Nolan Bushnell

I believe there are Steve Jobses all around us. Really, what is happening is that they're being edited out of importance.

Women were very, very good at 'Pong'. It was part of the dating scene. The number of people who told me they met their wife or husband playing 'Pong' was huge. They were shoulder to shoulder, talking and playing. It was body contact and verbal contact.

I had an awful lot of my soul invested in Atari culture.

My sweet spot is figuring out how to make a product that people love and how to refine it to make them love it more. All the rest is business noise.

I'd love to design a school.

Hire for passion and intensity; there is training for everything else.

People like secrets. Creative people really like secrets.

Selling Atari when I did - I think that's my biggest regret. And I probably should have gotten back heavily into the games business in the late Eighties. But I was operating under this theory at the time that the way to have an interesting life was to reinvent yourself every five or six years.

I try to get a vision of the future, and then I try to figure out where the discontinuities are.

Atari showed that young people could start big companies. Without that example it would have been harder for Jobs and Bill Gates, and people who came after them, to do what they did.

A lot of what is wrong with corporate America has to do with a culture filled with antibodies trained to expel anything different. HR departments often want cookie cutter employees, which inevitably results in cookie cutter solutions.

I think 'Something Ventured' is a nice piece because it celebrates venture capital in a unique and powerful way.