Quotes from Tom Anderson

Expensive gear helps for night shots, but I wouldn't recommend beginners overspend on a camera.

When you go to a band's MySpace page you will have the full discography of everything they've ever recorded that you can listen to online.

The first people in a company are the most important. They will hire people like themselves and create a culture that either works or eats away at the chance for success.

One day I woke up and discovered that I was in love with tripe.

The very first plan I wrote for MySpace was that it would be a portal, but a portal wrapped around your user profile.

I've literally never seen a crowd react to a band the way they react to the Polysics. Signing them to MySpace Records was an obvious choice. I wanted to be the person to bring this seasoned band to a new culture and audience. I'm really proud of them.

I think people are feeling more artistic and creative with something like Instagram that makes editing easy. That's a good thing for sure.

It sounds crazy, but even in the first plan that I wrote up, I mentioned AOL, Yahoo and hotmail, knowing we would be big. And its crazy to think that it happened.

We didn't expect it to be cool, with people trading URLs instead of phone numbers.

We recognized from the beginning that we could create profiles for the bands and allow people to use the site any way they wanted to. We didn't stop people from promoting whatever they wanted to promote on MySpace.

It made a lot of sense to me that the music part of our site would work for filmmakers as well. They'll be able to upload clips. There will be a section where you can watch what they are doing. They'll tell where their screenings are. It took a lot longer than we wanted to because we were growing so fast.

We had a much bigger vision than creating a dating site.

We've tried to simplify the site because some people found it too difficult to use and were intimidated by it.

Newscorp has always been, for us, very easy to work with and they respect our opinions and let us run the site we wanted to. And, in fact, they wanted to keep us on. They weren't saying, hey, let's throw these guys out. They were buying into what MySpace was and the founders, and so it's been very good for me.

On Friendster, if you were a band and you made a profile, they would delete it. They didn't want bands on their site.

MySpace is the site I wanted to be on.

Celebrities have been using MySpace since the site's launch and it's a natural extension for us to now offer them an aggregated channel where they can be in control of their own image.

I had looked at dating sites and niche communities like BlackPlanet, AsianAvenue, and MiGente, as well as Friendster, and I thought, 'They're thinking way too small.'

And I always say sign up for MySpace and see what your kid is doing. Be his friend on MySpace. Know what your child is doing online because you're going to know more there than you'd ever know when he goes to school.

For years troops stationed all over the world have utilised MySpace as a lifeline to communicate with their loved ones back home.

When I'm on the net, someone always wants to chat with me. But outside of MySpace, it's a completely different world. I don't get recognized that much on the street.

I think we have replaced MTV. MySpace is more convenient. You can search for things, while MTV is just delivering things to you. On MySpace you can pick your own channel and go where you want.

If you knew me before Myspace, you'd probably thought I'd have been a scholar teaching philosophy in a university my whole life. If you met me before college, you'd probably have thought I'd be a musician for my entire life.

The connection between someone in Leeds and a comedian in Los Angeles would probably never happen if it weren't for MySpace, so it enables friendship and connection far more than it limits it.