businesspeople-from-california

"Born and raised in , Mr. Gemignani started making at age 15 in his brother’s pizza shop in When Mr. Gemignani encountered his first on a visit to the city 20 years ago, he was a changed man. “In California, pizza was just that, pizza. But when I started traveling and visiting places like New York, you understand pizza in a totally different and beautiful way,” he said. I felt that there would be a renaissance in the slice business coming,” Mr. Gemignani said. He opened the acclaimed in the in 2009. Shortly after, he realized that the New York slice was just as deserving of respect as the sanctified whole and s that most pizza nerds lauded. So the following year he opened the first Slice House next door — where the pizza boxes read, “Respect the Craft!” in big, bright red letters."

"One of my head pizzaiolos, Laura Meyer, has lived and studied in Italy and speaks fluently. So when the world championships in , Italy, rolled around, she was excited to give it a shot. We flew over together and planned her entry in the pizza in teglia ("," or what we would call ) division. I advised her not to go too off the wall—Italians don't love that, especially from Americans—but to add a little twist that would be just creative enough. Laura settled on a classic pizza alla diavola, which is made with whole milk , , and slices of the spicy oblong known as soppressata picante. Her clever addition was a scattering of on top of the finished pizza. Tasting the mildness of the Italian mozzarella, she decided to blend in a bit of ' for extra flavor. And because we were in Parma, she finished her creation with shavings of , and some for good measure. ... In addition to a title she will hold all her life, she won a , a of , and a five-kilo block of Parmesan cheese, which she hand-carried all the way back home. ..."

"Boris never, ever gave me favouritism. Never once did I ask him for a favour. Never once did he write a letter of recommendation for me. He didn’t know about my asking to go to trips. He only knew me as an extremely passionate entrepreneur of the London tech scene."

"On the bus, he had a book of short stories. I think it was Voltaire, I remember striking up a conversation about classic literature and Shakespeare, we immediately bonded over this kind of mutual love of classic literature and particularly Shakespeare.”"

"Of course the first initial reaction is to deny everything, and to come out making sure your side… when I saw the way I’m objectified and dragged through the press with all these misquotes and misinterpretations of who I am. If I’d looked a different way or if I was a man, I wouldn’t be objectified this way…”"

"I feel like I'm juggling a lot right now, but my main focus is my cosmetics line. There's so much I want to do that I can't really think about anything else. I want to take my time and work on each individual product until it's perfect. I don't want to rush into anything."

"I had the opportunity to make like the coolest makeup line that I've always dreamed of. It's really my only passion. I learned a lot though and just have experienced things that people my age do not even know how to handle. I do feel like people don’t take me seriously as a businesswoman because of my age and my reputation. But I do think they’re starting to. I like to prove people wrong."

"With YouTube, I remember our first hit was of two Chinese students in their dorm room singing (with roommate studying in the background). That was the first time I saw that anyone could become a creator and that people wanted to watch content from all types of creators."

"Susan was employee number sixteen at Google."

"As a company that has long supported free expression, Google obviously stands by the right that employees have to voice, publish or tweet their opinions, but while people may have a right to express their beliefs in public, that does not mean companies cannot take action when women are subjected to comments that perpetuate negative stereotypes about them based on their gender"

"I realized the impact Google was going to have when I started using it in 1998 when it was just getting started. One day I couldn’t access the service and realized I couldn’t get my work done. I realized how Google could help people all over the world to find the information they needed."

"I was still fairly certain that huge swaths of crypto were essentially a pyramid scheme, but the bubble hadn’t popped. The industry was doing great. It seemed quite possible that the craze could continue far beyond my deadline. Or maybe crypto would gain so many followers that it would become unstoppable. I had no idea what the ending of the book was going to be. After we’d spent a few hours together, I decided to ask Bankman-Fried for advice. This was half interview tactic, half genuine cry for help. I didn’t expect him to tell me his whole industry was really a fraud. But I wanted to see if he might be willing to point me in the right direction. So I laid out my whole narrative dilemma. I told him my theory: that the coin called Tether, the supposedly safe crypto-bank that served as the backbone for a whole lot of other cryptocurrencies, could prove to be fraudulent, and how that could bring down the whole industry. Bankman-Fried said that I was wrong. Crypto wasn’t a scam, and neither was Tether. But he wasn’t offended by my question. He said he totally understood my problem. Then he did something that didn’t strike me as strange at the time. But knowing what I know now, I can’t help but wonder if he was trying to make some kind of winking confession. Bankman-Fried cut me off, nodding, as I tried to explain more. His tone turned chipper. He said: “It’s like the narrative would be way sexier if it was like, ‘Holy shit, this is the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme,’ right?” Right."

