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The most interesting biofuel efforts avoid using land that’s expensive and has high opportunity costs. They do this by getting onto other types of land, or taking advantage of byproducts that aren’t used in the food chain today, or by intercropping.

If we drive down the cost of transportation in space, we can do great things.

We’re excited by the success of WhatsApp on top of Android. Amazon brings services like Kindle on top of Android. It’s a competitive world and a lot more complex than people realize. When you run a platform on scale, you have to make sure it’s truly open. That way, not only do you do well, so do others.

A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

The common thread for everything I do is this idea of a Web-services architecture. What does that mean? It means taking components of software and systems and having them be self-describing, so that you can aim them, ask them what their capabilities are, and communicate with them using a standard protocol.

I look at Google and think they have a strong academic culture. Elegant solutions to complex problems.

There are really two things that have to occur in order for a new technology to be affordable to the mass market. One is you need economies of scale. The other is you need to iterate on the design. You need to go through a few versions.

Mediocre theoretical physicists make no progress. They spend all their time understanding other people’s progress.

There are different ways to do innovation. You can plant a lot of seeds, not be committed to any particular one of them, but just see what grows. And this really isn’t how we’ve approached this. We go mission-first, then focus on the pieces we need and go deep on them and be committed to them.

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.