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With World Health, Every Life You Save Is A Wonderful Thing, So It's Not This Question Of Whether You Solve It Or You Don't. The Chance Of Completely Solving The Problems Has Long Odds. But Really, The Thing Is That You Get To Save The First Child, The Second Child, The Third Child. You Can Just Feel Good About That.

-Bill Gates

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With World Health, Every

Bill Gates

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With World Health, Every Life You Save Is A Wonderful Thing, So It's Not This Question Of Whether You Solve It Or You Don't. The Chance Of Completely Solving The Problems Has Long Odds. But Really, The Thing Is That You Get To Save The First Child, The Second Child, The Third Child. You Can Just Feel Good About That.

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Now Everyone Takes It For Granted That You Can Look Up Movie Reviews, Track Locations, And Order Stuff Online. I Wish There Was A Way We Could Take It Away From People For A Day So They Could Remember What It Was Like Without It.

The Bulk Of The Universities Are About Teaching Kids.

The Most Important People Is To Pick People Who Like To Write Software And Who Are Good At... Good Developers Like Working With Each Other. And They... They Reinforce Each Other's Skills.

Like My Friend Warren Buffett, I Feel Particularly Lucky To Do Something Every Day That I Love To Do. He Calls It "tap Dancing To Work."

Know Your Numbers' Is A Fundamental Precept Of Business.

Success Today Requires The Agility And Drive To Constantly Rethink, Reinvigorate, React, And Reinvent.

We All Learn Best In Our Own Ways. Some People Do Better Studying One Subject At A Time, While Some Do Better Studying Three Things At Once. Some People Do Best Studying In Structured, Linear Way, While Others Do Best Jumping Around, Surrounding A Subject Rather Than Traversing It. Some People Prefer To Learn By Manipulating Models, And Others By Reading.

Most Of Our Competitors Were One-product Wonders... They Would Do Their One Product, But Never Get Their Engineering Sorted Out.

The Key Thing You Can Do To Reduce Population Growth Is Actually Improve Health.

So On The Demand Side [for Energy], There Have Been A Variety Of Policies That Globally Have Been Way Over $50 Billion A Year Of Tax Credits, Raising The Price Of Electricity Through Things Like Renewable Portfolio Standards, So The Total Amount Of Money That's Gone Into Sending A Price Signal To Push Up Demand Versus What Would Happen Without It Has Been Gigantic.

Certainly, The Windows Share Of Servers Is Strong.

Computers And Games Don't Waste Time - People Do.

Leaders Are Those Who Empower Others.

It’s Been Proven That Of All The Interventions To Reduce Poverty, Improving Agricultural Productivity Is The Best.

In This Business, By The Time You Realize You're In Trouble, It's Too Late To Save Yourself. Unless You're Running Scared All The Time, You're Gone.

Funny Inspirational

I'm Never Fully Satisfied With Any Microsoft Product.

Billionaires Should Never Be Responsible For Solving Problems, Because They're Not The Government.

Whenever You Have Multiple Devices Including Multiple Pcs That You Want To Share Information With, It's Always Been A Bit Complicated.

Money Has No Utility To Me Beyond A Certain Point.

If We Think Long Term, The Younger Generation Here Is Better About Embracing The World. Not Seeing Countries Boundaries Kind Of An "us Versus Them" Thing.

Strategically, A Major Function Of The Ceo Is To Look For Bad News And Encourage The Organization To Respond To It. Employees Must Be Encouraged To Share Bad News As Much As Good News.

Make It Just Like A Mac.

Going Out In The Field, It's Always Enlightening To See What's Working And What's Not And To Sit Down And Talk - I Was With Young Girls In South Africa - Understanding Why Our Tools For Prevention Aren't Being Adopted, And What Way May Need To Invent To Help Protect Them.

There Is Competition, .. Can Any Microsoft Endure Future Competition Without Innovation? The Answer Is No. We've Got To Keep Changing.

When I Was Young I Liked Taking Tests. I Happened To Be Good At It. Certain Subjects Came Easily, Like Math. All The Science Stuff. I Would Just Read The Textbooks In The First Few Days Of Class.

In My 20s, I Worked Very, Very Hard. I Have A Much More Balanced Life Now.

There Are Gmo Skeptics More In Europe Maybe Than In Other Places, But Not Exclusively.

