The computer environment is radically different today. In the 1980s, it was like the Wild West, with a lot of open territory. Now, the cowboys have moved out and the farmers have moved in.
— Mitch Kapor
If we're not creating an educated and skilled workforce, there is just no conceivable way that were going to be economically competitive.
It is possible to take a population of students who are failing and whose schools are failing them, who are being written off as not being college material, and if they have the right support, they can all go to college and succeed.
Technology advances at exponential rates, and human institutions and societies do not. They adapt at much slower rates. Those gaps get wider and wider.
Lotus's efforts around the Mac were pathetically unsuccessful, which is sad.
Old ways of thinking die hard, particularly when they were weaned by legally enforced monopolies.
Successful entrepreneurs develop products that inspire their passion. They have to. It's that passion that gets them through the long, arduous, uncertain and frightening early days of a start-up.
Often, the disconnect between the marketing hype around a new product and what the product actually does is astounding.
Microsoft represents the best of ourselves or the worst.
If information wants to be free, then that's true everywhere, not just in information technology.
When new technology in the classroom starts happening, some people get very excited and think of it as a panacea. It attracts very high amounts of money; it raises expectations, and those expectations aren't met.
Fundly is at the dynamic intersection of high-growth technology startups, social entrepreneurship, and the exploding world of social media. Kapor Capital is proud to back this passionate team, their product, and Fundly's impressive customer base.
I originally invested in Dropcam because I foresaw what the company and their products could do for consumers and the industry. I've been deeply impressed with what they've done in such little time, and I'm confident that they'll continue to exceed my expectations.
E-mail is a victim of its own success.
People in the industry foresee a time in which, for many people, the only thing they'll need on a computer is a browser.
There's a great deal of suspicion and misunderstanding about IT among practicing doctors. One hears things like, 'I don't want to be turned into a data entry clerk, and I don't want some machine between me and my patients.'
Reversing the escalation of health care costs is going to need more than legislation, yet it can be done without imposing rationing, as critics of reform fear.
We are living in an era of anxiety produced by computer and communications technology.
I think there is widespread agreement that there is a crisis in public education.
There's an admirable belief about the virtues of meritocracy - that the best ideas prove the best results. It's a wrong and misguided belief by well-intentioned people.
The kind of products you envision as an entrepreneur is a function of your life experience.
Jazz was a bomb. That was also the low point of Mac sales. People had just written it off.
Life in cyberspace seems to be shaping up exactly like Thomas Jefferson would have wanted: founded on the primacy of individual liberty and a commitment to pluralism, diversity, and community.
Few industries have the ability to transform society like tech, yet too few companies are asking the questions or working on the problems that would create meaningful social change.
It's illegitimate to talk about a post-scarcity Utopia without talking about questions of distribution. There have always been these Utopian predictions - 'electricity too cheap to meter' was the atomic promise of the 1950s.
I give Bill Gates an A for vision because, as a business person and a strategist, he's brilliant. His flaw is that his view is not informed by a humanistic or compassionate vision of how to make computers work for people.
In an economy where more and more value is in information - is in the bits, not the atoms, where bits can be copied essentially for free - any time you have that situation, economic schemes that rely on existing models of intellectual property laws for protection are going to do less and less well.
We have to examine very carefully any privacy-reducing technology.
Failing to continue to support the public higher-ed system in California will have devastating long-term consequences.
StumbleUpon has humanized the Web and mastered a way for people to discover online content by incorporating an individual's personal preferences and recommendations of friends and like-minded people.
The more you eliminate the inefficient use of information, the better it is for productivity.
Linden Lab's technological breakthroughs have made 'Second Life' a truly revolutionary experience.
Physicians today, as human beings, are not exempt from the perverse economic pressures created by fee-for-service regimes to see more patients for shorter appointments and order more tests and procedures. If the incentives were changed to pay to foster better health outcomes, I am convinced physician behavior would change over time.
If advertisers want to decorate their ads to increase their conversions by showing what users think, that's a good thing.
Hackers are seen as shadowy figures with superhuman powers that threaten civilization.
I believe in having an impact in doing things.
We have a responsibility to give people opportunities to do what they can do. It's a fundamental tenet of democratic society. Libertarians who believe in a completely minimalist state, and don't feel we have that responsibility, are harming humanity.
I routinely failed to understand that 'simple and straightforward' would have been a much better product strategy for Lotus.
When regulations restricting competition are relaxed, nobody's market share is protected. If telephone companies can offer video programming, cable revenue will surely drop.
Life in cyberspace is often conducted in primitive frontier conditions, but it is a life which, at its best, is more egalitarian than elitist and more decentralized than hierarchical. It serves individuals and communities, not mass audiences, and it is extraordinarily multi-faceted in the purposes to which it is put.
Every year we are greeted by a host of new apps that will 'change the way we think' about ordering takeout, 'fundamentally transform' our shoe purchases, or 'revolutionize' the way we edit photos.
Human intelligence is a marvelous, subtle, and poorly understood phenomenon. There is no danger of duplicating it anytime soon.
Open source can propagate to fill all the nooks and crannies that people want it to fill.
I'm like George Lucas, bringing together a creative team that will come up with a unique, well-crafted product.
There are excellent public interest grounds to have a search engine whose rankings are transparent.
Diversifying our tech talent pool is an imperative for the tech sector. More diverse engineers and entrepreneurs will bring about a new type of innovation that Silicon Valley has yet to see.
You can't be in the tech community... without realizing there's a big shortage of talent.
Velano Vascular has developed a simple, game-changing innovation that will improve the way medicine has been practiced for decades.
The widespread adoption of broadband and the continued advances in personal computing technology are finally making it possible for the collective creation of an online world on a realistic scale.
A typical medical practice is like an old-fashioned business which keeps all of its records on paper. It can probably track down any individual transaction if it needs to, but it's basically helpless when it comes to overall measurements of performance. And that's the big problem.
