lee
Father of the World Wide Web
In 1991, '92, every day I'd have to decide whether to write some code, or go and persuade somebody else to write some code, or write some documentation, or persuade somebody else to write some documentation, or go and give a motivating talk somewhere explaining what the whole thing is supposed to be about, or try to argue with administration for funds or resources or whatever it takes. Today, everything -- the same sort of choices exist all the time, and I have to balance my time and find more things. Some things are more motivating than others, but I find to stay sane I have to keep working with other people, and I have to keep programming. I have to keep involved with the actual design.
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Yogi Berra
Baseball Hall of Fame
I just like to hit, and the fun of the game is hitting. Well, you got to play a little defense, too. But hitting, I was very fortunate. You know, a lot of guys, "You're a bad ball hitter." I said, "No, the ball looked good to me. I swung at it." I could leave a pitch alone the first time like that. The next time, I hit at it, and I do something with it. I have fun with [Derek] Jeter. You know, sometimes he strikes out on that ball up here. And, I get on him. I say, "What'd you swing at that ball for?" I says. "It looks good." And he says, "You used to swing at it." I said, "Yeah, but I hit it. You don't."
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Jeff Bezos
Founder and CEO, Amazon.com
In 1998 and 1999 you could raise $60 million for an Internet idea without a business plan with a single phone call. It was a very different era, but back in 1995 it was very difficult to raise money. And, by the way, it wasn't more difficult than it had been for the previous 20 years to raise money, it just was sort of normally hard. It's supposed to be hard to raise a million dollars. So, with a lot of hard work we raised that million dollars from about 20 different angel investors who invested about $50,000 each, and that was the original money that really funded Amazon.com.
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Jeff Bezos
Founder and CEO, Amazon.com
Once you are looking at the odds in a realistic way -- it's very important for entrepreneurs to be realistic -- and so if you believe on that first day while you're writing the business plan that there's a 70 percent chance that the whole thing will fail, then that kind of relieves the pressure of self-doubt. It's sort of like, I don't have any doubt about whether we're going to fail. That's the likely outcome. It just is, and to pretend that it's not will lead you to do strange and unnatural things. So, what you do with those early investment dollars -- if you have $300,000 and then you have a million dollars -- what you do with those early precious capital resources is you go about systematically trying to eliminate risk. So, you pick whatever you think the biggest problems are, and you try to eliminate them one at a time. That's how small companies get a little bit bigger, and then a little bit bigger, and a little bit bigger, until finally, at a certain stage, you reach a transition where the company has more control over its future destiny.
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