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Pierre Omidyar
Founder and Chairman, eBay
Pierre Omidyar: That was my professional debut. Six bucks an hour. And it's funny too, thinking about it, because it was using computer technology to print out library cards for the card catalogue. And so all it was, was a program to just format. You know, somebody would type in the information and it would format it the way the librarian wanted, so they could put the cards into the card catalogue. So this is incredibly basic computer technology. This is no database there. No search engine, nothing like that. But yeah, six dollars an hour. And also, at that time I also worked on the software to help schedule classes, which was key. This was in high school at tenth or 11th grade, I think, when I was working on that, and I resisted the temptation to put in some code in there to make sure I never had classes on Friday, because I wouldn't have been able to get away with it, but I thought about it.
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Pierre Omidyar
Founder and Chairman, eBay
Pierre Omidyar: When I was in college I taught myself how to program the Macintosh. A big foundation actually for that was a class. It was actually -- so it wasn't completely self-taught -- it was a C programming class called "Data Structures." It was the big kind of the "weed-out" class for the computer science program. I learned how to program C. A great, great professor. Probably one of the best I've ever had, and a couple of things stem from that story. The first is that that professor eventually had to leave the school. He was a great teacher but apparently he had never published anything, and so they axed him. He had to leave and that was a scandal, at least in my mind. So I don't know what exactly that taught me, but it did have an impact on me and -- yeah. And then second, you know, I learned how to program C, and then I used that ability to teach myself how to program the Macintosh which I was just very excited about learning everything I could about it. And of course, that's how I began actually my professional career was after college -- actually a year before graduating from college -- I took a summer job in California working at a software company for the Macintosh.
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Larry Page
Founding CEO, Google Inc.
Larry Page: I think the age is a real issue. It's certainly a handicap in the sense of being able to manage people and to hire people and all these kinds of things, maybe more so than it should be. Certainly, I think, the things that I'm missing are more things that you acquire with time. If you manage people for 20 years, or something like that, you pick up things. So I certainly lack experience there, and that's an issue. But I sort of make up for that, I think, in terms of understanding where things are going to go, having a vision about the future, and really understanding the industry I am in, and what the company does, and also sort of the unique position of starting a company and working on it for three years before starting the company. Then working on it pretty hard, whatever, 24 hours a day. So I understand a lot of the aspects pretty well. I guess that compensates a little bit for lack of skills in other areas.
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Suzan-Lori Parks
Pulitzer Prize for Drama
When I'm writing, it's as if I am sitting in a garden, like a jungle where everything grows, and when I am rewriting, I'm riding on a horse through a field, brandishing a beautiful sword, the sword of discrimination -- not racial discrimination -- but discernment, I suppose you'd call it, a sword of discrimination. I am brandishing the sword, and there's music, like Wagner playing, bumpa-da-bum-bum, and I'm cutting everything that doesn't belong. So there's writing, and there's rewriting. I enjoy both.
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