The most valuable lesson I learned in dealing with the ups and downs was to invest in my employees - to do all I could for them when the times were good.

Innovation is all about people. Innovation thrives when the population is diverse, accepting and willing to cooperate.

Entrepreneurship is like a computer game in which you have to master every level before achieving success. Startups repeatedly stumble and have to go back to the drawing board. The best way to skip some levels and to increase the odds of survival is to learn from others who have already played the game.

I used to have an obsession with building businesses and forgot about building health. I was focused on the destination instead of the journey. I caution you to not do the same.

On the Internet, speed matters. According to research by Microsoft, Google, and others, if a website is even 250 milliseconds slower than a rival, people will visit it less often.

The Internet has become a bunch of interlinked but linguistically distinct and culturally specific spaces. There's some interface between them, but there's a lot less than there was years back when we were sort of pretending that this was one great global space.

The over-all point is that new technology will not necessarily replace old technology, but it will date it. By definition. Eventually, it will replace it. But it's like people who had black-and-white TVs when color came out. They eventually decided whether or not the new technology was worth the investment.

The Calandra Institute, the Metropolitan Opera Archives, the library at Lincoln Center, and the Fashion Institute of Technology were helpful and key to piecing together what life must have been like at the turn of the last century.