Top 94 Quotes & Sayings by Harper Reed

The first thing is - and this is very important - I support the unmonitored use of the Internet for everyone. It doesn't matter what country you're in or what you do for a living - everyone should have the right to an unmonitored Internet.

I spent a lot of time hacking, doing all this stuff, building websites, building communities, working all the time, and then a lot of time drinking, partying, and hanging out. And I had to choose when to do which.

The opportunity to step away from everything and take a break is something that shouldn't be squandered.

'Data scientist,' as a profession, is largely a fad.

Not every time you open Messenger do you want an Uber, but when you do want an Uber, it appears. That is the goal.

My career choice has largely been what I wanted to do. I always knew that technology would be one of the threads.

I wonder which is ultimately more creepy: shopping at Amazon or using Facebook?

PayPal's been around forever. How do we use that platform to solve the future of commerce?

Photo management software is terrible. Mylio is pretty good - but disrupts the 'natural' flow of things: i.e. Apple Photos.

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.

Mobile usage is going up; mobile conversion is not.

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.

We are often celebrating technology and codes, but we don't really think about the creative side.

TechStars offers a network, and being a part of that network is an awesome opportunity.

The thing about Snapchat is it is ephemeral, so you don't - it's not like a video that you post to YouTube and then everyone can see it. It's this video that you get to share this kind of very intimate experience again, this very kind of genuine experience with another person in a more one-on-one sort of way. And I really appreciate that.

In technology startups, there's a lot of winging it.

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.

Instagram is amazing, and I enjoy sharing photos there. However, I don't think it is where my photos will go to live.

All of this conversation about chat and assistance lays the groundwork for what I would look at as the future of commerce.

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.'

What I do think is important is this idea of a 'privacy native' where you grow up in a world where the values of privacy are very different. So it's not that I'm against privacy but that the values around privacy are very different for me and for people who are younger than my parent's generation, for whom it's weird to live in a glass house.

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.

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.

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.

I am patiently waiting for the singularity.

I'm not a very patient person in general.

We developed our product called Dashboard, which was a software tool that was designed to be a virtual campaign office to help volunteers communicate and collaborate through emails and interacting online. It was our attempt to take an offline field office and merge it online.

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.

In the U.S., it's all about turnout, which means you have to appeal to every single Democrat to get them to vote.

I really think we have a future ahead of us where chat is obviously a big part of it, but I don't think the context of having that little assistant in your pocket is necessarily the only place where it will be.

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.

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.

I want to involve creativity more in technology and business. It is obvious that for us to be successful, a healthy relationship with creativity is needed.

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.

If there's a wall, we break it down and go through it.

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.

Our goal is to solve a problem for the retailer, not to solve a problem for my ego - which is big.

Before I was hired by Obama's team as the CTO for his 2012 re-election campaign, I had certainly never been involved with anything of that nature before. Yet, I somehow knew I could do the job. I attribute that confidence to my experience as a hacker and the subsequent willingness to take risks.

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.

I grew up in Greeley, Colorado, in a house without a television set. I was a very nerdy kid: I used to play 'astronaut' and eat bouillon as astronaut food. We also had tons of books.

If there's one thing about Chicago, we take care of our own.

Data is what powers all of us and our lives. It is ubiquitous among our now-connected lives. I love how it is now the oxygen of our Internet world.

Chicago's a flyover city. I don't think we should try to change that. But it would be really cool if we had a little more opportunity for investors to come hang out.

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.

If you get a WhatsApp message, you're probably going to open it. That's the interesting thing.

People are building apps that are doing super-crazy things, and there's a lot of talk about modeling and microtargeting. Facebook can predict when people are going to break up, and Target is able to predict if a woman is pregnant before she knows just based on the type of lotion she bought.

Myself, I have a philosophy degree and a fake computer-science degree. I say fake because I really didn't learn anything.

Advice is always awesome because it never makes any sense when you compare it all together. It always contradicts other advice. I love advice.

When you have a good vision and a very large capability of impact, that's very powerful.

I have to say that you don't really know stress until you know that the path of the free world is resting a little bit on your shoulders.

When you read Trump's tweets or see candidates interact online like Jeb did with Hillary, you're like, 'Yes, it's just like my friends.' That's the magic.

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.

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.

You can tell charlatans when they say 'big' in front of everything.

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.

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.

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.

I never would wish technology failing on any sort of opponent or enemy.

We were orbiting around the idea of intent and context. We would take the bus into work, and if you said, 'Here's a shirt you might like,' and I open it on my mobile phone, I'm not going to pull out my credit card and wallet. We thought, 'How does someone do this? An e-mail to yourself, or you try to remember?'

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.