Our Modern Lifestyle Is Not A Political Creation. Before 1700, Everybody Was Poor As Hell. Life Was Short And Brutish. It Wasn't Because We Didn't Have Good Politicians; We Had Some Really Good Politicians. But Then We Started Inventing - Electricity, Steam Engines, Microprocessors, Understanding Genetics And Medicine And Things Like That. Yes, Stability And Education Are Important - I'm Not Taking Anything Away From That - But Innovation Is The Real Driver Of Progress.

Haiti Should Remind Us All That There Is An Immediate Need To Invest In And Promote Long-term Development Projects That Are Sustainable, Scalable, And Proven To Work.

I Think It Makes Sense To Believe In God, But Exactly What Decision In Your Life You Make Differently Because Of It, I Don't Know.

Microsoft Is Not About Greed. It's About Innovation And Fairness.

Investing For The Poor Requires Participation From The Entire Community.

Another Trick In Software Is To Avoid Rewriting The Software By Using A Piece That's Already Been Written, So Called Component Approach Which The Latest Term For This In The Most Advanced Form Is What's Called Object Oriented Programming.

The Intersection Of Law, Politics, And Technology Is Going To Force A Lot Of Good Thinking.

I Didn't Used To Wear A Watch. Now I Have A Spot Watch, Which I Wear All The Time.

Embrace Bad News To Learn Where You Need The Most Improvement.

Corruption Is One Of The Most Common Reasons I Hear In Views That Criticize Aid.

China Is Certainly An Important Player In The Global Economy, And A Widespread Aids Epidemic Would Threaten That Growth.

In A System Of Capitalism, As People's Wealth Rises, The Financial Incentive To Serve Them Rises. As Their Wealth Falls, The Financial Incentive To Serve Them Falls, Until It Becomes Zero. We Have To Find A Way To Make The Aspects Of Capitalism That Serve Wealthier People Serve Poorer People As Well.

Really Advanced Civilization Is Based On Advances In Energy.

Advanced Civilization

Personally, I'd Like To See More Of Our Leaders Take A Technocratic Approach To Solving Our Biggest Problems.

Any Machine That Can Run A Browser Is Not Thin. The Browser Has To Be The Thickest Application Man Has Ever Invented, And It's Getting Thicker Faster Than Anything Ever Development By Man.

Investing In Innovation, Which Was My Broad Theme Talking To [warren Buffett ], That Included Health Vaccines, It Included Energy And Education.

There Is This Broad, Broad Recognition Of How Technology Is Enabling New Things. Companies That Never Paid Attention To Computers In Any Form Now See Digital Technology As Creating Threats And Opportunities For Them.

What Are The Top 20 Universities In The World That Do Good Materials Research That Might Create Carbon Fibers To Do Jet Stream Kites Or New Magnets That Will Allow [energy] Generation To Be Done Up There And You Just Bring The Electricity Down. You Either Have To Bring Down Rotational Energy, Which Is Hard, Or You Have To Have The Generator Up There And Bring Down The Electricity. Well, Putting The Generator Up There Is Hard To Do Because It's Too Heavy.

If Success Corrupts, I'm Probably Pretty Corrupted By Now.

If People Had Understood How Patents Would Be Granted When Most Of Today's Ideas Were Invented, And Had Taken Out Patents, The Industry Would Be At A Complete Standstill Today.

Kids Are Taking Pcs And The Internet To New Heights. They're The Ones That Are Designing The Cutting-edge Web Sites.

Exposure From A Young Age To The Realities Of The World Is A Super-big Thing.

Drones Overall Will Be More Impactful Than I Think People Recognize In Positive Ways To Help Society.

It's Energy Intensification, Where We Essentially Have, Through Our Light Bulbs And Cars, The Manpower Of [hundreds Of] People Working On Our Behalf, Helping Our Food Being Created, Helping Our Materials Like Steel And Plastic And Wood And Paper Be Created. Our Lifestyles Are Incredibly Energy Intense.

There Is A Difference Between What Technology Enables And What Historical Business Practices Enable.

The United States Has A Huge Budget Deficit So Taxes Are Going To Have To Go Up And I Certainly Agree They Should Go Up More On The Rich Than Everyone Else. That - That's Just Justice.

When You Want To Do Your Homework, Fill Out Your Tax Return, Or See All The Choices For A Trip You Want To Take, You Need A Full-size Screen.

