Nathan Myhrvold Quotes

The most successful people in the world are the ones who thought of that idea that was 'too crazy to work.'

It was a crazy idea. But, as usual, that’s all Percy had.

There's this famous observation that I totally believe: Great startup ideas are the ones that lie in the intersection of the Venn diagram of 'is a good idea' and 'looks like a bad idea.' So you want most people to think it's a bad idea and thus not compete with you until you get giant. But for it to secretly be good.

We are exploring creative models to pursue innovation outside the confines of our normal process, taking calculated risks and learning from them.

I am in the business of exploring crazy possibilities.

I'm a bit crazy, so sometimes I just get these mad ideas that, on paper, aren't even possible.

Ideas that most people derided as ridiculous have produced the best outcomes. Don't do the obvious thing.

Entrepreneurs are all a little crazy. There is a fine line between an entrepreneur and a crazy person. Crazy people see and feel things that others don't. An entrepreneur's dream is often a kind of madness, and it is almost as isolating. What differentiates the entrepreneur from the crazy person is that the former gets other people to believe in his vision.

In Silicon Valley, if you spend a lot of time thinking about the obstacles, you'll talk yourself out of everything, because the more you look at it, the less logical something sounds, since no one has done it yet.

I've always been controversial because I offer new ideas. For me to be controversial, I think this is positive.

A creative mindset is in increasingly high demand: employers are vying for workers who are able to dream big and deliver big with the next must-have product. Creative thinking fuels innovation, it leads to new goods and services, creates jobs and delivers substantial economic rewards.

It's important to have people who will say to you that you're really off the beaten track.

Part of the challenge of being an entrepreneur, if you're going for a really huge opportunity, is trying to find problems that aren't quite on the radar yet and try to solve those.

Most entrepreneurial ideas will sound crazy, stupid and uneconomic, and then they'll turn out to be right.

Video games are engineered now, but the step I am trying to take, no one can engineer.

Some of the best ideas that we've invested in have made no sense to conventional sources.

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.

My parents always encouraged me to do creative stuff, to do weird stuff.

The bad thing about young people starting a company is that sometimes they do it for the wrong reasons or because they have the wrong skill set, but the good thing is that they don't have any of the old paradigms baked into them, so they have a lot of the bright new ideas that are harder to come by as you get older.

One of the great things about young entrepreneurs is that they don't know that something can't be done. So they try something that's so audacious and usually end up pulling it off.

We need people who dream impossible things, who maybe fail, sometimes succeed, but in any case who have that ambition.

If you think 20 years out and ask what's the most important company on the planet, it is not any company you could write down today. The most important company 20 years from now has not even been founded yet and doesn't have a name.

I'm always up for collaborating with people who are slightly leftfield.

I was always excited about doing things with people that were ahead of their time, that were sort of out of sync with the rest of society.

Silicon Valley's long-running track record of creating globally disruptive startups is the envy of the world.