Company Founders

"Sam Altman won't tell you that GPT-4 has 220 billion parameters and is a 16 weight mixture-model with 8 sets of weights."

"Half of these AI alignment problems are just human alignment problems. And that's what's also so scary about the language that they use. It's not the machines you want to align; it's me."

"When someone makes [a large language model] that is capable of citing its sources, it will kill Google. [...] Some startup is going to figure it out. I think, if you ask me, [...] I think by the end of the decade Google won't be the number one web page anymore."

"[About AI:] Oh, no! We can loose control? Yes! Thank God! I hope they loose control. I want them to loose control more than anything else. [...] Centralized and held control is tyranny. I don't like anarchy either, but I will always take anarchy over tyranny. Anarchy have a chance."

"The fundamental limitation of [computer] cloud is who owns the off-switch."

"Intelligence is so dangerous; be it human intelligence or machine intelligence. Intelligence is dangerous."

"It struck me one day how just silly atheism is. Of course we were created by God. It's the most obvious thing."

"Just dumping the code on GitHub is not open source. Open source is a culture. Open source means that your issues are not all one year old stale issues. Open source means developing in public."

"My central thesis about the world is there are things that centralize power and they're bad, and there are things that decentralize power and they're good. Everything I can do to help decentralice power I'd like to do."

"I'm hoping that games can get out of this whole mobile gaming dopamine pump thing [...] and create worlds."

"Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is barbaric, and I am categorically against it. I am horrified about the fate of people in Ukraine – many of them my personal friends and relatives – whose houses are being bombed every day."

"Since the start of the war, I have been focused on trying to support the talented Russian engineers who took a decision to leave the country. It has been an extraordinarily complex process, helping these engineers to start a new life."

"I'm pretty centrist politically. If there is one political position I cannot stand, it's deceleration. It's people who believe we should use less energy. Not people who believe global warming is a problem; I agree with you. Not people who believe that saving the environment is good; I agree with you. But people who think we should use less energy. That energy usage is a moral bad. No. No. You are diminishing humanity. [Instead we should ask] How do we make more of it? How do we make it clean? How do I pay 20 cent for a megawatt hour instead of a kilowatt hour?"

"I am known as one of the founders of Yandex. In our minds, when we founded it, we weren’t only creating a technology company. We were helping to create a new Russia – open, progressive, integrated into the global economy, and able to bring value to the world beyond natural resources."

"For the longest time at Comma I asked "Why did start a company? Why did I do this?" But, you know, what else was I going to do?"

"Utilitarianism is an abhorrent ideology. [...] I think charity is bad. what is charity but an investment that you don't expect to have a return on. [...] Probably almost always [making the world better] involves starting a company. [...] I like the flip side of effective altruism: effective accelerationism. I think accelerationism is the only thing that that's ever lifted people out of poverty. The fact that food is cheap, not we're giving food away because we are kindhearted people. [...] [Universal basic income], what a scary idea. [...] Your only source of power is granted to you by the goodwill of the government. What a scary idea. I'd rather die than need UBI to survive, and I mean it. [...] You can make survival guaranteed without UBI. What you have to do is make housing and food dirt cheap."

"I wanted to change the way Kente was kept and used. I believed that you could actually cut Kente and use it to do almost everything."

"I feel like what I’m doing is a calling so I think I have arrived at what I was supposed to do in the first place and I’ve always followed it so I don’t have regrets in anything that I have done. I always knew fashion was an area I was going to venture into."

"In the past, mothers would lock it up in a trunk and have it is passed from generation to generation. We didn’t get to wear it unless it was some amazing occasion."

"I say they should stay focused, committed and dedicated in their thoughts and their minds and the direction they are going."

"My vision in the next few years is to own different shops in different parts of Africa, Europe and the US, expand my production line and invest in men’s clothes"

"They must learn to set goals for themselves and work towards achieving such goals"

"Customers do not call me on my personal line. Everything business is done at work so that it doesn’t come home. So the weekend is spent with my children. So I advise mothers to find a structure in their lives that they will use to be able to run their businesses as well as manage the children at home."