The Internet? We Are Not Interested In It

The Machines Need To Get Faster. They Need To Get Cheaper.

It's Hard To Improve Public Education - That's Clear.

Public Education

Perhaps I Should Be Flattered That Somebody Imagines The Name Is Worth So Much, Especially Since My Parents Gave Me The Same Name 42 Years Ago For Free.

My Job Is About The Most Fun Thing I Do, But I Have A Broad Set Of Interests, Going Places, Reading Things, Doing Things.

I Think Any Statement About Stock Prices Is Always Suspect Unless It's Made By Warren Buffett.

U.k. Companies Are In Very International And Very Competitive Markets. If You Look At Pc Penetration In The U.k., It Is Very Similar To The United States Market.

I Definitely Think Leaving Kids Massive Amounts Of Money Is Not A Favor To Them.

Computer Science … Jobs Should Be Way More Interesting Than Even Going To Wall Street Or Being A Lawyer--or, I Can Argue, Than Anything But Perhaps Biology, And There It's Just A Tie.

Today, You Always Know Whether You Are On The Internet Or On Your Pc's Hard Drive. Tomorrow, You Will Not Care And May Not Even Know.

I Didn't Even Complete My University Education

University Education

Contrary To Popular Belief, I Don't Spend A Whole Lot Of Time Following Soccer. But As I Have Traveled Around The World To Better Understand Global Development And Health, I've Learned That Soccer Is Truly Universal. No Matter Where I Go, That's What Kids Are Playing. That's What People Are Talking About.

I Don't Like Typing Messages On My Phone. Some People Get Used To It.

What I Do Best Is Share My Enthusiasm.

We're In A Period Of Uncertainty About [donald Trump] Administration Policies And The Range Of What Might Happen Is Particularly Higher. I Don't Think That These R&d And Innovation Budgets Will Be Substantially Reduced.

Being Flooded With Information Doesn't Mean We Have The Right Information Or That We're In Touch With The Right People.

You Can Always Think Of Something Like The Xbox 360 As A Super Set-top Box That Can Do Everything The Set-top Box Does, But Then Have The Graphics To Do The Games As Well.

We Need A Malaria Epidemic In The Blogging Community! Either That Or We Need People Who Have Seen The Malaria Epidemic To Start Blogging.

Research Shows That There Is Only Half As Much Variation In Student Achievement Between Schools As There Is Among Classrooms In The Same School. If You Want Your Child To Get The Best Education Possible, It Is Actually More Important To Get Him Assigned To A Great Teacher Than To A Great School.

The Most Straightforward Path Would Be If We Could Bring The Cost Of Solar Electric And Wind Down By Another Factor Of Say, Three, And Then Have Some Miraculous Storage Solution, So That Not Only Over The 24-hour Day But Over Long Periods Of Time Where The Wind Doesn't Blow, You Have Reliable Energy. That's A Path. But Energy Storage Is Hard. That's Not A Guaranteed Path.

I Keep Bumping Into That Silly Quotation Attributed To Me That Says 640k Of Memory Is Enough. There's Never A Citation; The Quotation Just Floats Like A Rumor, Repeated Again And Again.

I Think There Certainly Was A Milestone In The '90s With Regards To The Internet Achieving Critical Mass. There Were Several Magical Factors That Came Together: The Creation Of Html By Tim Berners-lee, The Drop In The Price Of Communications, And All The Pcs Out There That You Could Put This Software Into.

If We [the Usa] Don't Innovate In Education, It's Literally Going To Mean Less People Get To Go Have That Education At A Time When More People Are Going To Want It. We've Got To Put Courses Out On The Web, We've Got To Put Interactive Learning Out On The Web.

I Think That Our Progress On Key Diseases Over The Next Several Decades Is Going To Be Pretty Amazing And So I Am Very Interested In That.

Life Is A Lot More Fun If You Treat Its Challenges In Creative Ways.

Analytical Software Enables You To Shift Human Resources From Rote Data Collection To Value-added Customer Service And Support Where The Human Touch Makes A Profound Difference.

Data Collection

I Am Super Lucky. I've Been In The Area Where Things Have Been Changing And Been Part Of The Digital Revolution, The Magic Of Software, The Internet, The Computer, And Now The Cellphone... So It's Been A Great Privilege.

