“The promise of artificial intelligence and computer science generally vastly outweighs the impact it could have on some jobs in the same way that, while the invention of the airplane negatively affected the railroad industry, it opened a much wider door to human progress.”
― Paul Allen
“Part of life has to be about enjoying life and having different experiences, especially if you’re with friends and you’re on an adventure on a boat or a submarine – it’s a lot of fun.”
― Paul Allen
“Facing your own mortality forces you to re-evaluate your priorities.”
― Paul Allen
“There’s no enjoyment to losing money.”
― Paul Allen
“We’ve had some tough times, but we’ve hung in there.”
― Paul Allen
“The brain is the most complex, challenging scientific puzzle we have ever tried to decode.”
― Paul Allen
“The brain is one of the richest green fields of science. There’s so much yet to be discovered.”
― Paul Allen
“You’ve got to enjoy time with your family and friends, and if you’re involved in sports franchises, those peak moments in playoff games. You have to enjoy life.”
― Paul Allen
“There’s a long history of artificial intelligence programs that try to mimic what the brain is doing, but they’ve all fallen short.”
― Paul Allen
“I’m trying to show people that they can activate their own passions and find their own path.”
― Paul Allen
“The best museums and museum exhibits about science or technology give you the feeling that, hey, this is interesting, but maybe I could do something here, too.”
― Paul Allen
“Whenever you make the Super Bowl, so many things – you have to have the good general manager and the coach and the great players, and you have to have not too many injuries – everything, game plans and everything, has to fall very much your way for that to happen.”
― Paul Allen
“Computers are really, basically, computing elements and a lot of memory. They are pretty easy to understand, as compared to the brain, which was designed by evolution.”
― Paul Allen
“Artificial intelligence… I’ve been following that since I was in high school.”
― Paul Allen
“I’m a very private person that prefers a low profile.”
― Paul Allen
“The definition of the good life is doing creative things, whether making music, trying to figure out how to do a particular piece of code, or putting together investments.”
― Paul Allen
“As quickly as it started, our business model evaporated. But while Traf-O-Data was technically a business failure, the understanding of microprocessors we absorbed was crucial to our future success.”
― Paul Allen
“I grew up watching games with my father at Washington Husky Stadium. When I moved out to Seattle, I had a friend who would take me to Seahawks games in the 1980s.”
― Paul Allen
“I’m trying to do some things with my brain institute to understand more about the impact of concussion on brain tissue, because we have some scientists over there who are really good at looking at brain tissue and the effects of things on brain tissue.”
― Paul Allen
“That would be such a life-changing thing, for us all to know that there are other beings out there who we could potentially communicate with, or maybe we are listening to a signal that they transmitted hundreds of millennia ago.”
― Paul Allen
“It’s very challenging to carve back market share.”
― Paul Allen
“I’m always trying to calculate the mathematical probability of certain outcomes.”
― Paul Allen
“I choose optimism. I hope to be a catalyst not only by providing financial resources but also by fostering a sense of possibility: encouraging top experts to collaborate across disciplines, challenge conventional thinking, and figure out ways to overcome some of the world’s hardest problems.”
― Paul Allen
“There’s a whole different way to express yourself in music and the other arts, and it hopefully complements other things you do in technology.”
― Paul Allen
“When I was 7 or 8, I became fascinated with hot rods.”
― Paul Allen
“I believe in the power of shared data and technology to help build a better future.”
― Paul Allen
“I was only in second grade when the Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. The night of his launch – April 12, 1961 – I went out onto the front porch and stared up at the stars, trying to see his capsule passing overhead. Like millions of others, I was enthralled by the idea of space exploration and have been ever since.”
― Paul Allen
“I have held Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock guitar and imagined what it would be like to play it, but that’s the extent of it.”
― Paul Allen
“As more intelligent computer assistance comes into being, it will amplify human progress.”
― Paul Allen
“As a species, we’ve always been discoverers and adventurers, and space and the deep ocean are some of the last frontiers.”
― Paul Allen
“Technology is notorious for engrossing people so much that they don’t always focus on balance and enjoy life at the same time.”
― Paul Allen
“The human brain works in, so far, mysterious and wondrous ways that are completely different than the ways that computers calculate. Things like appetite or emotion, how do those function in the brain?”
― Paul Allen
“When it comes to helping out, I don’t believe in doing it for the media attention. My goal is to support the organizations that need help.”
― Paul Allen
“I am very excited to be supporting one of the world’s most visionary efforts to seek basic answers to some of the fundamental question about our universe and what other civilisations may exist elsewhere.”