"To sew is one thing but one needs to understand the business end of it. It is necessary that people come to see that talent can only take you so far, the ability to apply proper business principles will define many who will make it in the industry and those who, unfortunately, will sink."

"It is important to learn how to push yourselves and get up because in Ghana, if you move one step, it pushes you back three steps but that is not the reason for not pursuing your ambitions so keep doing it until you become successful."

"we need to enhance creativity in the schools.It is very important for our country. It’s my hope to be at some point and some level with design. I added entrepreneurship because after school the designer becomes business people in our own area."

"I am a disciplined, principled, and determined woman. I always set goals for myself and make sure I achieve them. This explains why I have been able to manage her time successfully and played my role as a wife, a mother, a teacher and a shop owner."

"Have discussions with God on the go. Be business-focused and ignore distractions. Be humble and respect all. Do not seek confirmation from another. Only God. Trust your intuition. Move above the best speed you can. When you identify your leading product, run with it."

"“Start with the limited capital you have, never give up, seek knowledge on ideas before and after initiating, diversity in skills within an entrepreneurial team is an important factor for success, networking is an important thing in the business world and passion for a business is good but not enough, commitment and determination sustain it.”"

"It's just a nickname that [professional skateboarder] came up with. I guess growing up watching mob movies and mob documentaries, there's always like has to be a boss. I had a Cadillac, it was just little stuff. I had an apartment; Jim was like, "He's the Boss". That's it. And then he just kind of stuck with it after that. I don't take part in it. I don't go around [saying] "I'm the Boss", you know? I don't care, whatever."

"Gonz is the most influential skater of all time, no question. Mark Gonzales created how to street skate, doing handrails and things that no one has ever done. When people were doing a boardslide on the rail and thought that was super crazy, he was doing 180 and 180 fakie 50-50s. The best and most technical skater today doing the hardest tricks beyond what anyone could think of is not doing what Gonz was doing then. It’s just not the same."

"I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study."

"The individual is better, society is better, and the state is better, for the culture of its citizens; therefore we desire to extend the means for the culture of all."

"I hope we have laid the foundation of an institution which shall combine practical with liberal education, which shall fit the youth of our country for the professions, the farms, the mines, the manufactories, for the investigations of science, and for mastering all the practical questions of life with success and honor."

"They stoked the gaping furnace with the poor wartime anthracite to build up the steam pressure and I was soon enveloped in that delicious childhood cocoon of excitement and terror, the red roaring furnace and the clattering steel and hissing steam and belching smoke coming to confirm my conditioned image of hell. But my father was there with his easy balance and [authority] and hell only could threaten. On the short journey to Goold’s Cross the men put the driver’s cap on my head and pointed out landmarks and the farms of friends and talked about horses and hurlers. They even fried the traditional engine-driver’s breakfast on the long steel shovel, but I was not going to be distracted. I was a train driver. I was going to be one for ever. My grandfather was one. My uncle was a Station Master at Bruree. My family was on the railway. Trains were in my blood. Nothing would change."

"A fierce antagonist in business competition, Mr. Trippe practiced a good-neighbor policy in dealing with foreign countries. He was a talented diplomat. If an earthquake or a hurricane occurred in Latin America, Pan Am was quickly on the scene, helping to remove refugees and providing emergency supplies."

"Trippe wasn't a dictator, but he did want to take over the world."

"Trippe had been a continuous innovator, but the sad irony is that he failed to re-invent his company for the leaner, far more competitive age he had done so much to shape: the age of travel for Everyman. A decade after his death, his airline, substantially dismembered, finally expired in 1991. [...] Throughout his career, Juan Trippe had been driven by the great American instinct for seeing a market before it happened–and then making it happen. In a real sense, he fathered the international airline business. To do so, he took on the entire airline industry, and risked his company to see his vision through. You’ve just got to admire a guy like that."

"History has clearly shown that among all the nations in the world, those which have developed to the fullest, their facilities for communication and transport have been the nations which have led the advance of civilization, and which have raised above all others, the standard of living of their people."

