There's a reason why Silicon Valley is the worldwide innovation center, or why this is the startup valley, because I truly believe startup companies like mine are pushing the economy forward.

We take privacy very seriously and have privacy a policy and our intention is never to sell any customer data.

I knew two things from my father: keep working hard, stay humble, and someday you'll be OK.

The harshest criticism may be the best words you ever hear.

If the world misunderstands us, then I don't blame others, it's our problem.

I'm a Chinese American.

Building trust is very important.

If your employees are not happy, nothing else at your company will go well.

My beloved father passed away just two months after I told him I was going to start a company. Whenever I make progress in my career, I wish I could share the news with my father.

We help ensure that Zoom is made up of caring people starting with the hiring process. At that point, we evaluate candidates on whether we believe they can embrace the value of Care and deliver happiness for others.

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.

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.

Social networking like Facebook or Twitter is very popular, but one thing I have found is that the more social networking tools you are using, the more alone you feel.

Hijacking other's meetings or classrooms - this is online crime.

Empathy, humanity and support for each other is more important than revenue, than growth.

We want to make sure every user is happy.

We should be on the forefront on this focus on justice, and do all we can to care about our community, to care about our society, and to make our communities a much better place.

I hope that with video conferencing like Zoom everyone can spend time with family.

That's what I love about history - nuance. I don't believe in unalloyed heroes. Everyone's got warts, and everyone's got a surprise side.

There is no secret orchard where ideas grow. Oh my, do I wish there were.

The Lusitania is a monument to this optimism, to the hubris of the era. I love that, because where there is hubris, there is tragedy.

It was David McCullough's 'The Johnstown Flood' that lit my imagination as to how I might one day go about writing book-length nonfiction, though my favorite of his books is 'Mornings on Horseback,' about the young Teddy Roosevelt.

When I'm considering an idea, and there is an element of hubris involved, I generally feel comfortable that it's going to be a good story. Pride goeth before a fall. It's an element of a lot of big stories.

I do think hubris played a role here as well, the belief that the Lusitania was too big and too fast to ever be caught by any submarine, and that, in any case, no U-boat commander would think to attack the ship because to do so would violate the long-held rules governing naval warfare against merchant shipping.

One of the things I've always loved is collecting telling little details.

Reading is such a personal thing to me. I'd much rather give someone a gift certificate to a bookstore, and let that person choose his or her own books.

Digression is my passion. I'm not kidding. I love telling the main stories, but in some ways, what I love most is using those narratives as a way of stringing together the interesting stories that people have kind of forgotten and that are kind of surprising.

As a writer, you always try to imagine, 'What if I were in a situation like this? How would I react?'

I was a promiscuous reader. I loved Nancy Drew books and Tom Swift - never the Hardy Boys - but I also read Dumas, Dickens, Poe, Conan Doyle, and Cornelius Ryan's war books. As to favorite character: I'm torn between Nancy, on whom I had an unseemly crush, and Edmond Dantes, the Count of Monte Cristo.

I've heard from the movie marketplace that James Cameron did such a killer job with 'Titanic' that it's almost impossible to do anything better.

I went to public school on Long Island, and it seemed every year we were being taught that you had a right to a fair trial and a right to confront your accuser.

The toilet from time to time imparted to the boat the scent of a cholera hospital and could be flushed only when the U-boat was on the surface or at shallow depths, lest the undersea pressure blow material back into the vessel.

I figured, correctly, that Berlin in February was not a destination coveted by tourists. I found good airfares on Lufthansa, an airline I quite like, and got a great rate at a brand new Ritz-Carlton, which clearly hoped to seduce visitors into forsaking Hawaii for Potsdammer Platz.

Room 40 knew a U-boat was heading south to Liverpool - knew the boat's history; knew that it was now somewhere in the North Atlantic under orders to sink troop transports and any other British vessel it encountered; and knew as well that the submarine was armed with enough shells and torpedoes to sink a dozen ships.

We, of course, have the power of hindsight in our arsenal, but people living in Berlin in that era didn't. What would that have been like as this darkness fell over Germany?

The Lusitania is important, of course, because this is where Germany began its maritime campaign using this brand-new weapon. We have to appreciate how the submarine, as a weapon against civilian shipping, was a particularly novel thing - so novel that many people at the time dismissed its potential power, its potential relevance.

'The Devil in the White City' - the 'White City' was the nickname for the World's Fair of 1893, the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

I figured I was going to apply to one journalism school and let fate take a hand.

The writer marks the changes he wants to make, while a proofreader also goes through the galley, checking it page-by-page against the manuscript. Once all these changes are identified, a second-pass proof is made, and this, too, gets sent to the author and the proofreader, and the process begins anew.

I've really tried to strip my writing of as many adjectives and adverbs as I possibly can.

I've met many Holocaust survivors who find the era infinitely compelling because they have this deep hunger to understand how it all could possibly have happened.

The Nazis hijacked the Jewish thing early on by defining it as 'the Jewish problem' and started looking for a solution. These are not just words.

At some point in the idea process, I simply wear myself down and force myself to choose. But here's the thing: Once I do choose, suddenly all the other possibilities wither and die, and thus I never have a backlog of well-formed ideas waiting for me when my latest book gets finished.

I've been asked a lot lately what message is there in the Lusitania for the modern day. To be honest, not much. Except that maybe hubris and overconfidence are always dangerous things.

I think, one day, I might actually try writing a bunch of - a collection of essays maybe on the funnier side of the spectrum. I don't know. But it's fun to have, frankly, Twitter as kind of an outlet. When you're writing about dark things all day, it's kind of fun to have fun.

As a rule, I am very skeptical of tying books to anniversaries. I don't think readers care. I also feel that it just about guarantees that somebody else will be writing a book on the same subject, but being a former journalist, I'm always interested in, like, why write about something today? Why do it now?

My favorite zone is from 1890 -1915, that zone that spans the overlap of the so-called Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. People had such a boundless sense of optimism; They felt they could do anything they wanted to do, and they went out and tried to do it.

It's essentially taught in high school and college survey courses as an item on a timeline: 'The Lusitania was sunk; the U.S. gets into World War I'.

Trying to find ideas is the hardest part of my job. You'd think it would be the most fun. Just sitting around reading whatever I want, going to cafes and libraries. But I always feel so unproductive. I think I was raised too well by my parents.

How you frame a debate is very important. When you call someone an 'illegal alien,' you've already stacked the deck against them.