― Paul Allen
“In my own work, I’ve tried to anticipate what’s coming over the horizon, to hasten its arrival, and to apply it to people’s lives in a meaningful way.”
― Paul Allen
“The possible is constantly being redefined, and I care deeply about helping humanity move forward.”
― Paul Allen
“What should exist? To me, that’s the most exciting question imaginable. What do we need that we don’t have? How can we realize our potential?”
― Paul Allen
“I enjoy creating new ideas, working on new creative projects.”
― Paul Allen
“I grew up around books. When I first held the book and it was a substantive, tangible thing, and I thought of all the work that went into it, not just my work but everybody else’s and the research and so forth, there’s a sense of really have done something worthwhile.”
― Paul Allen
“In the first eight or so years at Microsoft, we were always chained to our terminals, and after I got sick the first time, I decided that I was going to be more adventurous and explore more of the world.”
― Paul Allen
“In the computer industry, you’ve got an interdisciplinary team of people who can come together, attack the problem, and work in a collaborative style. You knock down one problem after another, cobble things together, and then hopefully turn the crank at some point.”
― Paul Allen
“With documentary-film projects, you hope you highlight an area of concern people haven’t thought about before. A lot of times, I’m asking myself – ‘This seems to be a significant problem. What can be done that hasn’t been done?’”
― Paul Allen
“In global warming, I think everyone is scratching their heads – are there technological things that can be brought to bear that can make a difference?”
― Paul Allen
“If you think about making a difference in the community, my family has always had a strong interest in the arts. I’m always interested in finding ways to innovate… It’s a blend; it’s not a point focus.”
― Paul Allen
“Traditionally, Seattle has been a great sports town and great football town. What the Huskies have achieved over the years has been pretty amazing. That’s how I got my first taste of football – when I went with my father to Husky Stadium.”
― Paul Allen
“Once you become an owner of a team, you get so much more into the sport and you can’t help it. So I really love NFL football now to the degree of following it much more than I did previously.”
― Paul Allen
“While I sign off on trades or free agents, I’ve rarely overruled my basketball people’s decisions. But I’m not shy about steering the discussion or pushing deeper if something doesn’t make sense to me.”
― Paul Allen
“You look at things you enjoy in your life, but much more important is what you can do to make the world a better place.”
― Paul Allen
“To make real progress in A.I., we have to overcome the big challenges in the area of common sense.”
― Paul Allen
“Those fortunate to achieve great wealth should put it to work for the good of humanity.”
― Paul Allen
“From my youth, I’d never stopped thinking in the future tense.”
― Paul Allen
“My high school in Seattle, Lakeside, seemed conservative on the surface, but it was educationally progressive.”
― Paul Allen
“You could tell three things about Bill Gates pretty quickly. He was really smart. He was really competitive; he wanted to show you how smart he was. And he was really, really persistent.”
― Paul Allen
“I was a programmer.”
― Paul Allen
“Languages evolve; ideas blend together. In computer technology, we all stand on others’ shoulders.”
― Paul Allen
“The brain was designed by evolution, so each part of it is optimized for what it does, and it’s incredibly, incredibly complex.”
― Paul Allen
“The biggest yacht that I have accommodates a submarine.”
― Paul Allen
“It turns out, if you go 1,000 feet down in the ocean, it’s really dark, and the animals are really strange, but if you put on some Pink Floyd, it’s fantastic.”
― Paul Allen
“My mother, God bless her, forced me to take touch typing when I was 16.”
― Paul Allen
“I was the center on our fraternity team, but I was a center-eligible, so I was known for my ability to go out, and I was pretty sure-handed catching a pass in the flat about ten yards down the field. My father played high school football and was pretty good. He also played center, so I always relished the idea that we both ended up playing center.”
― Paul Allen
“At one point, I was the youngest owner in major league sports.”
― Paul Allen
“If you have an analytical bent like I do, going back to my days as a programmer, you like to ask questions.”
― Paul Allen
“Somehow, I knew you had to have perfect eyesight to be a test pilot, and so that was it for my astronaut career.”
― Paul Allen
“You have a certain number of dreams in your life you want to fulfill.”
― Paul Allen
“Even though Traf-O-Data wasn’t a roaring success, it was seminal in preparing us to make Microsoft’s first product a couple of years later.”
― Paul Allen
“We taught ourselves to simulate how microprocessors work using DEC computers so we could develop software even before our machine was built.”
