I think small business is struggling in New York City. It's a fantastic market, it's a very appealing market, there's lots of opportunity, at the same time it's a very difficult place to build a small business.
Square has already found that the micro-merchant market isn't a profitable business, and as a result they have been trying to shift into the more lucrative small business market.
I think Virgin Blue is still a very promising and exciting business.
Now, I know that's not a view that's widely held in the market but I think the market is simply throwing it into the too-hard basket at the present time because of the oil price events.
But we think it is still a very exciting business.
I don't know if it's a small-market thing or not, but we never get the benefit-of-the-doubt calls like New York, L.A., Miami and the big market teams. That's just the way it is.
Mid-'80s in New York was fantastic. I remember my first Gay Pride parade in the city. Where I grew up was very sheltered, so when I got to the city, there was this freedom and so much happening. At the same time, there was this pressure of AIDS and everything else. New York is so different today.
When there were not very many Internet companies, the supply of Internet companies to the market was small and the appetite for them was large. Therefore, if you were in the business of creating Internet companies in 1996-98, you had a market that provided massive demand for that.
Our party [Republicans] has been focused on big business too long. I came through small business. I understand how hard it is to start a small business. That's why everything I'll do is designed to help small businesses grow and add jobs. I want to keep their taxes down on small business. I want regulators to see their job as encouraging small enterprise, not crushing it.
The cost to do business in Australia is higher, and the lack of scale is a part of that - Australia is a very small market compared to the U.S.
We find that no matter what country we're in, if we hit the right economic notes and appeal to the mass market, we're able to build the business very, very rapidly.
Oddly enough, government policy helped get the fast food outlets into the city. Very well-intentioned small business administration loans to encourage minority business ownership. The easiest business to get into is opening a fast-food franchise in the inner city.
If the proposed ordinance is adopted it will hurt small women- and minority-owned businesses the most, the majority of which are already struggling mightily to do business in this city of higher-than average costs of doing business.
New York as an industry is the best city for real estate. You're in a very transparent market. If you need to liquidate, you make three phone calls and you could sell something, even in the worst market. It is also less forgiving; if you make a mistake you can lose money.
In 2007, I was living in San Francisco. I came out of business school, and I was very keen on doing something with a small company. I felt that the market, in general, in mobile phones was just going to explode.
A good idea for a new business tends not to occur in isolation, and often the window of opportunity is very small. So speed is of the essence.
I think it's really important to realize that small businesses are often the portal for immigrants into the New York City economy. I think we have something like 40,000 small businesses that are immigrant-run in New York.
I think that New York City in the year 1900 was a very difficult place to survive.
We really began to think in different ways about our business in terms of climbing this mountain and it became very clear very quickly this was the smart thing to do. Not only did we start to generate answers for those customers, they embraced us for what we were trying to do. The goodwill in the market place has just been stunning. The rest of the business case is pretty simple. I cost it down not up.