Windows 95 Was A Nice Milestone.

Since When Has The World Of Computer Software Design Been About What People Want? This Is A Simple Question Of Evolution. The Day Is Quickly Coming When Every Knee Will Bow Down To A Silicon Fist, And You Will All Beg Your Binary Gods For Mercy.

When The Pc Was Launched, People Knew It Was Important.

The Kids Are A Big Part Of My Schedule.

You Need To Understand Things In Order To Invent Beyond Them.

Microsoft Has Had Its Success By Doing Low-cost Products And Constantly Improving Those Products And We've Really Redefined The It Industry To Be Something That's About A Tool For Individuals.

I Know That Historically Our Foundation Has Had Great Relations With All The Administrations.[bill] Clinton Administration Did A Lot Of Outreach. The Greatest Rise In U.s. Foreign Aid Was Under The [george] Bush Administration, That's Where We Got The Aids Initiative, Which Is Called Pepfar.

The Thing About Hd-dvd That Is Attractive To Microsoft Is That It's Very Pro-consumer In Letting You Copy All Movies Up Onto The Hard Disk.

Giving Money Effectively Is Almost As Hard As Earning It In The First Place.

To Win Big, You Sometimes Have To Take Big Risks.

There Was A Magical Breakthrough When The Computer Became Cheap And We Could See That Everyone Could Afford A Computer.

The World Today Has 6.8 Billion People...that's Headed Up To About 9 Billion. If We Do A Really Great Job On Vaccines, Health Care, Reproductive Health Services, We Could Lower That By Perhaps 10 To 15 Percent.

Flying Cars Are Not A Very Efficient Way To Move Things From One Point To Another.

In Almost Every Area Of Human Endeavor, The Practice Improves Over Time. That Hasn't Been The Case For Teaching.

Effective Philanthropy Requires A Lot Of Time And Creativity - The Same Kind Of Focus And Skills That Building A Business Requires.

The Information Highway Will Transform Our Culture As Dramatically As Gutenberg's Press Did The Middle Ages.

I'm Certainly Well Taken Care Of In Terms Of Food And Clothes ... Money Has No Utility To Me Beyond A Certain Point. Its Utility Is Entirely In Building An Organization And Getting The Resources Out To The Poorest In The World.

You Can Go Overboard In How Quickly You Might Expect New Technologies To Transform People's Lives. But I Very Much Believe The Way Software Is Used, The Way Information Gets Distributed, Will Be Dramatically Different Within 10 Years. There Is Fire To Go With All This Smoke.

If You Mess Up, It's Not Your Parents' Fault, So Don't Whine About Your Mistakes, Learn From Them.

Hopefully, Whether It's Energy Or Child Vaccines, The Case Of The Many Benefits Helping Countries So That They Are Stable, So These Refugee Problems That Have Been Troubling For Europe - A Little Less So For The U.s. But, Even So, A Lot Of Controversy There - These Things Are Why The Future's Going To Be Better Than The Past. People Really Do Look To The United States, So We'll Be There Making The Case.

When I Walk Into A Grocery Store And Look At All The Products You Can Choose, I Say, "my God!" No King Ever Had Anything Like I Have In My Grocery Store Today.

Software Is Definitely Engineering. It's Different In That We Take On Novel Tasks Every Time. It's Not Like Building A Certain Bridge That Is Virtually Identical To Some Previous Bridge Or Some Previous Building.

The Current Information Revolution Is A Cultural Revolution, A Social Revolution, A Thoroughgoing Technological Revolution That Involves Not Just Information, But Labor, Leisure, Entertainment, Communication, Education, Culture And Thus Is Part Of A Major Cultural And Social Shift.

India Just Went 3 Years With No Cases [of Polio]. Pakistan Is Our Toughest Location Right Now Because Some Parts Of The Taliban Have Not Allowed Vaccinators To Come In And Have Even Attacked Vaccinators. We Are Hopeful This Will Get Resolved Since No One Wants Their Kid To Be Paralyzed. I Spend A Lot Of Time Making Sure The Polio Campaign Is Doing The Best It Can. We Have Great Computer Models That Help Guide Our Activities.

I Mean, If We Said Right Now, There's Somebody In The Next Room Who's Dying, Let's All Go Save Their Life, You Know, Everybody Would Just Get Up Immediately And Go Get Involved In That.

