Company Founders

"I incorporated it in 2016, and it has grown beyond my wildest dreams."

"Government’s focus mainly on research findings from institutes is not encouraging to the young ones who have fresh and modern ideas that can help fast tract socio-economic development."

"The most successful entrepreneurs I know are optimistic. It's part of the job description."

"Talent is scarce and hard to keep."

"Before you know it, we have an army of strong and powerful women that can stand and compete anywhere in the world."

"Information is out there but local communities don’t have access to it, and they will rely on the next alternative."

"Over the years, people have gotten inappropriate medical advice from some practitioners, especially at the local council level and of course the consequence was disastrous to their health."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"It was a lot of experimenting for us – we tried out so many ideas and at the end of it all we learned how to build mobile information systems – basically endless databases of relevant information, and build applications on top of that ."

"But they face many challenges such as high cost of production, lack of access to energy and poor infrastructure. Technology can help reduce their costs and enable them to operate more efficiently."

"Recognising the work we do is encouraging and it is also a reminder that we are not doing anything in vain. It pushes us to greater heights."

"I was raised by a teacher and entrepreneur, who encouraged my siblings and I to be ambitious and pursue meaningful careers. After every school year, mom and dad would ask us what we wanted to do with our lives, and this put a lot of pressure on us to always ask ourselves why we were doing whatever we were doing."

"It is a great honour for the entire team working tirelessly to realise the dreams that we have ."

"As young people we want to be inventors," she told the onlooking heads of state ."

"He states there is a male in the home and that he is going to wait for his wife. He stated that he doesn't know who the male is but that his name is David and that he is a friend. He sounded somewhat confused."

"Earlier this week, Hamas used w:Telegram (software) to warn civilians in Ashkelon to leave the area ahead of their missile strikes. Would shutting down their channel help save lives — or would it endanger more lives?”"

"I’m turning 41, but I don’t feel like celebrating."

"In my 20 years of managing discussion platforms, I noticed that conspiracy theories only strengthen each time their content is removed by moderators. Instead of putting an end to wrong ideas, censorship often makes it harder to fight them."

"Every one of us is going to die eventually, but we as a species will stick around for a while. That’s why I think accumulating money, fame or power is irrelevant. Serving humanity is the only thing that really matters in the long run."

"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."

"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"

"Without a sense of purpose, no company, either public or private, can achieve its full potential."

"If you look over the course of my career, how the US has improved and other countries have improved, being an optimist, especially in financial markets, have proven to be a good outcome."

"Dear CEO, Each year I make it a priority to write to you on behalf of BlackRock’s clients, who are shareholders in your company. The majority of our clients are investing to finance retirement. Their time horizons can span decades."

""If we believe we can stop using coal today, we’re fooling ourselves … The answer is not to think that we can just run away from coal worldwide. … We could do all that we are potentially able to do, and even that will not be enough, because so many other parts of the world are just adding more and more carbon to our air … We need to be fair and just. We need to be open-minded."*"

"Being an optimist, especially in financial markets, have proven to be a good outcome. Being a pessimist out of any one periodic time, you may have good success, but over the long run, I believe in capitalism, that in the long run, it's the best economic model in the world."

"In 2006, Erik Prince, founder of the private military company Blackwater, learned the United Arab Emirates was shopping for inexpensive light attack airplanes to support its special forces. Prince, then director of Presidential Airways, a Blackwater subsidiary, offered to develop a weaponized version of a cropduster. Presidential bought an Air Tractor AT-802A, yanked out the cropdusting equipment, added six hardpoints, and attached gun pods and dummy bombs. The prototype, displayed at the 2009 Paris Air Show, was to be transformed into the first of 24 production aircraft for the UAE, but the deal fell apart... Even Erik Prince still wants light attack airplanes: His new company Frontier Services Group, according to the website The Intercept, hired an Austrian company to arm Thrush cropdusters and send them to Africa. The deal fell through because it violated weapons export regulations."

