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Virtually every real breakthrough in technology had a bubble which burst, left a lot of people broke who'd invested in it, but also left the infrastructure for this next golden age, effectively.

During my eighty-seven years I have witnessed a whole succession of technological revolutions. But none of them has done away with the need for character in the individual or the ability to think.

It is in revolutionary periods that the culmination of previous trends and the beginning of new ones appear.

I think the dot-com boom and bust represented the end of the beginning. The industry is more mature today.

Technology is rooted in the past. It dominates the present and tends into the future. It is a real historical movement - one of the great movements which shape and represent their epoch.

Perhaps the most encouraging trend is that, through technology, people are realizing how much agency they actually have. Technology has revolutionized the way we eat, live, communicate, socialize, learn, and do. We see enormous potential to create lasting, positive change in the way the world works by doing what we are doing.

We who work in technology have nurtured an especially rare gift: the opportunity to effect change at an unprecedented scale and rate. Technology, community, and capitalism combine to make Silicon Valley the potential epicenter of vast positive change.

So many technologies start out with a burst of idealism, democratization, and opportunity, and over time, they close down and become less friendly to entrepreneurship, to innovation, to new ideas. Over time, the companies that become dominant take more out of the ecosystem than they put back in.

Innovation and disruption are the hallmarks of the technology world, and hardly a moment passes when we are not thinking, doing, or talking about these topics.