Investor Quotes

I think it's very important to have a feedback loop, where you're constantly thinking about what you've done and how you could be doing it better.

I'm the only person I know that's lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year. It's very character-building.

The tough thing is figuring out what questions to ask, but […] once you do that, the rest is really easy.

Pixar is seen by a lot of folks as an overnight success, but if you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time.

I'm cooler than you. WAAAY cooler.

Talent is extremely important. It's like a sports team, the team that has the best individual player will often win, but then there’s a multiplier from how those players work together and the strategy they employ.

We like to buy businesses, but we don't like to sell them.

I think there should be regulations on social media to the degree that it negatively affects the public good.

I have drifted away from thinking about these philanthropic things. And it was only as the wealth got large enough and Melinda and I had talked about the view that wealth wasn't something that would be good to just pass to the children.

As individuals, people are inherently good. I have a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups. And I remain extremely concerned when I see what's happening in our country, which is in many ways the luckiest place in the world. We don't seem to be excited about making our country a better place for our kids.

Software is inherently complicated. If you say to somebody I want an airline reservation system, to really say what you want in terms of overbooking and fares, and different airlines communicating with each or schedule changes, it's immensely complex. And so you can't write a program that's any simpler than that full specification.

Microsoft is always two years away from failure.

I hate the way people use PowerPoints instead of thinking

It is a mistake to hire huge numbers of people to get a complicated job done. Numbers will never compensate for talent in getting the right answer (two people who don't know something are no better than one), will tend to slow down progress, and will make the task incredibly expensive.

Life is not a continuous process, there's some sort of finite number of achievements that defines your life.

The market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the government to do the right things.

Capitalism has shortfalls. It doesn't necessarily take care of the poor, and it underfunds innovation, so we have to offset that.

I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates.

If I had a dollar for every time someone made fun of me in high school-oh wait, I do!

The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future.

Philanthropy is fun and fulfilling.

There is a certain responsibility that accrued to me when I got to this unexpected position.

We hire people who want to make the best things in the world.

In order to learn how to do something well, you have to fail sometimes. In order to fail, there has to be a measurement system. And that's the problem with most philanthropy - there's no measurement system. You give somebody some money to do something and most of the time you can really never measure whether you failed or succeeded in your judgment of that person or his ideas or their implementation.

The American worker is more productive than he's ever been.

When I take a look at a company's annual report, if I don't understand it, they don't want me to understand it.

The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far - the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We're obviously in a very upward cycle right now and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not.

Great companies are built on great products.

Pretty much, Apple and Dell are the only ones in this industry making money. They make it by being Wal-Mart. We make it by innovation.

A small team of (A plus) players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players.

There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat. That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.

Do your best at every job. Don't sleep! Success generates more success so be hungry for it. Hire good people with a passion for excellence.

Spam will be a thing of the past in two years' time.

The thing that's worth doing is trying to improve our understanding of the world and gain a better appreciation of the universe and not to worry too much about there being no meaning. And, you know, try and enjoy yourself. Because, actually, life's pretty good. It really is.

The journey is the reward

I was lucky - I found what I love to do early in life.

Confidence is key. You're not going to put your money - you're not going to leave your money with me unless you're confident I'm going to give it back to you.

If empathy channels our optimism, we will see the empathy and the diseases and the poor school. We will answer with our innovations and we will surprise the pessimists.

Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.

If you have a harem of 40 women, you never get to know any of them very well.

It's class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn't be.

There's a true schizophrenia where if you say to voters, you know, do you think the federal government spends too much money and they should spend less, they say yeah, absolutely. Then you name specific things, like Pell grants for students and they say, no, not that. How 'bout NIH, medical research funding? Nah, you really shouldn't cut that. And pretty soon you've proved that what the American public is against is arithmetic.

The human body is the most complex system ever created. The more we learn about it, the more appreciation we have about what a rich system it is.

The Green Revolution focused on the big three - maize, rice and wheat - and the Green Revolution did not adapt the big three to African conditions, other than South Africa, as much as they should have.

Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.

Only a few businesses will succeed by having the lowest price, so most will need a strategy that includes customer services.

I don't create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done.

Knowing what to leave out is just as important as knowing what to focus on.

It's never paid to bet against America.

I think this is the start of something really big. Sometimes that first step is the hardest one, and we've just taken it.

Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.

It is hard to overstate how valuable it is to have all the incredible tools that are used for human disease to study plants.

Although I don't have a prescription for what others should do, I know I have been very fortunate and feel a responsibility to give back to society in a very significant way.

If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.

I never invest in anything that I don't understand.

Customer service will become the primary value added function of every business.

Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

The kids are a big part of my schedule.

We've got all the ingredients for a sensational future.