"My plan was to write a profile of crypto's boy genius, the man who, at twenty-nine, seemed to have the future of money figured out His rise had been so meteoric that it seemed plausible when he said FTX would one day take over all of Wall Street. He was worth at least $20 billion, but he claimed he'd only gotten rich so that he could give it all away. He drove a Toyota Corolla and liked to sleep at the office on a beenbag chair, which I could see next to his desk. It was an irresistable story. The problem was it was not true. While the media, politicians, venture capitalists, and investment bankers lauded him as a benevolent prodigy—a Warren Buffett or J. P. Morgan for the digital age—he was secretly embezzling billions of dollars of his customers' money and blowing it on bad trades, celebrity endorsements, and an island real-estate shopping spree to rival any drug kingpin's."

"Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls"

"He’s a phenom ... He’s achieved a lot so far, and he has the respect of a lot of investors—I’m one of them—but his job is just beginning."

":* "Sam Bankman-Fried Is Going Down Posting" (By Will Gottsegen November 19, 2022)"

"I would never read a book... I'm very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that, I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post."

"I got involved in crypto without any idea what crypto was... It just seemed like there was a lot of good trading to do."

"Groupthink: Fletcher took listservs mainstream with OneList, a company he founded in 1997. Users turned to OneList to create, administer, and find mailing lists through a simple Web-based interface. By 2000, when Yahoo! bought the company for $420 million to establish Yahoo! Groups, OneList had millions of subscribers and was sending out billions of emails per month"

"Ask Jeeves will be committing resources to Bloglines to help us build out our service even more and accelerate our product roadmap"

"I got to ride the bubble"

"This time, I’m trying to make new mistakes"

"[Memo to Bill Gates:] "Bring it on." [A Microsoft newsreader would expand the market without hurting Bloglines]. They’re a program, we’re a service, like webmail. With us, you’ll be able to read your feeds from anywhere"

"I’m not great at CSS and, like many others, find that positioning elements on a web page can range from tedious at best to utterly frustrating at worst. Fortunately, ChatGPT-4 is pretty adept at stuff like this. I’m not saying it’s perfect every time, but usually, I can arrive at an answer after a few iterations."

"Parents are happy I am doing what I love, maybe not so happy that all those videogames they told me were a waste of time ended up being as important as I always told them they would be!"

"For every family in liberal San Francisco that went solar with SunRun in 2010, nearly eight families in more conservative Fresno made the switch to our solar power service."

"A lot of my life is just copying things that I see. There's not a lot of original thought here. There truly is not. I mean, we can all pretend we're all fucking geniuses. Honestly, be good copiers. Do you know what I'm saying? It's the best thing in the world. Like, be around high-functioning, high-quality people and just copy the shit that they do. Observe the shit that's you know kind of crappy and don't so that stuff. It's not a fucking complicated formula."

"I can’t control them. I can control my decision, which is that I don’t use that shit. I can control my kids’ decisions, which is that they’re not allowed to use that shit."

"The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth. This is not about Russian ads. This is a global problem. It is eroding the core foundations of how people behave by and between each other."

"Life is full of choices, and many years ago, I chose to become a vegetarian, and it was one of the best choices I’ve ever made."

"[About why he named his daughter True and son Ocean] I want those names to be their destiny, for my daughter to be honest and my son to be expansive. I try to be like a forest, revitalizing and constantly growing. … being called Forest helped me find my identity."

"Mozilla believes both in equality and freedom of speech. Equality is necessary for meaningful speech, and you need free speech to fight for equality. Figuring out how to stand for both at the same time can be hard."

"The MPL 1.1 versions had one expert who had been involved in every word and every decision. Even today, more than a decade later, I can still bring to mind particular phrases or section references along with the rationale behind them."

"When I wrote the MPL we drew upon the GPL v2 for many ideas, and on the MIT and BSD and early Apache license."

"The average consumer does not know the difference between browser, Internet and search box."

"Many of today's trading relationships actually make America more globally competitive. . . . Raising tariffs among the United States, Canada and Mexico will only weaken a well-oiled manufacturing machine that is driven by the high level of integration the three economies have in their supply chains. This integration makes the region as a whole more competitive vis-à-vis the world."