― Paul Allen
“Microprocessors were instantly attractive to us because you could build something for a fraction of the cost of conventional electronics. That’s essentially what we did with the Traf-O-Data computer – only it was too narrow and challenging an area to try to build a service business in.”
― Paul Allen
“I remember having pizza at Shakey’s in Vancouver, Washington in 1973 and talking about the fact that eventually, everyone is going to be online and have access to newspapers and stuff, and wouldn’t people be willing to pay for information on a computer terminal.”
― Paul Allen
“Our net worth is ultimately defined not by dollars but rather by how well we serve others.”
― Paul Allen
“Go Seahawks! Go Blazers!”
― Paul Allen
“As someone who was basically a software engineer for many years, I became fascinated with how the brain functions and is put together and works in such a different fashion than computers do.”
― Paul Allen
“I just try to stuff my brain with everything that I can read on what is going on in science at a very high level, and sometimes I see connections of what might need to be done.”
― Paul Allen
“It’s always interesting to bring scientists together, because they typically have very polarized views.”
― Paul Allen
“No one knows the complete function of sleep. Is it to reset the brain or give it more of a rest period? Is it for cleaning the brain of all the garbage protein? For me, talking about these things as a non-biologist is fascinating.”
― Paul Allen
“I am generally fascinated by what are the big, challenging questions – that’s behind my curiosity.”
― Paul Allen
“Nobody really knows what it would take to create something that is self-aware or has a personality. I guess I could imagine a day when perhaps, if we can understand how it works in the human brain, which is unbelievably complicated, it could be possible.”
― Paul Allen
“General managers – I like to talk about the ‘golden gut’: general managers that not only can have a sense for the players that are going to perform beyond what people expect and get team chemistry right, but they also have to be able to make trades.”
― Paul Allen
“The NFL, as compared to the NBA, it’s so physical and so emotional almost every play.”
― Paul Allen
“Any time you get to compete for the championship in a professional spot, it’s just a magic thing.”
― Paul Allen
“In Seattle, I’ve talked about how Pete Carroll is such… I’m kind of surprised at the variety of styles that successful coaches can have. Some are very communicative and positive and energized – like, Pete Carroll has all that in spades. Some of them are more cerebral; some are more directive.”
― Paul Allen
“The Ebola virus is unlike any health crisis we have ever experienced and needs a response unlike anything we have ever seen.”
― Paul Allen
“I think it’s pretty unique to see a coach adjust to the talent he has and maximize the abilities of players he has and help them keep growing.”
― Paul Allen
“That darn luxury tax is pretty painful.”
― Paul Allen
“I think, as an owner, you really want to do the team right, the fans right, and the community right and build a winning organization.”
― Paul Allen
“You want someone who will challenge you back; sometimes, that’s the way the best decisions get made.”
― Paul Allen
“In the early days at Asymetrix, we were focusing on business automation.”
― Paul Allen
“Blame me for having to type the backslash in DOS.”
― Paul Allen
“I got a taste when I was in Kenya a while ago of what medical care was in rural Africa. I was in a town of about 10,000 people, and a shipping container with a rusty microscope was their medical clinic.”
― Paul Allen
“Long periods can pass between the times you play for a championship, so you have to savor those moments.”
― Paul Allen
“Sports is such a cyclical thing; it’s often feast or famine. But what you try and do as an owner is build a winning organization.”
― Paul Allen
“In Portland, I am more involved in the details of trade discussions because I’ve been around that sport longer and can watch tape and can give some input to the drafting process. In football, not at all. It’s so specialized.”
― Paul Allen
“I’m trying to transmit the visions of creativity and build institutions that are incredibly catalytic to their fields.”
― Paul Allen
“Something that is characteristic of me is the breadth of my interests.”
― Paul Allen
“AI2 was born from a desire to create a system that could truly reason about knowledge, rather than just offer up what had been written on a subject before.”
― Paul Allen
“In order to be truly intelligent, computers must understand – that is probably the critical word.”
― Paul Allen
“I first got interested in the brain through computers.”
― Paul Allen
“One of the things I’ve come to appreciate about the brain is the importance of location. It’s not just a set of interchangeable parts that you can swap in and out.”
― Paul Allen
“There are so many intricacies to our brain that won’t be understood unless we start to look at the system as a whole. All these different details don’t operate in isolation.”
― Paul Allen
“As a programmer, you’re working with very simple structures compared to the brain. So I was always fascinated by how the brain works.”
― Paul Allen
“The brain has this amazing level of almost fractal complexity to it. When you start looking at any part of it in detail, you realize that it’s much more complex than you thought.”
