What makes the meaning of life is people, so you try to be good to people immediately around you and in your broader community. So a lot of my projects are about how I can affect the world in the hundreds of millions.

Hard work isn't enough. And more work is never the real answer. The sort of grit you need to scale a business is less reliant on brute force. It's actually one part determination, one part ingenuity, and one part laziness.

If you can get better at your job, you should be an active member of LinkedIn, because LinkedIn should be connecting you to the information, insights and people to be more effective.

I've long believed that if you're not embarrassed by your first product release, you've released too late.

I usually allocate time each week to work on topics outside of the normal workflow. These topics can be multi-year strategies for work, theories of how the world is changing, or just something refreshingly different or new.

For Trump, the reasons to release his tax returns have always been compelling. Doing so would show the American people he doesn't just talk about accountability and transparency but also walks the walk.

I'm a little unusual: I'm a six-person-or-less extrovert.

Even by Silicon Valley standards, PayPal's vision was massively ambitious.

Sometimes freedom from normal rules is what gives you competitive advantage.

Trump often says he needs to keep his tax returns private until the IRS finishes auditing him. But the IRS itself has said this isn't necessary. And recently, Trump changed his tune, saying he'll release his returns as soon as Hillary Clinton releases the 33,000 emails she deleted from her email server.

When thinking about how to deploy kind of professional and social networking into your business, it's really not a question of if - it's a question of when.

My belief and goal is that every professional in the world should be on a service liked LinkedIn.

Your customers are always a bottomless well of surprises.

The business of America is business, but it's about high-integrity business. It's about a business where you keep your word, where you make square deals.

For me, the ethical arguments that resonate strongest are the ones that oppose the death penalty.

So benevolent, enlightened, wise dictators are the most efficient form of government. The problem is what comes afterwards, right?

Each year, I ask, 'Now that I have this knowledge, these resources, what can I do?'

The world's better off the more Silicon Valleys there are and the more scaled companies there are.

I think I have a good track record, both in commercial investing and in philanthropic investing. I don't have any interest in creating a named foundation; I have an interest in really good impact for capital. I think I'm pretty good at doing it, so I'm going to apply myself to doing it in my lifetime.

The American people deserve to know what's on Trump's tax returns. And Trump must show that he truly embraces accountability and transparency and understands what it means to work on behalf of the public interest.

As a child, I wondered often, 'Why are we? What is the meaning of life?' These questions made me realize that life is what has meaning - not just individual lives, but all of our lives.

I would have volunteered to work at Netscape. It was the center node of this new technology and the commercial ecosystem of the Internet.

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.