"We should say we think a big element in the process of seeking peace [in the Middle East] is the acceptance of Israel's existence and so we´re going to go around to all our friends in Europe and Asia and elsewhere and say let´s accept Israel´s right to exist - and a way of doing that is to move our embassy to west Jerusalem. As long as the embassy is in Tel Aviv, it sort of says we´re camping out."

"When current events set us thinking about which former Washington policymaker might have something interesting to say about this story or that story, the name of George Shultz inevitably comes to mind."

"George left us at a moment when our national arguments are too often vindicated by passion rather than reason, by the debasement of the adversary rather than the uplifting of purposes. He also believed that if you were blessed with great gifts, you had a responsibility to apply yourself, and if you cared about your country, you had a duty to defend and improve it. He was skilled in presenting his convictions, but above all practiced the art of making controversy superfluous by encouraging mutual respect. Trust, George used to say, is the coin of the realm."

"Any further spread of nuclear weapons multiplies the possibilities of nuclear confrontation and magnifies the danger of diversion. Thus, if proliferation of weapons of mass destruction continues into Iran and remains in North Korea in the face of all ongoing negotiations, the incentives for other countries to follow the same path will become overwhelming. Considerations as these have induced former Senator Sam Nunn, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, former Secretary of State George Shultz, and I -- two Democrats and two Republicans -- to publish recommendations for systematically reducing and eventually eliminating reliance on nuclear weapons. We have a record of strong commitment to national defense and security. We continue to affirm the importance of adequate deterrent forces, and we do not want our recommendations to diminish essentials for the defense of free peoples while a process of adaptation to new realities is going on. At the same time, we reaffirm the objective of a world without nuclear weapons that has been proclaimed by every American President since President Eisenhower."

"Gorbachev's impressionability also showed up in economics. He had been aware, from his travels outside the Soviet Union before assuming the leadership, that "people there . . . were better off than in our country." It seemed that "our aged leaders were not especially worried about our undeniably lower living standards, our unsatisfactory way of life, and our falling behind in the field of advanced technologies." But he had no clear sense of what to do about this. So Secretary of State Shultz, a former economics professor at Stanford, took it upon himself to educate the new Soviet leader. Shultz began by lecturing Gorbachev, as early as 1985, on the impossibility of a closed society being a prosperous society: "People must be free to express themselves, move around, emigrate and travel if they want to. . . . Otherwise they can't take advantage of the opportunities available. The Soviet economy will have to be radically changed to adapt to the new era." "You should take over the planning office here in Moscow," Gorbachev joked, "because you have more ideas than they have." In a way, this is what Shultz did. Over the next several years, he used his trips to that city to run tutorials for Gorbachev and his advisers, even bringing pie charts to the Kremlin to illustrate his argument that as long as it retained a command economy, the Soviet Union would fall further and further behind the rest of the developed world. Gorbachev was surprisingly receptive. He echoed some of Shultz's thinking in his 1987 book, Perestroika: "How can the economy advance," he asked, "if it creates preferential conditions for backward enterprises and penalizes the foremost ones?""

"Few people did as much to shape the trajectory of American diplomacy and American influence in the 20th century as George Shultz. He was a gentleman of honor and ideas, dedicated to public service and respectful debate, even into his 100th year on Earth. That's why multiple Presidents, of both political parties, sought his counsel. I regret that, as President, I will not be able to benefit from his wisdom, as have so many of my predecessors."

"[A] revenue-neutral carbon tax would benefit all Americans by eliminating the need for costly energy subsidies while promoting a level playing field for energy producers."

"Paul likes to test himself. That's what makes Paul run. He's got a lot of courage, a highly underrated element in people's lives these days."

"I'd like to be remembered as a guy who tried — tried to be part of his times, tried to help people communicate with one another, tried to find some decency in his own life, tried to extend himself as a human being. Someone who isn't complacent, who doesn't cop out."

"I've repeatedly said that for people as little in common as Joanne and myself, we have an uncommonly good marriage. We are actors, we make pictures — and that's about all we have in common. Maybe that's enough. Wives shouldn't feel obligated to accompany their husbands to a ball game, husbands do look a bit silly attending morning coffee breaks with the neighbourhood wives when most men are out at work. Husbands and wives should have separate interests, cultivate different sets of friends — and not impose one upon the other."

"I was terrorized by the emotional requirements of being an actor. Acting is like letting your pants down; you're exposed."

"I wasn't driven to acting by any inner compulsion. I was running away from the sporting goods business."

"Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experiences."

"I was always a character actor. I just looked like Little Red Riding Hood."