"Erik Prince can be a difficult man to wrap your mind around—an amalgam of contradictory caricatures. He has been branded a “Christian supremacist” who sanctions the murder of Iraqi civilians, yet he has built mosques at his overseas bases and supports a Muslim orphanage in Afghanistan. He and his family have long backed conservative causes, funded right-wing political candidates, and befriended evangelicals, but he calls himself a libertarian and is a practicing Roman Catholic. Sometimes considered arrogant and reclusive—Howard Hughes without the O.C.D.—he nonetheless enters competitions that combine mountain-biking, beach running, ocean kayaking, and rappelling... The common denominator is a relentless intensity that seems to have no Off switch. Seated in the back of a Boeing 777 en route to Afghanistan, Prince leafs through Defense News while the film Taken beams from the in-flight entertainment system.... Stepping off the plane at Kabul’s international airport, Prince is treated as if he, too, were Al Jazeera–worthy. He is immediately shuffled into a waiting car and driven 50 yards to a second vehicle, a beat-up minivan that is native to the core: animal pelts on the dashboard, prayer card dangling from the rearview mirror. Blackwater’s special-projects team is responsible for Prince’s security in-country, and except for their language its men appear indistinguishable from Afghans. They have full beards, headscarves, and traditional knee-length shirts over baggy trousers. They remove Prince’s sunglasses, fit him out with body armor, and have him change into Afghan garb..."

"“I don't think Erik Prince has much idea about the EIC,” John Keay, who wrote The Honourable Company, a history of the corporation, wrote in an email. <b"

"Families of seven more people who were killed, and 19 who were wounded in Blackwater's infamous Sept. 17, 2006 shootout in Baghdad's Nisoor Square have sued Blackwater, now known as Xe, its founder Erik Prince, and a Prince's network of mercenary companies, in Federal Court. These dead people left 19 children. Many of the surviving plaintiffs saw their loved ones killed and also were shot. As in two other cases filed this week, the plaintiffs demand punitive damages for war crimes, wrongful death, spoliation of evidence, and other charges."

"After Panetta briefed members of Congress on Prince’s activities, Prince’s role in the CIA program leaked to the media. Prince felt badly burned, and he took his frustrations out by telling Vanity Fair about his CIA work, which burned his bridges at the spy agency. “The last thing [the CIA] wants, Panetta tells Rolling Stone, “is a yahoo who’s trying to play up what he’s doing as a lone-wolf approach to doing justice for the country.”... In January of 2017, Prince flew to the Seychelles... to meet with a Russian government official who was looking to make contacts with the incoming administration. The Russian official was Kirill Dmitriev, a former Goldman Sachs banker who headed Russia’s $10 billion sovereign wealth fund, which was subject to U.S. sanctions. Dmitriev reported directly to Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he referred to as his “boss.” Prince told Mueller’s office that he and Dmitriev spent most of their time discussing oil prices.... Prince told Congress under oath that he and Dmitriev met once in the Seychelles. He later conceded they met twice... Prince still hasn’t gotten the military contract he had been lobbying for, but his other adventures in Trumpworld have recently come back to bite him. Prince was a member of the advisory board of a charity Bannon was promoting to raise private funds to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border...."

"After the invasion of Iraq, however, Blackwater grew far faster than Prince’s ability to manage it. The firm became, in Prince’s words, “something resembling its own branch of the military”... “They just ran out of people of the quality they needed,” a former senior U.S. military commander in Iraq tells Rolling Stone... Prince’s rising stock in post-9/11 America was also driven by his work with the CIA. According to Prince, he became an official asset, putting himself and his company’s resources at the spy agency’s disposal. Rolling Stone obtained an unpublished chapter of Prince’s book, which the CIA has blocked from release... Prince describes how, in addition to training CIA operatives and maintaining the agency’s drone fleet, he helped set up a program to train a terrorist hit squad at the behest of the spy agency. Prince writes that... he spent a “few million” recruiting and organizing a team of about a dozen foreign mercenaries... Prince says the off-the-books program had support...with then-Vice President Dick Cheney...Blackwater, but it soon fell apart — with deadly consequences. On September 16th, 2007, Blackwater personnel shot and killed 14 unarmed civilians in Nisour Square... The next day, the Iraqi government announced that it would revoke Blackwater’s license to operate and demanded to prosecute the Blackwater guards. The New York Times reported that Blackwater continued to operate in Iraq after Blackwater’s president authorized bribes of about $1 million to Iraqi officials, a charge Prince later dismissed as “false.”"

