The key thing in any kind of guiding of the business is how do you create a strong organization that is kind of accelerating into the future. And when you're in trouble, the question is, what are the techniques that you can, you know, trim, refinance, sell, et cetera, in order to get this business back to that characteristic.
I'm sympathetic to the people who go, "Whoa, we'd like to have the benevolent, wise dictator. It will all work much more efficiently," but the reason that we remain staunch democrats - with a small d - is it's a decades long, it's a centuries long, it's a country long process for being inclusive.
Part of the reason we like democracy is it's the portfolio of decades, which is to say you don't also get the disastrous dictator who completely destroys a society, engages you in wars and so forth.
Times of economic crises can change what the competitive landscape looks like, because when, for example, you have boom times, capital is easy to come by, growth is easy, sometimes what you focus on is, you know, how to accelerate in the boom. During economic crises, the question is, the companies that come out of, you know, that are sailing through that with the best liquidity, both assets on the balance sheet, making money, ability to grow their businesses, get a disproportionate competitive advantage.
Benevolent, enlightened, wise dictators are the most efficient form of government. The problem is what comes afterwards.
The actual, the forming of ties with a group of people around you where they help you grow as a professional, solve problems, get opportunities, and you help them, is actually the constitutive base of the foundation of a strong, modern career.
[Hillary Clinton] is also smart, she talks to people, she hears, and she says, "OK, I need to update, we need some much bigger changes."
When thinking about how to deploy kind of professional and social networking into your business, it's really not a question of if, it's a question of when. And the reason is, just think about the fact that those businesses that adopt new technologies to operate efficiently and use them to get a competitive edge are the businesses that in fact, you know, it becomes one more competitive advantage. Whether it's a fax machine or a mobile phone or a new way of doing financing or any of these things, you know, these are key things to do.
I think Hillary [Clinton] hears the anger in a broad swath of the American people, and she says, "OK, how do I help create a future that's good for you?"
I think Hillary [Clinton] has [woken up to the plight of the middle class] and is working toward it in a democratic process.
Now, in economic crises times, the kind of things you're looking at is it's generally harder to get capital, revenue growth may be more, revenue lines may be unstable or growth may be less easy to predict that you're going to get to. And so what you do is you take a certain conservative approach of when, as all entrepreneurs should do, you plan for both good luck and bad luck, you put extra time on, "Okay, if I have bad luck, what do I do about that?"
One of the things is when you think, "Wait, I'm fearful of retaliation, I'm fearful of oppression because of someone who is going into a public office, who might be vengeful for their own personal reasons, that's actually not a reason to hide - that's a reason to step up, right?"This is part of what we learned from the 1920s.
The other reason why people don't take a stand, which is very true in this election, is looking at [Donald] Trump and fearing reprisal, fearing reprisal from someone who is seeking the highest, most powerful role in the land, who has had a history of doing everything from attacks, threats and lawsuits and who has a complete kind of vengeful, narcissistic behavior, which makes people legitimately worried, almost like a schoolyard bully, that if I step up, am I going to be targeted, too?
Because in our boom times, everything is growing, usually, you know, the kind of things that come to mind are Wild, Wild, West, or land grabs, you know, these sorts of things, in order to make something, you know, kind of to grow into the future and to get all the growth that you need to have. So you tend to hire a lot because you're running fast to the future.
Silicon Valley tends to believe in the individual who creates a small group and does something big. Democracy is always frustrating, but it creates a society that, for example, allows us to invest in each other's kids, to have public education, to have both a greater society and individual freedom for creating businesses.
Democracy is always frustrating.
I think we realized the depth of frustration through the current political process. So we said, "OK, we know there's a serious problem here, we know we need to work on it," and now it's "Oh, we need to work on it a lot faster."
One of the great strengths of American culture is this empowerment of individual, is the individual being able to be entrepreneurial, create new things. But you create a whole group of people to make great companies. It's employees and investors and customers and partners. The fabric of society, of a network of relations, is key to being successful.
My greatest influences are actually probably a set of different teachers. And these teachers, most prominently at my high school, but also a few others, helped kind of instill in me, thinking thoughts about how life is meaningful in terms of how we all kind of live in a network of people and how you interact with those people is part of what makes life essentially meaningful and then kind of concepts to think about, how do you add value to other people's lives? How do they add value to yours? And how do you kind of form a community together in the network?
We have made a huge amount of progress over the last 50 years by enabling trade, by enabling kind of collaboration and learning. And actually, in fact, when you look at your average 30-year-old today, they're much better off than a 30-year-old 20 years ago, 30 years ago, because of progress in technology and health care and all the rest of this.
I actually think we need to put our energies, as entrepreneurs, as technology inventors, as government, to being much more inclusive. I think the key thing is actually working together.
At Silicon Valley, I'm extremely sympathetic to the revolutionary response. I not only agree with it emotionally. I agree with it practically. And the only thing I disagree with is, I don't think Donald Trump is that. Trump is blow it up for no good reason at all. You want to actually do revolution with a target, with an idea, with building a new system.
[Hillary Clinton] is part of the establishment, and that's good for foreign policy and for understanding the ongoing health care system.
We understand that most of the middle class doesn't know what to do, doesn't feel like they have economic progress, and [Hillary Clinton] goes, "OK, I realize that's my top agenda item. That's the thing I need to do."
People generally worry about social networking more than they need to. In kind of consumer internet investing and on social and professional networks, I kind of look at time spending and time efficiency. You know, time saving sites. So on time spending sites, things where you play lots of games or that sort of thing, you might worry about a productivity loss if people are spending a lot of time doing that. So if there's a lot of kind of addictive gaming going on during work hours, that won't be as helpful to you.
