Words matter. These are the best Sarah Lacy Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The best entrepreneurs know when to ignore sage advice.
Few people would doubt that Mark Zuckerberg would build a great product. But I, at least, would never have expected him to become so great at hiring, motivating, managing, and ultimately getting whatever it is his company needs from people.
As I’ve written before, China’s ability to be the assembly line to the world wasn’t where its role in the global economy ended; it was where it began. An ability to make products cheaper than anywhere else gave way to an ability to make high end products more nimbly than anywhere else.
Sometimes the hardest thing about committing the perfect crime can be keeping your genius to yourself.
Some people have blithely dismissed growth in markets like China and India, saying Silicon Valley will always be the hub for tech: that everyone will come to us. Wake up: Because the numbers are showing money and talent is increasingly going elsewhere.
The biggest barrier to starting a company isn’t ideas, funding or experience. It’s excuses.
It’s happening: Lou Dobbs’ dream come true and Silicon Valley’s worst nightmare. We’re already seeing the reverse brain drain as smart immigrants take their U.S. educations and experience building companies and creating technology back to their home countries.
One of the nice things about being a private company is operating without the intensity of public glare. It’s hard to grow a company under a microscope of constant second guessing.
The thought for a long time was that banks needed to be too controlled, too regulated to be turned over to the Wild West of the Net. Then the credit meltdown hit, and we saw just how reckless these so-called safe and regulated institutions were.
Lesson to would-be fame seekers: It’s not really a new world when it comes to celebrity. There are no shortcuts. It’s still talent, perseverance and hard work. Even the speed and reach of the Net can’t create lasting value and income overnight.
Everything about Mark Zuckerberg is pure hacker. Hackers don’t take realities of the world for granted; they seek to break and rebuild what they don’t like. They seek to outsmart the world.
If Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t understand something, it’s not defeat. It’s not even something he has to accept. It’s merely a challenge he needs to engineer his way out of, and that includes human emotions and relationships.
Unions inherently create an ‘us versus them’ dynamic that makes winning against a company’s management the top goal, not serving customers, innovating, or in the case of education, teaching kids.
It’s almost a cliche that great Silicon Valley entrepreneurs don’t go sit on a beach when they make a lot of money; they get back to work building another company or at least investing in other people’s companies.
Benefitting from a job bubble is not only a first world problem, it’s an upper-class-educated-lucky-to-be-in-the-right-industry-at-the-right-time kind of first world problem.
The roots of Silicon Valley are full of stories of immigrants and minority groups who experienced bigotry and made it anyway. Why should women be any different?
I think everyone has their own style in journalism. Look, I’m a girl from the South! Sometimes I laugh. Someone can pejoratively call it giggling. But if you look at the body of my work, I ask lots of hard questions and break a lot of hard news.
As smartphones have allowed us to have our computers, emails, social media feeds, and a full surveillance system in our pockets at all times, stories of the law enforcement’s unease with that have been popping up in the press. And of course, the ones that become viral videos aren’t exactly flattering for law enforcement.
I always want to have San Francisco as my home and my base. I’m a business reporter – that’s what I do and what I enjoy – and I don’t know another place on the planet that would be as fascinating to cover.
When a PR person asks why is it a big deal that they got your name wrong or sent you a pitch on something you would never cover, it’s because when you get hundreds of those a day, it’s incredibly annoying. It’s basically like having telemarketers call you all day long for something you never want to buy.
What created Silicon Valley was a culture of openness, and there is no future to Silicon Valley without it.
A lot of the books that have been written about Silicon Valley are really good. Michael Malone’s books are incredible. I think his ‘Infinite Loop’ is the best book that’s been written about Apple.
I am a huge fan of using social media to connect with people because I think there was this ‘ivory tower’ aspect of journalism where people might read a byline for years but have no idea about the person who was behind it and never get to communicate with them or ask them a question.
One of the great ironies of the social media era is that some of the least social people in the world created it.
For all the billions of dollars created here, Silicon Valley is remarkably stingy when it comes to giving.
Get a lawyer to look at your contract or beware. Because no company – evil or not – is going to do it for you.
I’ve been reading a lot about Silicon Valley history recently and was struck by just how core the lack of unions has been to the American tech industry’s evolution. It’s enabled the constant creative destruction that keeps Silicon Valley relevant and thriving in a rapidly changing world.
You know that American dream and American spirit of innovation we always talk about? Turns out, the bulk of it was built by people who came to America from somewhere else, not people born American. We have no birthright or natural lock on these things.
Being in Silicon Valley is like playing for the Yankees. You get knocked around more than anywhere else, the glare of the media spotlight is more brutal, and the expectations are higher than they’d be in any other city.
The one thing I didn’t do that was kind of controversial was go work for a daily paper, because I didn’t like that kind of journalism, and I’m glad I didn’t because that’s the business model that’s going totally extinct.
