If you get a WhatsApp message, you're probably going to open it. That's the interesting thing.
— Harper Reed
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.
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.
Instagram is amazing, and I enjoy sharing photos there. However, I don't think it is where my photos will go to live.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not a very patient person in general.
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?'
In technology startups, there's a lot of winging it.
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.
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 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.'
Photo management software is terrible. Mylio is pretty good - but disrupts the 'natural' flow of things: i.e. Apple Photos.
Advice is always awesome because it never makes any sense when you compare it all together. It always contradicts other advice. I love advice.
We are often celebrating technology and codes, but we don't really think about the creative side.
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.
Mobile usage is going up; mobile conversion is not.
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.
PayPal's been around forever. How do we use that platform to solve the future of commerce?
'Data scientist,' as a profession, is largely a fad.
You can tell charlatans when they say 'big' in front of everything.
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.
Not every time you open Messenger do you want an Uber, but when you do want an Uber, it appears. That is the goal.
I am patiently waiting for the singularity.
In the U.S., it's all about turnout, which means you have to appeal to every single Democrat to get them to vote.
When you have a good vision and a very large capability of impact, that's very powerful.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Our goal is to solve a problem for the retailer, not to solve a problem for my ego - which is big.
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 wonder which is ultimately more creepy: shopping at Amazon or using Facebook?
Myself, I have a philosophy degree and a fake computer-science degree. I say fake because I really didn't learn anything.
If there's a wall, we break it down and go through it.
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 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.
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.
