Marc Ostrofsky Quotes

One of the great things about Silicon Valley is, irrespective of how competitive you might be with another company or how closely you might be working with that company, there's a great sort of give and take, and camaraderie from - between - some of the executives in the valley and some of the other investors in the valley.

I don't think Silicon Valley understands the power of Wikipedia, how it works, or the opportunities it represents.

The real force of Silicon Valley is the mentality, the spirit. There's no reason at all that can't be replicated in Paris.

We talk to our partners in Silicon Valley every week, so we have a real sense of what goes on.

The natives of Silicon Valley learned long ago that when you share your knowledge with someone else, one plus one usually equals three. You both learn each other's ideas, and you come up with new ones.

We who work in technology have nurtured an especially rare gift: the opportunity to effect change at an unprecedented scale and rate. Technology, community, and capitalism combine to make Silicon Valley the potential epicenter of vast positive change.

I separate the world of startup communities into two constituencies - leaders and feeders. The leaders are entrepreneurs and the feeders everyone else.

People tend to pay too little attention to history - the history of Silicon Valley and American business - and think they're the first people to come across a problem.

The decision to join Stripe and run 'Increment' was a pretty easy one for me: It was an opportunity to be impactful, to collect and share best practices from the most effective engineering teams in the world. 'Increment' is a step toward flattening the distance between the Silicon Valley elite and developers everywhere.

The reason why Silicon Valley is a worldwide innovation center is because it is a open culture that embraces diversity. You see people from all over the world. When you have many people from different backgrounds gathered together, that is where innovation comes from.

I don't really consider myself a teacher. I think - like, I have opinions like everyone else, and I just share my opinions.

South Florida's international connections mean there's a different kind of innovation here. We're able to intersect with a lot of brilliant people who are not associated with Silicon Valley.

Before I came to Silicon Valley I was in Beijing, China and I was twenty-seven. When I saw the Internet, I immediately realized that it was going to change everything.

Proximity is power. If you can get proximity with people that are the best in the world, things can happen because all of the people they know, the insights they have and the life experience they have. They can save you a decade of time by one insight.

We teach what we know, but we reproduce what we are.

In brief, the function of knowledge is to make one experience freely available to other experiences.

There is always something new to learn. There is always something new that I am learning and I wanna share it with the world.

Often thoughts are given to me with the sole purpose of giving them away.

A period of high civilization is one in which thoughts fly freely from mind to mind, from one country to another-yes, from the past into the present.

…that's what old people are here for, — else their experience is of little use.

That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

If one is only to talk from first-hand experience, conversation would be a very poor business.

The operative assumption today is that someone, somewhere, has a better idea; and the operative compulsion is to find out who has that better idea, learn it, and put it into action-fast.

We submit to the society of those that can inform us, but we seek the society of those whom we can inform. And men of genius ought not to be chagrined if they see themselves neglected. For when we communicate knowledge, we are raised in our own estimation; but when we receive it, we are lowered.

Picking other people's brains is an art worth cultivating.