Top 40 Harper Reed Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

My parents are very supportive: they helped redirect my technology attitude and my punkness into positive things.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

I love books that stand the test of time.

In New York City, they have their own way of doing things. Every city and every region should do its own thing.

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.

The main ideas for us are scale, stability, and audience.

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 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.

We make interesting companies and real businesses. It’s not social networks for cats.

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.

Mobile usage is going up; mobile conversion is not.

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.

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

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

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

I am patiently waiting for the singularity.

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.’

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.

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.

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.

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

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.’

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.

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 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.

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

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

‘Data scientist,’ as a profession, is largely a fad.

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.

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.