Leaders, whether in the public or the private sphere, must understand the responsibilities that come with their role. They are the most visible standard-bearers of their organizations. Holding them accountable to this responsibility protects the promise of our organizations and our communities.

If you contrast the productivity that comes from a networked or capitalist distribution of resources versus a centralized planning system, frequently referred to as communism or socialism, the network approach does much better when it's applied accurately.

The same instincts that make us good students can make us lousy entrepreneurs.

The key thing for me has always been how we realize the mission - enabling every professional in the world to change their own economic curve by the strength of their alliances and connections with other people.

Business is the systematic playing of games.

Zynga is about fun. Fun is important. Fun is good. And to have the ability to do something fun for 10 or 15 minutes that's right at your fingertips and involves your friends, well, that's better than television in terms of social connectivity.

The death penalty and the arguments it inspires don't only involve ethics, morals, and justice. There are bureaucratic and economic aspects to it as well. All these different aspects commingle in ways that convince me we should take whatever steps we can to abolish the death penalty.

Any effort to make the death penalty speedier and less costly - more 'efficient' - will inevitably make it less just.

Most often I am only interested in an idea if it's going to get hundreds of millions of users. That's the scale that I am always trying to play to.

The reason the social-networking phenomenon is something that I invested in early and massively - I led the Series A financing for Friendster; I founded a company called Socialnet in 1997; I founded LinkedIn; and I was part of the first round of financing in Facebook - it sounds trivial, but people matter.

And people who take risk intelligently can usually actually make a lot more progress than people who don't.

Entrepreneurs are like visionaries. One of the ways they run forward is by viewing the thing they're doing as something that's going to be the whole world.

I get energy from one-on-one conversations most often, and I lose energy from group conversations most often.

PayPal was disruptive, it was democratizing, and it had universal appeal. It gave power to millions and millions of individuals and reduced monopolist control from nations, banks, and other huge corporations.

People are still very focused on the startup story: Risk-taking founders, with a bold idea, some capital and a network supportive environment, go out and take the shot on goal. But the problem is, this is no longer the truth about what makes Silicon Valley so special.

I really like the 'Silicon Valley' show. It's good to do a little rib-poking and not take yourself too seriously, so I think it's awesome the show does that.

LinkedIn allows professionals, including the middle class, to invest in themselves in order to find the right jobs. That essentially can help make them prosperous.

The way you deal with bullies is you change their economic equation. Make it more expensive for them to hassle you.

What happens during recessions, is you have less windfalls just helping you cover mistakes. You have to be more careful about not making mistakes.

The key thing is to invest in the future, and what that means is - when you're deploying technology or you're a technology business - is to make sure that you're keeping on the innovation cycle, where you're both creating and adopting the new business practices and the new techniques in order to drive your business the right way.

If performance management were a movie, it will become less 'Gladiator' and more 'Moneyball.'

Democracy tends to be a collaborative process, a committee, a consensus. Silicon Valley tends to believe in the individual who creates a small group and does something big.

Over the last 20 years, I've worked on or invested in many companies that scaled to 100 million users or more. But here's the thing: You don't start with 100 million users. You start with a few. So, stop thinking big, and start thinking small.

It's unprecedented in the post-World War II era to have the leader of Germany say, 'Oh we can't rely on America anymore.'

As a candidate, Trump could make outlandish statements with little regard for their Constitutional implications. As President, he is pledged to respect the Constitution's authority, and the specific rights and protections it guarantees to every American citizen.

If Trump's actions as President reflect his campaign rhetoric, the ACLU and other capable organizations like it will be critical for defending the Bill of Rights for all Americans.

In democracies, we aren't always governed by the people or the parties that we voted for. But when officials are elected, we must respect their authority, as long as they're exercising that authority within the bounds of whatever regulatory frameworks are in place to guide them.

Our elected officials must understand that we, the American people, expect them to perform the duties of their office, even when that means working with other elected officials from different parties.

The best ideas make you want to say 'yes' and 'no' in the same breath.

A startup, to a some degree, is a set of those challenges of, 'If you don't solve this, you're dead.'

I do think there are some irreducible inefficiencies in government. But we still need to have government; we still need to make government effective if we can.

One of the things that happens that's challenging within the democratic process is that people say, 'Look at this failure, so we should totally change this whole thing.' And then you add in tons of bureaucratic process and checks and balances, and all of a sudden, it doesn't work that well.

Silicon Valley tends to be very myopic - to be focused on one or two things - which has some strengths as well as weaknesses.

Simply writing a Ph.D. or academic book was unlikely to play much of a role in helping shape people's lives as I wanted.

Our polling methodology has gotten outdated, and, in fact, it's not really telling us what it needs to be telling us.

We need to invest in technologies that amplify human capacity, not replace it.

In the past, individuals and companies envisioned a lifetime mutual commitment. That's not realistic anymore - nor is it in the interest of either party. So both parties need a more adaptable way to engage each other and co-invest over shorter periods of time for mutual benefit.

Many employer-employee relationships are built on a lie that starts from the first interaction: neither party automatically conceives of the relationship as something that will last a lifetime, but both interact as if it is. This lie of omission bases the relationship on distrust.