Your Customers Get Better When You Do.

Service Culture

Software Innovation, Like Almost Every Other Kind Of Innovation, Requires The Ability To Collaborate And Share Ideas With Other People, And To Sit Down And Talk With Customers And Get Their Feedback And Understand Their Needs.

Historically, Privacy Was Almost Implicit, Because It Was Hard To Find And Gather Information. But In The Digital World, Whether It's Digital Cameras Or Satellites Or Just What You Click On, We Need To Have More Explicit Rules - Not Just For Governments But For Private Companies.

Typically, Your Corporate E-mail Account Is Not, Today, That Spam-targeted. It's More The Free E-mail Accounts That Are Spam-targeted.

As For Drugs - Well, Gates Was Certainly Not Unusual There. Marijuana Was The Pharmaceutical Of Choice.

Microsoft Has Some Assets Like Office That Have Stayed Strong And There's So Much Room For Innovation In Those.

The World Needs Banking But It Does Not Need Banks.

Make Sure People Get Educated, Help Out With Health Emergencies. Those Things, The Government Should Do. That's 96 Per Cent Of The Economy, Those Two Sectors.

In Order For The United States To Do The Right Things For The Long Term, It Appears To Be Helpful For Us To Have The Prospect Of Humiliation. Sputnik Helped Us Fund Good Science - Really Good Science: The Semiconductor Came Out Of It.

Imagine, Just For The Sake Of Discussion, That You Had A Few Hours A Week And A Few Dollars A Month To Donate To A Cause - And You Wanted To Spend That Time And Money Where It Would Have The Greatest Impact In Saving And Improving Lives. Where Would You Spend It?

Countries Which Receive Aid Do Graduate. Within A Generation, Korea Went From Being A Big Recipient To Being A Big Aid Donor. China Used To Get Quite A Bit Of Aid; Now It's Aid-neutral.

Learning To Write Programs Stretches Your Mind, And Helps You Think Better, Creates A Way Of Thinking About Things That I Think Is Helpful In All Domains.

Take Agriculture, Where We Haven't Done Much, Or Sanitation; Saying, "okay, We Will Be Able To Make A Really Huge Effort There." It Really Energized The Foundation And Half Of What We've Gotten Done In This Last Decade Is Because Warren [buffett] Trusted Us.

I Could Name About A Dozen Paths, And You'd Like To Have A Whole Bunch Of Research On All Those Paths, And Then, Eventually, At Least Four To Five Companies With Really Significant Financing Try And Get To Big Scale, Going Down And Really Trying To Prove It Out.

Africa Is On The Rise.

In Low-income Countries, Getting To A Health Post Is Hard. It's Very Expensive.

Reward Worthy Failure - Experimentation.

Making Mistakes

You Have To Be Willing To See That Sometimes The Governments Of These Poor Countries Don't Come Through. You Have To Think About That As A Constraint. How Do You Help Them Be Better? How Do You Come Up With Things That Actually Work, Even In Those Tough Situations.

Oh, I Think There Are A Lot Of People Who Would Be Buying And Selling Online Today That Go Up There And They Get The Information, But Then When It Comes Time To Type In Their Credit Card They Think Twice Because They're Not Sure About How That Might Get Out And What That Might Mean For Them.

I Am Surprised That In Various Countries, Whether It's The U.k. Or The U.s., You See Isolationist Tendencies That Would Tend To Work Against The Co-operation, Whether It's Climate Change, Immigration, Innovation, Helping The Very Poorest. Those Are Things Where You Want To Think Across Country Boundaries And See A Win-win-type Solution.

The World Is Not Flat, And Pcs Are Not, In The Hierarchy Of Human Needs, In The First Five Rungs.

If People Want Capital Gains Taxed More Like The Highest Rate On Income, That's A Good Discussion. Maybe That's The Way To Help Close The Deficit.

By 2035, There Will Be Almost No Poor Countries Left In The World.

Until Recently, Over 98 Percent Of Teachers Just Got One Word Of Feedback: Satisfactory. If All My Bridge Coach Ever Told Me Was That I Was 'satisfactory,' I Would Have No Hope Of Ever Getting Better.

