My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you'll understand that it's harder to be kind than clever.”

Primero, lanzarse, incluso sin tener todas las respuestas. Segundo, tener resiliencia y disciplina, porque los mercados son volátiles. Tercero, buscar grandes problemas del consumidor. Muchas oportunidades nacen de la frustración.

It’s very hard to give people advice, because you don’t know their personality. Personality is a big part of that. Everybody is faced with passing opportunities. Many people watch the opportunity come and watch it go. I say, if an opportunity comes and you have got the self-confidence, grab it. Ride it for a bit. If it’s not the right opportunity, do something else, but be positive about opportunities.

Scientists are people who are curious and want to pursue knowledge and pursue truth, and this still remains the most timeless and priceless value of a scientific career. My advice to an early-career scientist is to remain true to your passion and curiosity and that sense of mission to discover knowledge and uncover innovation. It's also very important to be using the tools of the moment, of the century. There are a lot of new tools to uplevel our own scientific research and scientific quest.

I read Stephen Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature a few years ago and got to talk to him about it after, which was a lot of fun. I reviewed it for my blog, Gates Notes, because I wanted other people to read it, love it, and hopefully learn from it the way I did. It's probably my favorite book and the one I recommend most often.

Microsoft was at the center of the personal computer revolution, and particularly the creation of a software market where you went out to lots of companies, and encouraged them to write software for different applications, mundane applications, wild applications. That idea that you would encourage people to be creative, and build software, and there would be a whole industry around that.