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The promise of the early web was that everyone could have a website but there was something missing. Maybe the technology wasn't ready.

I'd say there was a fair amount of skepticism at the time about whether the Internet held any promise. And of course I felt that it did.

As the web becomes more and more of a part of our every day lives, it would be a horrible tragedy if it was locked up inside of companies and proprietary software.

Nobody has really grasped yet the great wealth that can be made selling data over the Web. There are 100 million potential customers out there.

Back in the late 1990s, venture capitalists got very excited about the Internet. A whole lot of money was poured into some companies that failed rather spectacularly, and a lot of people lost a lot of money.

When it broke out in the mid 1990s, the web was society's first at-scale digital artifact. It spread in orders of ten, first thousands, then millions, then hundreds of millions of pages - and on it went, to the billions it now encompasses.

For most of the '90s and the first part of this decade, content providers who wanted to publish online only needed to worry about the graphical web browser.

The fact of the matter is that the Internet has brought together millions of people who trust one another for reasons that are unknown.

The Web is actually a coming together of three technologies, if you like: the hypertext, the personal computer, and the network. So, the network we had, and the personal computers were there, but people didn't use them, because they didn't know what to use them for, except maybe for a few games.

Around '93, '94, the conventional wisdom about the Internet was that it was a toy for academics and researchers. So it was very, very underestimated for about two years.