"A century ago and for three brief decades, our nation held that world leadership. A small country, confined to our Atlantic coast, when our vital sea commerce was crowded from the seas by stronger competitors, America rose to claim her rightful maritime birthright. Inspired in this cause our merchants provided the capital, our shipwrights the genius, our master mariners the driving power that brought into being a new maritime force. From our seaports raced forth a new breed of ocean craft, the Clippers, of such sharp-cut lines and towering masts as had never before been seen upon the seas. With hard-driving Yankee masters on their quarter decks, they raced through gales and over endless seas, lee rails awash, tall-rigging, taut with full-blown sails, to sweep our flag to a leadership upon the Seven Seas that was never successfully to be challenged in the days of sail. And in these thirty years our commerce mounted, our prestige among the nations rose, the standard of living of our people increased at a rate which has never since been equaled in our history."

"But the age of iron and steam was coming and we were unprepared. Our place upon the seas was soon forgotten as the manpower of the nation and its industry moved westward to develop the richest land empire the world has ever known."

"Mass travel by air made possible by the Jet Age may prove to be more significant to world destiny than the atom bomb. For there can be no atom bomb more powerful than the air tourist, charged with curiosity, enthusiasm and good will, who can roam the four corners of the world, meeting in friendship and understanding the people of other nations and races."

"As we carry men, mail and merchandise - ideas and ideals - science, medicine, culture and the arts - we will again be carrying cargoes of good-will. I hope we will never carry cargoes of imperialism and hate. We must see that they are not sent. We must remember that air transport is the vehicle, not the cargo. It can serve good ends or bad."

"We must preach the gospel, 'Go abroad set up new businesses, bring in the other fellow as a local partner, be it a shoe factory, a supermarket, a sales outlet, an assembly plant, a hotel, or a local airline.' We know know that whatever community, whatever nation we may belong to as citizens, we are residents of this earth: that we are bound together and will be increasingly bound together, as we make greater and better use of the air, in a common fate: the fate of this small planet which to all of us is home. Because of aviation, men are beginning to think of themselves and of their earth in different terms -- terms which make war -- ultimate war -- less and less acceptable."

"Today, the frontier of our great west is behind us. Once again we have come to a realization, just as did our forefathers in the days of sail, that America’s position among the nations of the world, the prosperity of our industry and commerce, the welfare of all our people is inseparably bound up in the advancement of our foreign trade."

"If you want to win a baseball game, you try to outhit the other fellow but you don't take away his bat. ... I urge that when the fighting stops, British Overseas Airways be permitted to secure—on equitable terms—all the ocean transport planes that are needed to restore the balance for fair competition."

"We are confident that a close study of the present trend will lead to the realization of truly tremendous progress in the crossing of ocean barriers and the linking the world continents closer by air transportation within the next few years."

"Thirty-five years ago America gave the world the airplane. But other nations developed it. Soon after the world war, the great transports of European nations were flying over age-old trade routes to Asia, Africa, and South America to assure for the countries a greater share of the world’s commerce. For many years America only watched."

"In these 20 years transport aviation has become a tremendous force in the international life of our nation. So rapidly that we have yet to realize it fully, it has reduced the world to one-fifth its former travel size. Its mission has everywhere been one of peace, friendship, of aid in developing mutual benefit of trade and commerce. It has within a single decade swept away forever the age-old barriers of time and distance between this nation and its neighboring republics and the lands beyond the seas. It has already proved itself a vital force for the protection and extension of this nation's world commerce. Equally important it has proved itself the means by which those friendly nations are being woven into a great community of good neighbors."

"Then ten years ago from that same heritage that produced the sailing clipper ships, once again the nation’s business men provided the capital and the nation’s industry provided the constructive genius to bring forth the Yankee clippers of the air which have again proved their superiority over all competitors. Commanded, like their predecessors, by American captains, manned by gallant crews, they have – in ten short years – brought our nation from last to first place on the airways of the world."