Harper Reed Quotes
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When I called people and said, 'Hey! Do you want to work for the president?' they usually said yes. I had 2 people say no. One person said no because they were a Republican; one person said no because they're a Libertarian.
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The digital team who were running Twitter, they weren't just going to put out a tweet for fun. They're going to try and figure out how do we measure the impact. Then they'd tweet it, and if it worked, great.
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Oftentimes in tech, people think, 'I'm the only one that has this.' I call them the Atlas People. They're like, 'The weight of the world is on the shoulders. I'm the only person who can solve this problem.' But you can't do that.
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The team that I had built was all white dudes with the same perspective on things that was at times comfortable and easy, but we weren't as innovative as our competitors.
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In technology startups, there's a lot of winging it.
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Ten Internets ago, when PayPal was started, it was all these tools that no one had built yet to bring commerce to the Internet. My first startup used PayPal.
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Let's not project our fears onto others.
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In the U.S., it's all about turnout, which means you have to appeal to every single Democrat to get them to vote.
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When you have a good vision and a very large capability of impact, that's very powerful.
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I never would wish technology failing on any sort of opponent or enemy.
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I would say Silicon Valley and New York have inflated salaries.
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There is the egoism of technologists. We do it because we can create. I can handle all of the parameters going into the machine, and I know what is going to come out of it.
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I think there are a lot of hurdles between a normal consumer brand figuring out their mobile strategy - let alone their chat app strategy - and programming a Facebook Messenger chatbot.
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Not every time you open Messenger do you want an Uber, but when you do want an Uber, it appears. That is the goal.
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I usually hire people who have very exemplary work experience. Where they went to school, or what degree they have, really has no play into the hiring decision.
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Myself, I have a philosophy degree and a fake computer-science degree. I say fake because I really didn't learn anything.
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When I give talks, I often quote from a button I received at a Google event: Always Be Creative. I use it to illustrate how important creativity is in technology and business.
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When you go from building T-shirts to software for a presidential campaign used by a cast of millions, it's pretty easy to think, OK, we can build something pretty big.
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I can only speak to the Democrat side, but for the Democrats, everything is aggressively measured, and what that means is if you're going to use Snapchat, you're going to use it for a reason, not just for fun.
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We see these wonderful apps that really have changed our world in many good ways such as Uber or Airbnb, but at the same time, they're drastically changing the workforce. And they're changing them so much that the industries themselves are not able to keep up.
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Data scientist, as a profession, is largely a fad.
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If you want to go and build a company that exists in Silicon Valley, then you should go and do it there. But if you want to build a company that is Australian, that represents your culture and your being, then you should do it in Sydney.
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Crowdsourcing is the future. However, if you don't trust your users to build/create/upload awesome work, they won't trust you with their crowd capital.
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I would still describe myself as a hacker. I still remember feeling the magic, the sense of discovery, when I first connected to a bulletin board. It seemed like the world was somehow brighter, the greens were greener. Like I'd stepped through a portal to the other side. I knew back then that things would never be the same again for me.