"Blackwater founder Erik Prince is pushing a plan to deploy thousands of privately-hired mercenaries to topple the Venezuelan Maduro regime- and many veterans are saying, “Put me in, coach.” In an extreme case of capitalism in action, the monarch of mercenary companies has been soliciting investment and support from Venezuelan exiles and influential conservatives. Prince has offered to send over 5,000 mercenaries to help Juan Guaido, the leader of the Venezuelan opposition forces."

"It seems the ballistics analysis was done to prove the guilt of the Americans, not to just try to identify what happened there.... I wasn't there. I'm not going to second-guess them..."

"The program was so secret, I was told that Cheney instructed the agency not to even brief Congress about it... Did Julian Assange chicken out?... If I saw something unsavory, I would have done something about it."

"I put myself and my company at the C.I.A.’s disposal for some very risky missions...But when it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus... He is incredulous that U.S. officials seem willing, in effect, to cut off their nose to spite their face. “I’ve been overtly and covertly serving America since I started in the armed services...I’m through... Every time an American goes through security, I want them to pause for a moment and think, What is my government doing to inconvenience the terrorists? Rendition teams, Predator drones, assassination squads. That’s all part of it... I’m going to teach high school... History and economics. I may even coach wrestling. Hey, Indiana Jones taught school, too."

"When a real coup is attempted, we won’t have to wonder what it is. We will know, because it will not be conducted by bare-chested Rambo wannabes strutting about in Viking helmets and goofily mugging for selfies. It will be executed by serious, unsmiling, highly trained ex-Special-Ops professionals — the kind recruited by Erik Prince for his private mercenary armies, and likely funded by the quiet-but-deadly confraternity of nearly 100 ultra-conservative right-wing billionaires like David Koch, John Menard, Robert Mercer, Rebekah Mercer, and others... If and when a cabal does decide it is time to act and seize control of both the real and symbolic power centers needed to ensure the success of a coup...they will be able to rely on experts in overthrowing governments such as Erik Prince, who enjoys privileged access to the highest levels of the Pentagon and CIA, and where he has been working with top officials for years on covert action projects that, coincidentally, look very much like dress-rehearsals for a coup, except that, unlike the events of January 6, they were conducted in absolute secrecy."

"United Nations investigators have found that Erik Prince — a Trump ally who founded the mercenary company Blackwater — broke a U.N. arms embargo on Libya by supporting a militia commander who was seeking to overthrow Libya’s internationally recognized government. The New York Times reports a confidential U.N. investigation reveals how Erik Prince deployed mercenaries, armed with attack aircraft, gunboats and cyberwarfare capabilities, to eastern Libya at the height of a major battle in 2019, in support of renegade former General Khalifa Haftar. Prince faces possible U.N. sanctions, including a travel ban and a freeze on his bank accounts and other assets."

"CBS reaped a publicity bonanza from La Cadena de las Americas (Network of the Americas). Fortune magazine devoted six pages to Paley's triumphant blow-by-blow account of his negotiations, filled with lofty pronouncements ("We are far too prone to think of Latin Americans as a mass of black-haired, backward people who owe what security they have, in the midst of their well-costumed revolutions, to the Monroe Doctrine and North American cash")."

"... My father sold newspapers, then worked in a tobacco factory, and then in a cigar factory, where as an apprentice he came upon his destiny. It was not long before my father got the idea of opening a cigar store with one cigar maker working in the front window, which was not uncommon in those days. The cigar maker, sitting at a table in the window, rolling cigars by hand, was not only functional but was an attraction and an advertisement. Passers-by would stop to watch and perhaps come in to buy. Between his factory job and his own store, my father learned all about tobacco and discovered that he had the gift of recognizing the various qualities of tobacco and of blending them in attractive combinations of flavor. It was his particular genius and became his lifelong vocation. ... His brand of cigars began selling so well that he decided to go out and sell them to other cigar stores. Eventually he gave up the factory job, put more cigar makers to work in the back room of the store, and found himself in the cigar business. It was a short step from there to opening a cigar factory of his own. He made a good product, built a business, and became successful at an early age. In 1896, the year he was naturalized at the age of twenty-one, he had probably become a millionaire."