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Jeff Bezos
Founder and CEO, Amazon.com
Jeff Bezos: I toyed with the idea of starting a company and even talked to a couple of friends about starting a company, and ultimately decided that it would be smarter to wait and learn a little bit more about business and the way the world works. You know, one of the things that it's very hard to believe when you're 22 or 23 years old is that you don't already know everything. It turns out -- people learn more and more as they get older -- that you seem to learn, you seem to realize that you know less and less every year that goes by. I can only imagine that by the time I'm 70 I will realize I know nothing. So that was, I think, a very good decision to not do that. I went to work for a start-up company, but one in New York City that was building a network for helping brokerage firms clear trades. It is kind of an obscure thing, and it's not very interesting to go into, but it used my technical skills, and it was very fun work, and I loved the people I was working with. From then on, I started working at the intersection of computers and finance, and stayed on Wall Street for a long time, ultimately worked for a company that did this thing called quantitative hedge fund trading. What we did was we programmed the computers and then the computers made stock trades, and that was very interesting too. And that was where I was working when I came across the fact that the web was growing at 2,300 percent a year, and that's what led to the forming of Amazon.com.
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Jeff Bezos
Founder and CEO, Amazon.com
Our timing was good, our choice of product categories -- books -- was a very good choice. And we did a lot of analysis on that to pick that category as the first best category for E-commerce online, but there were no guarantees that that was a good category. At the time we launched this business it wasn't even crystal clear that the technology would improve fast enough that ordinary people -- non-computer people -- would even want to bother with this technology. So, that was good luck.
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Jeff Bezos
Founder and CEO, Amazon.com
So, you want to start a company. Well, the first thing you do is you should write a business plan, and so I did that. I wrote about a 30-page business plan. I wrote a first draft. In fact, I wrote the first draft on the car trip from the East Coast to the West Coast. And, that is very helpful. You know the business plan won't survive its first encounters with reality. It will always be different. The reality will never be the plan, but the discipline of writing the plan forces you to think through some of the issues and to get sort of mentally comfortable in the space. Then you start to understand, if you push on this knob this will move over here and so on. So, that's the first step.
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Benazir Bhutto
Former Prime Minister of Pakistan
Benazir Bhutto: I think the most profound influence in my formative years was the years I spent at Harvard. I went there at a time of great social ferment, at a time when the Vietnam war was being fought. I -- as a nation -- was against the Vietnam war, but I found that my American fellow students were against that war too. So -- and they didn't want to fight the war. They were protesting it and I found that if you didn't like something you could do something about it. It was also a time when Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and idealism -- Cesar Chavez and the grape boycott from California, labor rights. So I was very much into saving the world. My generation grew up in saving the world. We thought education wasn't important. Exams weren't important, although I still did it because I was scared my father would get cross, but I discovered that life was more than my homework and my tuitions and my tutorial. Life was about the larger issues where we could all play a role.
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Elizabeth Blackburn
Nobel Prize in Medicine
As soon as I started looking at the molecular behavior, there was something unusual about the way the DNA was behaving, and then subsequent experiments by us and by others, over the next few years said, "Ah, there's something going on here which is different." So now, why are they important? So now, fast forwarding and jump ahead now to much more what we know. We know that the genetic material is in long thread-like molecules, DNA molecules, and they have -- each DNA molecule has two ends, and the ends have to be protected. Otherwise they kind of chemically fray away every time the cells multiply. So it turned out to be particularly important to cells that they protect the ends, and furthermore that they replenish the ends of DNA. It was that replenishment that was going on and giving rise to the strange behavior of the DNA that made us first suspicious. And then Carol and I then, you know, we'll look for telomerase. So we didn't stumble over telomerase. It was something that, there was some reason to think might exist, but it would take some real digging to get it.
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Elizabeth Blackburn
Nobel Prize in Medicine
One thing teaching makes you very, very clearly aware of is, if you don't really understand something, and think about it, you will never be able to teach it. So particularly starting at Berkeley, where I really had to learn how to teach undergraduates pretty early on, and that took a lot of work. That was a fairly daunting thing to have to teach undergraduates at Berkeley, without any kind of real training for it, and I remember feeling pretty under pressure while I was doing that. But it was worth going through that kind of crucible, because it was something that taught me a whole lot, and I learned the hard way. I have to say, I made a lot of mistakes in how I went about it. The poor students had to put up with a lot, but I realize that it is so important that if you teach, then it means that you've understood it, and then you've cleared your brain, and you've forced your brain to think about it, and that's really good.
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