Campaigns are crazy things. They're half startup, half enterprise.
— Harper Reed
I don't drink coffee; I drink a lot of green tea and water.
I would say Silicon Valley and New York have inflated salaries.
Taking time to do something slower than you normally would is a privilege that should not be ignored.
My parents are very supportive: they helped redirect my technology attitude and my punkness into positive things.
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.
Let's say we were a peacekeeping force in some small country that most people had never heard of. And we were there to host a peaceful election, and we then found out a bunch of stuff was hacked. We probably would push to have another election to make sure that would be fair.
Don't eat the pizza; get lots of sleep - you have to take care of yourself. It's about being your tip top self at all times, and if you are unhealthy, or you're sick, or you don't feel good, even it's just because you're sluggish, you're not going to make it because you're not going to be able to react to things.
We make interesting companies and real businesses. It's not social networks for cats.
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.
I read a lot of books. I read because it inspires me and shows me paths that I could never imagine. Sometimes those paths are horrible and sad, and sometimes they are hopeful and amazing. Not always are they paths to the future, and sometimes the paths are actually about the past but make sense when applied to the future. Books are amazing.
Let's not project our fears onto others.
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.
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 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.
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.
I never would wish technology failing on any sort of opponent or enemy.
I've had a lot of bosses that I didn't agree with, but the worst boss was very much me myself. So, I can't let myself slack off, and if I do slacking off, I'm the one that's yelling at myself. I've worked with a lot of different employers, and none of them have been as aggressive as I have been.
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.
There are a lot of people who are unable to take a break to clear their minds. I imagine they are the ones who need it the most.
The information diet of a senior campaign staffer is insane. We were all addicted to our chosen email delivery devices and were aggressively tethered to them. It made sense and wasn't an issue during the campaign because of the importance of the situation. However, once the campaign was over and we were successful, the information flow dried up.
Security is very difficult. You have to be very careful about security, and I think oftentimes people just forget; they don't invest in the right things.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The main ideas for us are scale, stability, and audience.
Presidential campaign and White House are two aggressively separate things. They still think I'm the weird kid in the corner, so I don't have much power. But I'll definitely do something to help.
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.
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.
All of this conversation about chat and assistance lays the groundwork for what I would look at as the future of commerce.
If there's one thing about Chicago, we take care of our own.
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.
My career choice has largely been what I wanted to do. I always knew that technology would be one of the threads.
A lot of people are buying things on the Internet - not just white men.
The opportunity to step away from everything and take a break is something that shouldn't be squandered.
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.
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.
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.
One of the things that I used to make sure I'd do was to always make sure I'd have dinner at home because I needed that disconnect from work. Even when it was crazy, I'd go home at, like, 10 o'clock and have dinner. That way, I had time where I could decompress a little bit and then go back in.
In New York City, they have their own way of doing things. Every city and every region should do its own thing.
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.'
I love books that stand the test of time.
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 didn't want to waste time by sending our volunteers to Republicans; we sent them to the undecided.
I'm a white male in power. In many cases, I'm the enemy.
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.
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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