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“There are two reasons [ business people are not publicly anti-Donald Trump ], one is well-intentioned, which is the classic kind of American notion. We want to be inclusive, we want to have our shareholders, our employees, our customers, whether they are Democrat, Republican, Green or Libertarian, to feel comfortable with how we're doing business. And so that tends to be apolitical. People say, "No, no, I just simply shouldn't get involved in politics."”

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“The other reason why people don't take a stand, which is very true in this election, is looking at [Donald] Trump and fearing reprisal, fearing reprisal from someone who is seeking the highest, most powerful role in the land, who has had a history of doing everything from attacks, threats and lawsuits and who has a complete kind of vengeful, narcissistic behavior, which makes people legitimately worried, almost like a schoolyard bully, that if I step up, am I going to be targeted, too?”

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“My greatest influences are actually probably a set of different teachers. And these teachers, most prominently at my high school, but also a few others, helped kind of instill in me, thinking thoughts about how life is meaningful in terms of how we all kind of live in a network of people and how you interact with those people is part of what makes life essentially meaningful and then kind of concepts to think about, how do you add value to other people's lives? How do they add value to yours? And how do you kind of form a community together in the network?”

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“Most of the ethical dilemmas that I have faced have all been in the category of, you know, I know something and what's my obligation to disclose it. So, for example, you see people make a mistake in the contract that you're making between the businesses and do you disclose it or do you reveal it? And generally speaking, the way that I solve these is I kind of go through a list of, you know, what's the most, what are the obligations and constituencies and in what order?”

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“Probably the biggest mistake that I made personally is I knew early on that I wanted to go into start-ups and creating kind of software that could help change the lives of millions of people. And basically what I did is I kind of went, okay, well, I need a set of titles and I need a checklist of skills, and I ran through all that, and that wasn't a useless thing, but what I didn't realize, and, you know, and no one gave me the right advice for doing this, is that actually your network, in essentially, is your career.”

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“Managing risk is a key variable, frankly, all aspects of life, business is just one of them, and one of the things that most people do in terms of managing risk, that's actually bad thinking, is they think they can manage risk to zero. Everything has some risk to it. You know, you drive your car down the street, a drunk driver may hit you. So what you're doing is you're actually trying to get to an acceptable level of risk.”

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“The key thing for a CEO to keep their head in the game is recognize that there's turbulent times, plan for, you know, bad luck as well as good luck, keep people focused on what the key, you know, business wins are, and you know, provide the energy that people always need in order to, you know, to go into battle because, you know, work is hard and go into work and do that well. And provide a good leadership beacon for that. In other words, it's the same thing that makes good leadership in any other time.”

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“Boom and bust cycles are very difficult for businesses because you're hiring a bunch because you're planning for the future. And if the future is going to be very big, you need to hire people, or suddenly you go to boom to bust, then all of a sudden, you're kind of battening down the hatches and trying to sail, you know, through the storm, it's a different thing. So part of it is making good decisions about, well, how long is a boom cycle going to be, you know, don't plan on it going forever.”

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“People generally worry about social networking more than they need to. In kind of consumer internet investing and on social and professional networks, I kind of look at time spending and time efficiency. You know, time saving sites. So on time spending sites, things where you play lots of games or that sort of thing, you might worry about a productivity loss if people are spending a lot of time doing that. So if there's a lot of kind of addictive gaming going on during work hours, that won't be as helpful to you.”

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“I think I knew how frightened people were [when Donald Trump was elected], and I think I knew that people were worried about their future. I don't think I realized that they would be willing to risk kind of a 1920s Germany in order to blow it all up, not realizing that we've accomplished a lot as Americans, and we want to keep the good things and revolutionize the new things.”

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“I think the right way to do this is just to step up and do it, so I actually think we'll see more of that over the next coming weeks, because I think they'll say, "We'd like to be good for business and quiet on politics, but this is too urgent, it is too much of a key crisis in who we are going to become as Americans. We can risk too much, and so we have to step forward." And I think you will see more and more people stepping forward, like Howard Schultz, Steve Case and other folks, in order to try to make a difference in this [Donald Trump] election.”

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“One of the great strengths of American culture is this empowerment of individual, is the individual being able to be entrepreneurial, create new things. But you create a whole group of people to make great companies. It's employees and investors and customers and partners. The fabric of society, of a network of relations, is key to being successful.”

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