So I guess I'm just very worried that with Internet privacy, we're doing the same thing we're doing with medical records, is we're throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and we're not really thinking about the tremendous good that can come from people sharing information with the right people in the right ways.

I thought about the things that will truly affect humanity. I came up with three: the internet, sustainable energy and space travel.

If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet,they can each tell 6,000 friends.

From a very early age, I also realized I wanted to invent things. So I became really interested in technology and also then, soon after, in business, because I figured that inventing things wasn't any good; you really had to get them out into the world and have people use them to have any effect.

In late 1995, I started collecting the links on the Web, because my advisor and I decided that would be a good thing to do. We didn't know exactly what I was going to do with it, but it seemed like no one was really looking at the links on the Web - which pages link to which pages.

You can make an internet company with 10 people and it can have billions of users. It doesn't take much capital and it makes a lot of money - a really, really lot of money - so it's natural for everyone to focus on those kinds of things.