Governments Will Always Play A Huge Part In Solving Big Problems. They Set Public Policy And Are Uniquely Able To Provide The Resources To Make Sure Solutions Reach Everyone Who Needs Them. They Also Fund Basic Research, Which Is A Crucial Component Of The Innovation That Improves Life For Everyone.

The Only Thing I Understand Deeply, Because In My Teens I Was Thinking About It, And Every Year Of My Life, Is Software. So I'll Never Be Hands-on On Anything Except Software.

The Most Impactful Dollars That Australia Can Spend Are Actually What Goes To Help The Poorest.

Should There Be Cameras Everywhere In Outdoor Streets? My Personal View Is Having Cameras In Inner Cities Is A Very Good Thing. In The Case Of London, Petty Crime Has Gone Down. They Catch Terrorists Because Of It. And If Something Really Bad Happens, Most Of The Time You Can Figure Out Who Did It.

If You Believe That Every Life Has Equal Value, It’s Revolting To Learn That Some Lives Are Seen As Worth Saving And Others Are Not. We Said To Ourselves: “this Can’t Be True. But If It Is True, It Deserves To Be The Priority Of Our Giving.”

I Want To Admit That I Am An Optimist. Any Tough Problem, I Think It Can Be Solved.

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.

When Paul Allen And I Started Microsoft Over 30 Years Ago, We Had Big Dreams About Software. We Had Dreams About The Impact It Could Have.

3d Is A Way Of Organizing Things, Particularly As We're Getting Much More Media Information On The Computer, A Lot More Choices, A Lot More Navigation Than We've Ever Had Before.

If The 1980s Were About Quality And The 1990s Were About Reengineering, Then The 2000s Will Be About Velocity.

I Believe Innovation Is The Most Powerful Force For Change In The World. People Who Are Pessimistic About The Future Tend To Extrapolate From The Present In A Straight Line. But Innovation Fundamentally Shifts The Trajectory Of Development.

Over Time, Yes, Countries Will Need To Look At Specific Gmo Products Like They Look At Drugs Today, Where They Don't Approve Them All. They Look Hard At The Safety And The Testing. And They Make Sure That The Benefits Far Outweigh Any Of The Downsides.

If You Rely Too Much On The People In Other Countries And Other Companies, In A Sense That's Your Brain And You Are Outsourcing Your Brain.

That's The Part Where The Governments Have A Unique Role, And Then When It Progresses Well Enough, Then Existing Companies Or New Startup Companies Should Take It. In The $3 Trillion A Year Energy Market, The Rewards Will Be Quite Fantastic.

I Choose A Lazy Person To Do A Hard Job. Because A Lazy Person Will Find An Easy Way To Do It.

[melinda Gates] Is A Lot Of Fun To Work With. There's Some Of The People Skills That She's Better At And Cares About More. It'd Be A Mistake Not To Think Of Her As Very Numerical And Interested In The Science. I Enjoy, If I Get Ahead Of Her, Say, Understanding The Immune System, Then We Can Spend A Few Hours, Where I'm Going Through How Amazing It Is And Interesting, And How That Affects Our Creating New Products, So I've Always Had A Partner.

So Not Only Are We Saving Lives Now, We're Creating The Incentive For The Breakthroughs That Over The Next Generation Will Mean We Can Take Aids, Malaria And Tb And Bring Those Numbers Dramatically Down.

I'm Going To Save My Public Voice Largely For The Issues Where I Have Some Depth.

For A Highly Motivated Learner, It's Not Like Knowledge Is Secret And Somehow The Internet Made It Not Secret. It Just Made Knowledge Easy To Find. If You're A Motivated Enough Learner, Books Are Pretty Good.

For One Thing, There's An Essential Human Factor In Every Business Endeavor. It Doesn't Matter If You Have A Perfect Product, Production Plan And Marketing Pitch; You'll Still Need The Right People To Lead And Implement Those Plans.

Some Very Poor Countries Run Great Vaccination Systems, And Some Richer Ones Run Terrible Programs.

I'm Serious When I Do My Work. I'm Not Serious When I'm Home With My Kids.

Patience Is A Key Element Of Success.

Certainly There's A Phenomenon Around Open Source. You Know Free Software Will Be A Vibrant Area. There Will Be A Lot Of Neat Things That Get Done There.

