Robert Metcalfe Quotes

I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.

In network theory, the value of a system grows as approximately the square of the number of users of the system.

Invention is a flower, innovation is a weed.

When you're running a company, creating jobs is the last thing you want to. When you're running a company you want to employ as few people as possible, and yet you inadvertently create jobs.

Innovation makes the world go round. It brings prosperity and freedom.

You don't grow the economy by growing government.

I've screwed up and I've overcommitted and it's typical of me.

I saw that there are people who will connive against innovation. They're hostile to it. And that has shaped my behavior ever since.

My advice is never let a publicist call you a 'visionary.' I've hung out with the visionaries at the famed Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. I've been a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur. I wouldn't touch 'visionary' with a 10-foot pole.

Where visionaries can be good at persuasion, CEOs are good at wielding authority. Visionaries transcend organizations, resources, and current realities, while CEOs master them.

The world needs a better understanding of how to encourage innovation. And innovators need to get better at it. Sign me up.

Grove giveth and Gates taketh away.

In seven to ten years video traffic on the Internet will exceed data and voice traffic combined.

Almost all of the many predictions now being made about 1996 hinge on the internet's continuing exponential growth. But I predict the internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.

If you cannot be on the project each day to check on things, then you should not try and be your own contractor.

I consider what I write to be literature. I choose the words carefully.