Tim O'Reilly

“Money is like gasoline during a road trip. You don’t want to run out of gas on your trip, but you’re not doing a tour of gas stations.”

“While the willingness of the ancient Greeks to sacrifice their lives for glory brings tears to my eyes, I cannot ultimately condone the choice of Achilles.”

“One of O'Reilly's advantages is that we have a network of thousands of user groups to whom we give free books, to whom we advertise our products, and they spread the word. If you don't have...”

“I've been deeply influenced by Aristotle's idea that virtue is a habit, something you practice and get better at, rather than something that comes naturally. 'The control of the appetites by...”

“Everybody who goes into government gets somewhat chewed up in the process. Being a senior appointee is like being at a startup, only more so: You run into opposition from the entrenched olig...”

“Conferences are really like parties, and an A-list party is one where A-list people are in attendance. You figure out who are the really important people to invite and get them to show up as...”

“Amazon is now the definitive source for data about whole sets of products - fungible consumer products. EBay is the authoritative source for the secondary market of those products. Google is...”

“I like to think that even if we make some really bad choices and go down some bad paths, we'll eventually emerge from it.”

“Just as the PC bled back into industrial economy, I think the Internet is going to bleed back into our overall economy and have a transformative effect on major sectors that we don't yet for...”

“We often get blinded by the forms in which content is produced, rather than the job that the content does.”

“I think Microsoft will have to change. I think that the business of Microsoft, the company of Microsoft, is going to continue to succeed. But I think the business model of Microsoft is going...”

“There's not a single business model, and there's not a single type of electronic content. There are really a lot of opportunities and a lot of options and we just have to discover all of the...”

“My original business model - I actually wrote this down - was 'interesting work for interesting people.'”

“A short, glorious life in service of a greater good - say, the life of the Spartans at Thermopylae, or the pilots in the Battle of Britain, of whom Winston Churchill said 'Never have so many...”

“There are a lot of lousy conferences that pander to sponsors. They end up creating an opportunity for boring speakers who are paid shills for their companies. We still get a few of those, bu...”

“Why did Google, for example, recently decide to offer free 411 service? I haven't talked to people at Google, but it's pretty clear to me why. It's because of speech recognition. It has noth...”

“I came up with the idea that I wanted to develop products because I saw services businesses being a dead end long term.”

“So many technologies start out with a burst of idealism, democratization, and opportunity, and over time, they close down and become less friendly to entrepreneurship, to innovation, to new...”

“I believe people are fundamentally good and want to find things that make life better for themselves. There are social dynamics for people that work, and there are ones that are pathological...”

“Everybody's enamored of the iPhone, the Google phone. But the applications are going to change. You know, we're going to start using our phones for shopping. It's going to change the nature...”