5 Quotes by Christian Davenport

Head down. Plow through the line.

What’s the quickest way to become a millionaire in space? Start out as a billionaire.

It was 1995, the dawn of the Internet era. “I thought the Internet would be something that would fundamentally change the nature of humanity,” he said during a speech in 2012. “It was like humanity gaining a nervous system.” So, he told his professor he was taking a deferment to see whether he could start an Internet company, and the teacher said, “Well, I don’t think you’ll be coming back.” That was the last time they ever talked.

The way rockets work right now is they are all expendable. So, you fly them once, and you throw it away. You can imagine if any mode of transport was expendable, it wouldn’t be used very much. But whether it’s a plane, a boat, a car, a bicycle, or a horse – they’re all reusable. If a 747 costs about a quarter-billion dollars and you need two for a round-trip, nobody is paying half a billion dollars from London to New York and back.

Twenty years later, “Day 1,” the name of the Amazon headquarters building, was still a rallying cry. “Day 2 is stasis,” he wrote in 2017. “Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.