― Paul Allen
“Anybody doing philanthropy has to find something that appeals to them from their own personal background or from intellectual curiosity.”
― Paul Allen
“We know a certain amount about neurons. You can do fMRI and watch parts of the brain light up. But what happens in the middle is poorly understood.”
― Paul Allen
“I’ve lived in Boston.”
― Paul Allen
“To me, it’s the kind of interesting question the human race should be investing in. Is there intelligent life out there? Are there other beings out there?”
― Paul Allen
“I really do care about the health of the players. That’s one of the tough things about the NFL – it’s so physically tough on the players.”
― Paul Allen
“I have to admit, between the Seahawks games and the Blazer games and playoffs games, we’re talking about close to 100 games a year, so I don’t really follow other sports a lot.”
― Paul Allen
“I think few people in their lifetime have the chance to be involved in something like the creation of Microsoft – that’s always going to be something I’m known for.”
― Paul Allen
“I’m not somebody that just has one or two things in life that are laserlike focused.”
― Paul Allen
“If you have the chance to realize some of these dreams you had as a kid, and you have the opportunity, why not pursue that?”
― Paul Allen
“Everyone’s dream is to take a pill – take a pill every day so you won’t have Alzheimer’s.”
― Paul Allen
“Some people are great at the pure mathematical things – like Bill Gates, he’s great at math things. He loves to do puzzles. Me, I like to look at an overall landscape and try to figure out, how do you solve a problem?”
― Paul Allen
“Back to Microsoft days, I’m always looking for, ‘OK, that’s great, but what can go wrong?’”
― Paul Allen
“What people don’t realize is the human body and the brain are so well designed to do – by millions of years of evolution – what we do.”
― Paul Allen
“Your dream, when you buy a sports franchise, is to win the championship, the Super Bowl.”
― Paul Allen
“The thing is, once you’re in the Super Bowl, you want to win. As time goes on, you want to win more and more.”
― Paul Allen
“It’s part of the juice of sports that you tend to find certain sports figures that you cheer on from other cities and others that you’re a bit skeptical about.”
― Paul Allen
“In an ideal world, everybody would find it easy to talk to the press… but not everybody is so excited.”
― Paul Allen
“I have had some amazing experiences as a musician – even with my modest skills.”
― Paul Allen
“There was a time when the government cut off funding to SETI, basically, and I thought it was something that should continue, and it was a very interesting scientific question.”
― Paul Allen
“Of course I love basketball.”
― Paul Allen
“The NBA is intense, but the NFL is a whole ‘nother level of intensity and dramatic, game-changing plays.”
― Paul Allen
“The intensity of the Super Bowl is one-of-a-kind. An NBA finals is best-of-seven. But the Super Bowl, one game, winner-take-all. The intensity is off the charts.”
― Paul Allen
“The idea that, you know – when I was growing up – that everybody would carry around a portable communicating device, that was science fiction when I was a kid.”
― Paul Allen
“I just try to find things that either need to be done, should be done, or where I can make a difference in a significant way. And the things I’ve been able to participate in have been very, very exciting.”
― Paul Allen
“Objectively speaking, Traf-O-Data was a failure as a company. Right as our business started to pick up, states began to provide their own traffic-counting services to local governments for free.”
― Paul Allen
“If it hadn’t been for our Traf-O-Data venture, and if it hadn’t been for all that time spent on UW computers, you could argue that Microsoft might not have happened.”
― Paul Allen
“A big part of the success of Microsoft was that every year, the chips our software ran on got faster and cheaper. They doubled in capability every 18 months under Moore’s law.”
― Paul Allen
“If Microsoft had never existed… The industry would probably be very fragmented.”
― Paul Allen
“Human beings are fragile things, and for the period of time it takes to get them to Mars and back, you have dangerous radiation from the sun and the galaxy. We have to think about issues like that.”
― Paul Allen
“Some people can vent their anger, take a breath, and let it go, but I wasn’t one of them.”
― Paul Allen
“The thing you realize when you get into studying neuroscience, even a little bit, is that everything is connected to everything else. So it’s as if the brain is trying to use everything at its disposal – what it is seeing, what it is hearing, what is the temperature, past experience.”
― Paul Allen
“As an ex-programmer, I’m still just curious about how the brain functions, how that flow of information really happens.”
― Paul Allen
“Moore’s Law-based technology is so much easier than neuroscience. The brain works in such a different way from the way a computer does.”
