There's been a lot companies that have shown "zero to one" kind of growth in the computer, internet software age. Facebook and Google are zero to one companies. Apple's iPhone was the first smartphone that really works, and of course, then you scale it horizontally, but the vertical component was really critical. Space X would also be one.
As of 1992, in fact-though the picture would have improved since then-the money that had been made since the dawn of aviation by all of this country's airline companies was zero. Absolutely zero.
Compared to Apple, Internet companies like Google and Facebook don't have strong perspectives on the way they want the world to work.
The engineering is long gone in most PC companies. In the consumer electronics companies, they don't understand the software parts of it. And so you really can't make the products that you can make at Apple anywhere else right now. Apple's the only company that has everything under one roof.
In the digital realm, companies are free from the friction of producing physical goods, and as a result, we see companies like Google go from zero dollars in revenues to billions at a much faster rate.
The only number that would ever be enough is 0. Zero pounds, zero life, size zero, double-zero, zero point. Zero in tennis is love. I finally get it.
I think 'Shark Tank' is targeting companies that are really trying to raise their very first dollar. A lot of them aren't really tech focused. We're definitely going after companies that are building real technology, either software or hardware, they probably have raised a couple hundred thousand already.
It is very similar to companies like Google and other internet companies. When you go and search on Google you don't pay for that. But sometimes you click on an advert and Google makes money on that.
My opinion is that the only two computer companies that are software-driven are Apple and NeXT, and I wonder about Apple.
When we first started our internet company, 'China Pages', in 1995, and we were just making home pages for a lot of Chinese companies. We went to the big owners, the big companies, and they didn't want to do it. We go to state-owned companies, and they didn't want to do it. Only the small and medium companies really want to do it.
It's a lot easier to gain traction when there is such a great proliferation of Internet access. The velocity at which some of these startups are gaining traction is mind-boggling. Companies like ShoeDazzle, Stella & Dot, Gilt, Groupon - these companies are going from zero to hundreds of millions in revenue in three years.
When Facebook acquired Oculus, the game changed immediately. You saw big companies jumping in. You saw people like Google getting fully committed, and then Microsoft came along with HoloLens - there was a lot of stuff that people were doing before, but now the space really ignited.
The United States ran the table on Internet innovations, creating companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Intel, Apple, Cisco, Twitter, Amazon, eBay, YouTube, and others. Europe and Japan scarcely contributed.
The reality is that zero defects in products plus zero pollution plus zero risk on the job is equivalent to maximum growth of government plus zero economic growth plus runaway inflation.
Being a public company is really terrible for most companies. I'd say Facebook and Google have done a pretty good job of standing up to the incredible quarterly pressure to hit numbers, but most companies - and I've observed a lot now - don't do a very good job of that.
Since Snowden went public, companies such as Apple and Google - two of the world's most valuable companies - have incorporated much greater encryption into their products and have also been at pains to show that they will not go along with U.S. government demands to access their encrypted products.
Baidu and Google are great companies, but there are a lot of things you can do outside them. Just as electricity and the Internet transformed the world, I think the rise of modern A.I. technology will create a lot of opportunities both for new startups and for incumbent companies to transform.