I talk often about being intrinsically motivated by learning. It's the primary driver of most of my activity.

When I struggled with a depressive episode in 2013, I realized that I had a glitch in my thinking about my own motivation. I had separated learning and teaching into different concepts.

In the mid-to-late 1990s, I was an entrepreneur-in-residence at the Kauffman Foundation working with Jana Matthews on 'learning programs for high growth entrepreneurs.'

What I'm looking for in my interaction is critical thinking on the part of the person pitching to me.

Chinese productivity is the highest in the world but the way they do it is by borrowing the technology from abroad, either by joint ventures or other means.

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.

In making certain things easier for people, technology has actually demotivated people from using their brains. We have all these devices that keep us connected, and yet we're more disconnected than ever before. Why is that?

The anonymity of the internet has been completely abandoned - everything's so tied to your identity and sense of self now. It's hard for me to see that changing, but that's why I wrote a love letter to something that once was.