Stewart Butterfield

Email is the lowest common denominator. It's the way you get communications from one person to another. There isn't really an alternative. Sometimes people will have Facebook messenger turned on, but 99 percent of the time, if you're sending a message to a human you don't know well, you're using email.

The scale of revenue growth is unprecedented. If you look back over history, whether you're looking at the railway robber baron era or the 1920s or the '50s or the '70s, it used to take a long time for a company to get to the point where they had tens of millions of dollars of revenue. It was almost never an overnight phenomenon.

The thrill of a photo-realist painter is if you get really close to the painting, it looks just like a photograph. Whereas in my case, if you get close to my paintings, they totally fall apart - so I'm about as far from a photo-realist as it gets.

The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.