Michael Dell

I called up a bunch of the CEOs of Silicon Valley companies and said, 'Hey, can I come and see you? And I'd like to learn about what you're doing.' And I don't know, most of them said yes.

You have to do stuff that you're actually incredibly passionate and excited about and you know something about. The 'oppor-tuneurs' don't do as well as the entrepreneurs.

I was in seventh grade math class, and we had this thing called Number Sense. So, I wasn't on the track team. Wasn't on the football team. Wasn't on the basketball team. I was in the Number Sense Club.

Relative to other economies in the world, India has a good feel to it.

If I come to Aspen for one or two nights, I stay at the St. Regis.

Rural technology is moving from kind of the back office to where everything, every company - sales, marketing, customer acquisition, new product development, media - all industries are becoming technology industries. And it's not information technology: it's business technology.

VMWare, as you know, remains a public company, and Secure Works is also a public company. And it's possible in the future that within the group, we could have other public companies.

The IT organization can't drive or lead a digital transformation. It has to come from the business and the business strategy, because they're fundamental to how a company or an organization evolves.

5G cell networks create a whole new wave of distributed and edge computing.

When you found a company, you feel a deep sense of responsibility for it. I'll care about Dell even after I'm dead. So this is a pretty personal process. And when you're doing what you love, and it's working, you don't get tired working what other people might consider long hours or crazy schedules. It's just fun. It's energizing.

At Dell, we believe the customer is in control, and our job is to take all the technology that's out there and apply it in a useful way to meet the customer's needs.

If you think about computing, there isn't just one way to compute, just like there's not just one way to move around. You can have shoes, you can have a car, you can have a bicycle, submarine, rocket, plane, train, glider, whatever. Because you have one doesn't mean you get rid of another one... But PCs continue to be important.

Microsoft's an important partner for Dell, an important company in the industry.

Real entrepreneurs have what I call the three Ps (and, trust me, none of them stands for 'permission'). Real entrepreneurs have a 'passion' for what they're doing, a 'problem' that needs to be solved, and a 'purpose' that drives them forward.

People ask me all the time, 'How can I become a successful entrepreneur?' And I have to be honest: It's one of my least favorite questions, because if you're waiting for someone else's advice to become an entrepreneur, chances are you're not one.

Dell's a company that has changed the IT landscape in making PCs and servers more affordable. There's enormous opportunities to make IT more accessible to tens of millions of companies, kind of democratizing the ability for companies to gain access to IT.

The world got enamored with smartphones and tablets, but what's interesting is those devices don't do everything that needs to be done. Three-D printing, virtual-reality computing, robotics are all controlled by PCs.

Twenty years and $40 billion. They seem like good round numbers.

There are a lot of things that go into creating success. I don't like to do just the things I like to do. I like to do things that cause the company to succeed. I don't spend a lot of time doing my favorite activities.

I can predict things. I can improve the uptime and the reliability. I can intervene and cause a better outcome before there's a problem.