The Challenge Here Is To Design A System Where Market Incentives, Including Profits And Recognition, Drive Those Principles To Do More For The Poor. I Like To Call This Idea Creative Capitalism, An Approach Where Governments, Businesses, And Nonprofits Work Together To Stretch The Reach Of Market Forces So That More People Can Make A Profit, Or Gain Recognition, Doing Work That Eases The World's Inequities.

I Believe That If You Show People The Problems And You Show Them The Solutions They Will Be Moved To Act.

Now We've Got That [children's Death Rate] Down To About 5 Percent, So We've More Than Cut It In Half, And That's Because We're Getting Vaccines Out, Economic Improvement Also Helps There, But The Vaccines Are Why We've Seen An Acceleration In Getting That Down.

We Make The Future Sustainable When We Invest In The Poor, Not When We Insist On Their Suffering.

The Ebola Epidemic Can Serve As An Early Warning Wake-up Call To Get Ready. If We Start Now, We Can Be Ready For The Next Epidemic.

We [corbis] Make It So Easy To Call Up Images, Whether Art Or People Or Beaches Or Sunsets Or Nobel Prize Winners.

When You Say That After World War I There Was A Pandemic That Killed More People Than The War Itself, Most Will Say: "wait, Are You Kidding? I Know World War I, But There Was No World War 1.5, Was There?" But People Were Traveling Around After The War, And That Meant The Force Of Infection Was Much Higher. And The Problem Is That The Rate Of Travel Back Then Was Dramatically Less Than What We Have Nowadays.

Thanks To Quality Education, Israel Is One Of The Most Advanced Countries In The World .. Israel Is Advancing In High-tech Even More Than Other Developed Countries.

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.

Learn From Your Unhappy Customers.

If You Think Your Teacher Is Tough, Wait Till You Get A Boss.

That It's A Worldwide Thing That Families Are Better Off.

Of All The Statistics In Health, Death Is The Easiest, Because You Can Go Out And Ask People, "hey, Have You Had Any Children Who Died, Did Your Siblings Have Any Children Who Died?" People Don't Forget That.

The Way To Be Successful In The Software World Is To Come Up With Breakthrough Software, And So Whether It's Microsoft Office Or Windows, Its Pushing That Forward. New Ideas, Surprising The Marketplace, So Good Engineering And Good Business Are One In The Same.

A Bad Strategy Will Fail No Matter How Good Your Information Is. And Lame Execution Will Stymie A Good Strategy. If You Do Enough Things Poorly, You'll Go Out Of Business.

In The Next 15 Years, We Can Halve Childhood Deaths. That's Doable.

In The Philanthropy Game, You're Going For Different Outcomes: Saving Childhood Lives, Having Kids Grow Up - Because They Don't Have Malnutrition Or Disease - That They Achieve Their Full Potential. We Take For Warren [buffett] Things That, Because He's Very Intelligent About The World But Doesn't Get To Go Out In Africa And See What We See, We've Taken And Say To Him Where We Stand And It's Basically A Very Positive Report That His Gift Has Made A Phenomenal Difference.

We Flew Down Weekly To Meet With Ibm, But They Thought The Way To Measure Software Was The Amount Of Code We Wrote, When Really The Better The Software, The Fewer Lines Of Code.

Virtually Every Company Will Be Going Out And Empowering Their Workers With A Certain Set Of Tools, And The Big Difference In How Much Value Is Received From That Will Be How Much The Company Steps Back And Really Thinks Through Their Business Processes, Thinking Through How Their Business Can Change, How Their Project Management, Their Customer Feedback, Their Planning Cycles Can Be Quite Different Than They Ever Were Before.

You Can Make Money And You Can Make Excuses, But You Can Never Make Money Out Of Excuses

The Ideal Thing Would Be To Have A 100 Percent Effective Aids Vaccine. And To Have Broad Usage Of That Vaccine. That Would Literally Break The Epidemic.

The World Is Progressing And Resources Are Becoming More Abundant. I'd Rather Go Into A Grocery Store Today Than A King's Banquet A Hundred Years Ago.

The Internet Is Just A Passing Fad.

The Dreams Of The Past - Whether It Was Public Tv Being Rolled Into The Classroom To Teach Spanish, Or The Film Projectors Or The Videotapes Or The Computer-aided Instruction Drill Systems - The Hopes Have Been Dashed In Terms Of Technology Having Some Big Impact. The Foundation, I Think Can Play A Unique Role There. Now, Our Money Is More To The Teacher-effectiveness Thing, And Technology Is No. 2, But I'll Probably Spend More Money On The Technology Things.

