In the U.S.A., technical innovations come out of universities and the research produced by Ph.D. students. We don't have that happening in India.

I remember when AOL was small and they were growing like mad. Consumers were coming on in droves because they made it easy to connect to the Internet. That was the single biggest innovation of AOL; when grandmas were signing up, AOL had arrived.

I guess the most seminal moment going early way back was my father died when I was 3 years old. I was raised by my grandparents, and my mother went back and got a degree.

You learn that different people are made differently, and they have different ways to reach to their goals. Some people reach their limits of what they can produce and create, and that doesn't necessarily make them bad. It is just that they may not be right for that role in that instance.

I was determined to create my own identity. My first hits, in fact, were straight-up rhythm and blues. My voice was compared to Aretha Franklin's - though, for my money, no one compares to Aretha.

When you write a book, you are asking someone to make an investment in their time and money. A column can come and go as the weeks pass, but a book needs to be timeless.

You can't throw money at the Internet to make it work - it really is all about the quality of the content.

Barack Obama took office in the middle of a massive financial crisis. He was handed a bunch of messes all around the world and at home.