I just want someone to explain to the American public why investing in transportation in Iraq is so much more important than investing in passenger rail right here in the United States of America.
When we took Netscape public, if people wanted to invest in the web, that was the only stock that they could do it by investing in. So Netscape's market value was higher than it probably otherwise would have been if there were lots of other ways to play that theme.
The big success stories - Facebook, Zynga and Twitter - are leading to investing in ideas on a napkin, because no one wants to miss out on the next big thing.
What's in my mind is that I'm investing in people. It might be through a building or a program, but I'm investing in people. And the people that I'm investing in are underprivileged or hold a core value that I believe in.
All of our competitors around the world, every country is investing more in infrastructure as a percentage of their GDP than we are. And down the road our children and grandchildren will have to compete with that more and more.
The most important thing for us is investing and making companies great, and then they have all the options they want, whether that's to go public or stay private.
In investing, we intuitively think we should make a number of small bets. A blockbuster strategy is the opposite. It means making fewer huge investments. But it turns out to be safer.
The press is still investing itself, it seems to me, in a sort of cynicism. It comes out better for them if they can predict hard times, bogging down, sniping, attrition.
Many hedge fund managers have become billionaires; perhaps this - plus their reputations as the smartest guys in the room - is why they have captured the investing public's imagination.
