A Look Back-Silicon Valley 15 years young

Here is a great CNN Perspectives story from 1999, that includes some of the Silicon Valley internet startup success stories at that time. Entrepreneurs and people living in the Bay Area can see familiar faces like the 15-years younger Steve Jürvetson, Tim Draper, Elon Musk and more.

Elon Musk, who had just sold his company Zip2 for 400M and talks about how he is going to change the banking industry with his new company X.com, that acquired Confinity in 2000 and become known as PayPal.

Some of the quotes from the story.

“It’s almost criminal to think of someone that would say that I’m just in it for the money. The reason you’re doing it, is you want to change the world. You want to have an impact.” Steve Jürvetson (DFJ)

“If you asked me 3 years ago, what would you do when you’re 30 and make a lot of money. I would’ve told you, I’ll retire, go to an island, go to the mountains. And yet, I’m not doing all those things, even though I can afford to do all of them. It is because I have realized that what excites me and drives me is challenge – to change the world yet again. To have a meaningful impact on peoples’ lives.” Sabeer Bhatia (founder of Hotmail)

“It’s sort of like series of poker games and now I’ve gone to a more high stakes poker game and just carry those chips with me. And I haven’t gone and taken my winnings out, but I’ve put almost all of my winnings back to the new game.” Elon Musk (PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX)
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“One of the greatest things about being engaged to a nerd is that you have all this technology at your fingertips. One of the things is that Graham (Spencer) has a digital camera and we keep our photo album on the web.”

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