― Paul Allen
“The computer is a very regular structure. It’s very uniform. It’s got a bunch of memory, and it’s got a little element that computes bits of memory and combines them with each other and puts them back somewhere. It’s a very simple thing.”
― Paul Allen
“I spent many, many hours in the stack at the University of Washington library just wandering around, when my dad was working, as a kid.”
― Paul Allen
“There are people out there who don’t see value in intellectual property, and so they’re always going to have a problem if there are lawsuits involving intellectual property.”
― Paul Allen
“I’ve been on record many times in the past about the challenge of being competitive with NBA teams in smaller markets.”
― Paul Allen
“Continuity is important in sports.”
― Paul Allen
“I think if you look at, for instance, what the Seahawks – what we did winning the Super Bowl, that was with a very young team. So you have to blend the experience with young players and develop those as well.”
― Paul Allen
“I’d love to bring a championship here to Portland.”
― Paul Allen
“Some people are motivated by a need for recognition, some by money, and some by a broad social goal. I start from a different place: from the love of ideas and the urge to put them into motion and see where they might lead.”
― Paul Allen
“I’ve always been interested in many different things.”
― Paul Allen
“I’m kind of a retired software engineer. I don’t write code anymore.”
― Paul Allen
“I would go in the university stacks and pull out books like ‘Jane’s Fighting Aircraft of World War II’ when I was 12 or something, and I’d spend hours reading about the engines in some of those planes.”
― Paul Allen
“Some of my first memories are waiting for my father to finish his day at work in the University of Washington library and come out and jump in the car with my mom and myself, and we’d be sitting there reading books, and then we’d go home.”
― Paul Allen
“The unique thing about Stratolaunch – one of the unique things – is it doesn’t require a fixed launchpad.”
― Paul Allen
“I want to have a family.”
― Paul Allen
“Recording studios are interesting; a lot of people say – and I agree – that you should have a lot of wood in a recording studio. It gets a kind of a sweeter sound.”
― Paul Allen
“I’m not a video-game player at all.”
― Paul Allen
“There are so many websites I read; I look at everything from Slashdot to Ars Technica to the business technology sites, major newspapers like the ‘New York Times,’ and my local papers where I live, which cover the sports teams I’m involved with. There are about 20 sites we go to regularly, and I do use Twitter and Facebook as well.”
― Paul Allen
“I’m on Twitter, and I have over 10,000 followers. Which is pretty modest compared to Charlie Sheen.”
― Paul Allen
“All of us who care about the world going forward would like to engage the government more.”
― Paul Allen
“I find the function of the brain incredibly fascinating, and it’s like trying to crack the toughest, most complicated problem there is.”
― Paul Allen
“Once you own a team for as many years as I have, and you root for that team for that period of time, you’ve got rooting for the Blazers in your blood, and the Sonics are one of our arch-competitors.”
― Paul Allen
“I think I’ve got such a diverse set of interests – movies, aviation, technology, sports teams.”
― Paul Allen
“In technology, most things fail. Most companies fail.”
― Paul Allen
“Our dream is to one day uncover the essence of what makes us human.”
― Paul Allen
“It’s really amazing to stand in front of a work you haven’t seen before and be almost overwhelmed by its beauty and the vision and execution of the artist.”
― Paul Allen
“Art fairs bring attention to up and coming artists and some amazing new works. They are a way to connect everyone with what’s happening at the cutting edge of art, both new and historic.”
― Paul Allen
“Vulcan Inc. is a unique organization that unites commercial, philanthropic, research, policy, and technology innovation. Our goals are ambitious – from saving Africa’s elephants to unlocking the secrets of the human brain to building sustainable communities and opening up access to space.”
― Paul Allen
“Seattle has a long tradition of celebrating local and non-local art – from the Burke and Seattle Art Museums to the Asian Art Museum.”
― Paul Allen
“In the university library my father helped lead, as the Associate Director of Libraries from ’60 to ’82, I spent hours and hours as a kid devouring piles of books so I could follow the latest advances in science.”
― Paul Allen
“My quest to expand access to space began more than a decade ago, when I teamed up with Burt Rutan at Scaled Composites to build SpaceShipOne. This innovative air-launched vehicle was the world’s first private spacecraft to carry an astronaut into sub-orbital space.”
― Paul Allen
“As always, space remains an unforgiving frontier, and the skies overhead will surely present obstacles and setbacks that must be overcome. But hard challenges demand fresh approaches, and I’m optimistic that Stratolaunch will yield transformative benefits – not only for scientists and space entrepreneurs, but for all of us.”
― Paul Allen
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