Harper Reed Quotes
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This idea of, there's a locked door; how do you open it? You don't necessarily care what's behind it; you're just more excited about opening the lock... It's not about finding the treasure; it's more about defeating the puzzle.
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Very smart people are often tricked by hackers, by phishing. I don't exclude myself from that. It's about being smarter than a hacker. Not about being smart.
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The advice I used to give to engineers I hired was, 'Don't eat the pizza.' Sometimes when you walk into these high-pressure environments, it's, like, doughnuts everywhere and all these little cakes.
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My entire career has been based around commerce. The Obama campaign was famous for raising boatloads of money online. My question is how do you make conversions better through mobile and e-mail.
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First of all, a giant corporation probably shouldn't be being hacked by teenagers. I put that on the corporation, not the teenagers. Teenagers are going to do what teenagers are going to do - rebelling. But if they're able to hack a big corporation, that seems like the corporation should be better at security.
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When I look for new books, I often struggle to find things that challenge and entertain me. This has caused me to spend a number of cycles thinking about where I can get the serendipitous book discovery experience that we had in physical book stores.
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The opportunity to step away from everything and take a break is something that shouldn't be squandered.
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My biggest worry is that no one seems to notice that we are not going to stop the technical progress that is going to continue to displace people through automation.
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I'm a white male in power. In many cases, I'm the enemy.
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Donald Trump won the election. I think that's true. I also think there was interference. If this was another country, I think we'd be demanding another election.
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We didn't want to waste time by sending our volunteers to Republicans; we sent them to the undecided.
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Google Photos is great. I enjoy using it to curate my photo collection online. The integration on iOS to Apple Photos is a bit too much voodoo for me.
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Campaigns are crazy things. They're half startup, half enterprise.
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I try and wake up relatively early. I listen to some music and check Twitter. I also make sure I weigh myself and check how long I slept. I do that because knowing that data seems better than not knowing it.
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It was on a bulletin board that I first learned about hacker culture, the 'Let's just break through this wall and see what's on the other side' mentality.
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One of my favourite books about hackers is 'Masters of Deception' about this hacking group in the 1990s. Many of them didn't come from wealthy families. These are kids that are very intelligent; they just happen to be misdirected.
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Startupfest is a very positive conference. I think a lot of it has to do with how different culturally it is from other startup or tech conferences.
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Books have literally powered most of my life. Whether as a stress relief when doing hard things or as vacation fodder, they are a constant and important part of my life.
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When you walk into a field office, you have many opportunities. We'll hand you a call sheet. You can make calls. You can knock on doors, and they'll have these stacks there for you. They'll say: 'Harper, you've knocked on 50 doors. That's great. Here's how you compare to the rest of them.' But it's all very offline.
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All of this conversation about chat and assistance lays the groundwork for what I would look at as the future of commerce.
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I don't drink coffee; I drink a lot of green tea and water.
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The main ideas for us are scale, stability, and audience.
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I programmed computers every day. And one of my favourite apps we built was this thing called Awesome Updater, that all it did is send you a tweet randomly that was like, 'Yo, you're awesome.'
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I find that I often forget that people come from all over. In interfaces, products, experiences, and building for people, we always forget that people are not us.