Paul Allen Quotes

I like working with writer-directors because you can solve problems right there.

People think that computer science is the art of geniuses but the actual reality is the opposite, just many people doing things that build on eachother, like a wall of mini stones.

Finding a programmer to work with if you don't already know one will be a challenge. Merely judging if a programmer is exceptional vs. competent will be very hard if you are not one yourself. When you do find someone, work together informally for a while to test your compatibility.

I believe in collaboration. I think that is the most entertaining and effective way to write for me, personally.

I know, for myself, I probably work a lot better in that - in the group environment. Only because if I am coming up short, someone else helps.

Fuseproject was founded in 1999, and the notion behind it, which is alive and kicking today, is fusing different disciplines. Our teams are absolutely incredible at their own discipline, but most importantly, they're incredible at partnering with each other.

Film is a collaborative art form. If you're not being collaborative, you probably shouldn't be working in film. You don't do it on your own. People who understand that, cultivate that, get the best results.

When I worked with Billie Jean King and Craig Kardon, and we would be working on something, Billie would show up and say, 'What about this?' Neither one of us had seen it.

Every scene is on the table to collaborate on, to pick apart, to try a million different ways. Usually, what ends up occurring in the end is something that no single person knew would happen or had planned for.

I think it's an important part of the visual effects supervisor's job to get really deeply embedded in production and keep us all focused on trying to generate the best result. I'm not proprietary about, 'I would rather do this effect than let physical effects do it.' No, let's do the smartest thing for the movie.

To do things that are as complicated and challenging as spaceflight, you have to have all disciplines represented to get the job done.

Its really important to have cooperative co-actors when you're working and specially when you are doing a daily soap.

If you're a set of guys looking to start a company, think about women you could team up with - they will see things differently and solve problems you didn't even realize you had.

When somebody would come in with a sketch that was not so good, you figured out in a room how to make that sketch work.

I have the good fortune of working with two brothers who are very accomplished, incredibly smart, and very capable. So thankfully there is not an issue in that regard where somebody isn't pulling their own weight. We collaborate all the time. We tend to take different paths, but we tend to reach very similar conclusions. It's actually great because it allows us to be much more creative in the process of getting things done.

So in a strong sense with Java it was a learning process for us - there was some tech learning - but the most important learnings were social or behavioral things.

If you go deep into a problem, you'll find most all of the time that there are yet more problems to be solved from the ground up.

It's always about the project itself than a character for me. It's all experiential.

Working with other people, it's hard to get them to make it sound like what you have in mind.

The nature of design is to synthesize disparate perspectives and create a richer end product through collaboration and iteration.

I am always thinking that some interesting possibility, some accidental synergy, could occur in a collaboration, and people seem to like it.

In our band, we had such an interesting democracy, and it worked really well.

The people who built Silicon Valley were engineers. They learned business, they learned a lot of different things, but they had a real belief that humans, if they worked hard with other creative, smart people, could solve most of humankind's problems. I believe that very much.

I love the flexibility of saying, "Today we're making 50-foot paintings, and we're going to have to join hands and figure out how that's going to work." But in the end, it's a possibility.

When you're designing and inventing the way I did, every minute of your life is put - every neuron in your brain into trying to think about the little code and how you can maybe have one less line of code and a little bit more straightforward from the beginning to the answer. And you don't have time to think about companies and products and how would I build this. So Steve Jobs and I were a very necessary pair.