I Meet People Overseas That Know Five Languages - That The Only Language I'm Comfortable In Is English.

Well, I Don't Think There's Any Need For People To Focus On My Career.

By Almost Any Measure, The World Is Better Than It Has Ever Been. People Are Living Longer, Healthier Lives. Many Nations That Were Aid Recipients Are Now Self-sufficient. You Might Think That Such Striking Progress Would Be Widely Celebrated, But In Fact, Melinda And I Are Struck By How Many People Think The World Is Getting Worse. The Belief That The World Can’t Solve Extreme Poverty And Disease Isn’t Just Mistaken. It Is Harmful. That’s Why In This Year’s Letter We Take Apart Some Of The Myths That Slow Down The Work. The Next Time You Hear These Myths, We Hope You Will Do The Same.

On My Desk I Have Three Screens, Synchronized To Form A Single Desktop. I Can Drag Items From One Screen To The Next. Once You Have That Large Display Area, You'll Never Go Back, Because It Has A Direct Impact On Productivity.

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.

Bringing Together The Right Information With The Right People Will Dramatically Improve A Company's Ability To Develop And Act On Strategic Business Opportunities.

I Don't Think There's Anything Unique About Human Intelligence.

If You Go Back To 1800, Everybody Was Poor. I Mean Everybody. The Industrial Revolution Kicked In, And A Lot Of Countries Benefited, But By No Means Everyone.

I Have A Particular Relationship With Vinod Khosla Because He's Got A Lot Of Very Interesting Science-based Energy Startups.

Very Interesting

Sometimes, I Think My Most Important Job As A Ceo Is To Listen For Bad News. If You Don't Act On It, Your People Will Eventually Stop Bringing Bad News To Your Attention And That Is The Beginning Of The End.

I Have To Say That In 1981, Making Those Decisions, I Felt Like I Was Providing Enough Freedom For 10 Years. That Is, A Move From 64k To 640k Felt Like Something That Would Last A Great Deal Of Time. Well, It Didn't - It Took About Only 6 Years Before People Started To See That As A Real Problem.

When I Say "an Energy Miracle," I Mean That There Will Be Some Form Of Energy Whose 24 Hour Cost Really Is Competitive With Hydrocarbons Given, Say, 20 Years Of Learning Curve. You Invent It, Then You Look At How Much Its Costs Go Down Over The Next 20 Years, That It Really Beats Hydrocarbons.

Cutting Through Complexity To Find A Solution Runs Through Four Predictable Stages: Determine A Goal, Find The Highest-leverage Approach, Discover The Ideal Technology For That Approach, And In The Meantime, Make The Smartest Application Of The Technology That You Already Have - Whether It's Something Sophisticated, Like A Drug, Or Something Simpler, Like A Bednet.

Test Scores Aren't Perfect, But Having A Test Score For Math Or Reading Or Other Things That We Can Objectively Measure Is A Meaningful Component That Makes A Lot Of Sense.

If I Had One Dollar Left, I'd Spend It On Pr

My Success, Part Of It Certainly, Is That I Have Focused In On A Few Things.

Focus In Business

A Company Needs To Have Good Business Reflexes, To Be Able To Marshal Its Forces In A Crisis Or In Response To Any Unplanned Event.

The Difference Between A Stranger Sending You A Message That You Might Be Interested In At A Very Low Volume Level, No Repetition, Just Sending It To Very Few People, And That Being Done As Spam - Those Things Get Close Enough That You Want To Be Careful Never To Filter Out Something That's Legitimate.

If I Think Something's A Waste Of Time Or Inappropriate I Don't Wait To Point It Out. I Say It Right Away. It's Real Time. So You Might Hear Me Say 'that's The Dumbest Idea I Have Ever Heard' Many Times During A Meeting.

Software Is More Important Than Hardware.

There's Only One Trick In Software, And That Is Using A Piece Of Software That's Already Been Written.

There's 20 Companies That I Have Investments In - Some Batteries, Some Solar-thermal, One Big Nuclear Thing. We Need Hundreds And Hundreds Of Companies Like That, So That In A 20-year Time Frame We Really Are Starting To Change The Energy Infrastructure.

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