I couldn't believe I was working with Michael Jackson. I thought, growing up as a kid, I thought Michael was a cartoon.

I've always had mostly women come out to see me perform. That's the reason the guys show up; they know R. Kelly is going to draw the women. Most of the songs I'm singing are catering to women anyway.

I started learning everybody's riffs, from Donny Hathaway to Jeffrey Osborne to James Ingram. That helped me create my own style of singing.

I started calling myself the Pied Piper, when I started using the flute sound in my music.

Know your career values: Not your parents' values, not your friends', but what you personally value in work. For me, it's things like moving quickly and scrappily, ownership and authority over my work, and flexibility.

In 2006, when doing a live stage show in Ireland, I tried for the first time to instantly induct a subject on stage, something I had never done before, nor did I know if it would ever work. The result almost cost me my career; the man I grabbed and instantly inducted went out cold and fell to the floor.

Niklas Zennstroem has a thorough background as a successful entrepreneur with extensive expertise in areas such as IT and online.

If I made a musical in the beginning of my career, it would have been crane shots and tracking shots and people coming out of cakes and whatever, but these techniques are something that I've left behind me.