Nathan Myhrvold Quotes

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Nathan Myhrvold

Profession : Businessman

Birth : August 3, 1959

If your kitchen smells good, your food lost something.

Nathan Myhrvold

A blowtorch is a wonderful thing. You can get one of those for about 25 bucks at Home Depot. And there's a ton of things that you can use a blowtorch for, in browning a steak or touching up the browning of a chicken or making creme brulee.

Nathan Myhrvold

Pressure cookers are relatively inexpensive, they're in every kitchen store, your grandma probably had one, but a lot of people don't. A pressure cooker is interesting because by pressurizing the vessel, you're able to cook much hotter than the boiling point of water, and still have water be present.

Nathan Myhrvold

It's very hard for individual inventors to get paid. For the same reason that private equity is valuable - broadly, that's a good thing - in the case of patents, many that own them aren't in a good position to take the next step.

Nathan Myhrvold

It's really hard to compete with Apple on pure coolness, and if you do, you're probably going to use some of the things they pioneered.

Nathan Myhrvold

Raw lobster tail, freeze dried, is amazing.

Nathan Myhrvold

I'm one of the first invention capitalists.

Nathan Myhrvold

The world has shown that if you provide capital and expertise to an area that is starved for capital and expertise, really good things will happen.

Nathan Myhrvold

In market research I did at Microsoft Corp. in the early 1990s, I estimated that the 'Wall Street Journal' took in about 75 cents per copy from subscribers, $1.25 at the newsstand and a whopping $5 per copy from ads. The ad revenue let them run a far bigger newsroom than subscribers were paying for.

Nathan Myhrvold

New online formats gutted the newspaper-ad business. Why pore over tiny print looking for a job in the want ads when you can tap a few keywords into monster.com, then click through and apply? Why pay a steep per-character rate for a classified when you can hawk a whole garage full of used stuff on EBay or Craigslist for free?

Nathan Myhrvold

One of the ugly secrets of the renewable-energy industry is that its products make no economic sense unless they are highly subsidized.

Nathan Myhrvold

Cooking is for chefs. Science informs us and lets us cook while knowing what we are doing, but it is not a replacement for the skills of a chef.

Nathan Myhrvold

Intellectual Ventures is a company that invests in invention.

Nathan Myhrvold

I think you would find almost anyone who stands up for their patent rights has been called a patent troll.

Nathan Myhrvold

There's a limit to how much you can deploy renewables, like wind or solar. People will talk about getting up to 30 percent of America's power from renewables, but you can't get to 100 percent because of their unreliability.

Nathan Myhrvold

If you had a really good - battery, it wouldn't matter that the sun goes down at night and the wind stops blowing sometimes. But at the moment, battery technology is nowhere near good enough to use at utility scale.

Nathan Myhrvold

The depressing thing about battery technology is that it gets better, but it gets better slowly. There are a whole bunch of problems in materials science and chemistry that come in trying to make existing batteries better.

Nathan Myhrvold

I have a very pragmatic approach to diets. Ones you can't stick to don't do you any good. Some people say, 'Just eat half of what's on your plate,' but I can't do that!

Nathan Myhrvold

Wine lovers have known for centuries that decanting wine before serving it often improves its flavor. Whatever the dominant process, the traditional decanter is a rather pathetic tool to accomplish it. A few years ago, I found I could get much better results by using an ordinary kitchen blender.

Nathan Myhrvold

The first thing that is not obvious to people is global warming is a less-than-1% effect. It's like being shortchanged at the bank by a penny every dollar. Over a long period of time with lots of transactions, that piles up.

Nathan Myhrvold