Top 60 Daniel Lyons Quotes

Apple is on fire, delivering smash hits across its entire product line. It’s hard to think of another company that has ever been on such a roll.

The chance to interact with big shots is drawing scads of aspiring entrepreneurs to Quora, along with venture capitalists and other Valley players.

I was a technology reporter. And I think everybody who covers tech at some point or another feels like a little kid with their face pressed against the glass looking in at the candy shop and going, ‘Wow, it looks so cool and so much fun.’

The technology, called near-field communication, involves a microchip that can send and receive data across very short distances, about four inches. Instead of swiping a credit card, you hold your phone near a reader and let the data zip between the two devices.

My prior stint at ‘Newsweek’ was a very different world. So it’s what it’s like to be in one of these kooky software startups as a grown up. It’s not entirely pleasant! It’s like, ‘Oh, I don’t fit.’

You can crank out Bitcoins on a PC, but it’s an incredibly computer-intensive task, and it will keep getting harder as the number of Bitcoins in existence increases. Some people have pooled together hundreds of machines to ‘mine’ Bitcoins. Most folks, however, just buy them on an exchange.

Nobody ever imagined how quickly the Android mobile-phone platform would take off – not even Andy Rubin, the Silicon Valley engineer who created it.

Conventional companies try to find new uses for capabilities they already have. Transformers look at what the market needs and then go build it, hiring new people and/or taking people off other jobs.

‘Silicon Valley’ likes being satirized. They’ve all been waiting for someone to come along and make fun of it.

If your plumber or pool installer or local appliance store uses HubSpot software, HubSpot may be holding information about you without you even knowing it. We figure we’re safe when we use online services. We figure we can trust the people who run them not to snoop on us. I used to believe that. I don’t anymore.

The iPod Touch is basically an iPhone with the phone part taken out, which is fine – since making calls is the one thing that the iPhone doesn’t actually do very well.

You realize that if you’re in the media business, technology is fundamentally what’s driving the change in that business.

There’s often a good, honest case to be made that a century-old company has not only a knack for growing and managing a P&L, but also, perhaps, a heart and soul.

Since the beginning of the internet era, it has been pretty widely accepted that when you join an online service, whatever data you put into it belongs to you.

There are too many ways that a startup gig can go sideways. If the startup won’t agree to hefty severance, pass.

HubSpot is divided into ‘neighborhoods,’ each named after a section of Boston: North End, South End, Charlestown.

Mesh networking is an old idea. Oddly enough, the low-cost XO Laptop built by the ‘One Laptop Per Child’ organization – the so-called $100 laptop – was designed with built-in mesh networking. The idea with the XO machine was that many kids using those laptops would be out in rural areas without reliable Internet access.

Android phones are sold by dozens of hardware makers, the biggest being Samsung, Motorola, and HTC. There are lots of different form factors. Slider phones. Phones with keyboards. Big screens, small screens, midsize screens.

My job, originally, was to write blog posts for their ‘HubSpot’ blog. They have a business model built on content. Then I was writing e-books for them, and after I came back from L.A., they had this new plan to launch a podcast.

I want to get in on how the media business is changing, how people are telling stories in new ways.

I wouldn’t say that I know a lot about ‘Silicon Valley’. I live in Boston, for one thing. And I don’t live and breathe this stuff the way most of the guys out there do.

I wanted to learn how to blog, so I was playing around with WordPress and Typepad and Blogger, starting all these different blogs just to learn how these things work. I had a fake Sergey Brin blog, an anonymous, fake Ph.D kind of blog. I did it for, like, I don’t know, six weeks, and the Steve Jobs one just caught on.

Amid all the job losses of the Great Recession, there is one category of worker that the economic disruption has been good for: nonhumans.

I often wonder what the world would be like if more companies were like Apple.

Confining a resume to a single page is good advice for anyone.

Google views Facebook as a threat to its business and has been trying to launch a social-networking service to compete with it.

Content is supposed to be king. But in the world of electronic devices, Apple seems to be placing the crown on its own head, apparently believing that its iPad and iPhone are more important to customers than the books, movies, and music they store on them.

To make a vehicle autonomous, you need to gather massive streams of data from loads of sensors and cameras and process that data on the fly so that the car can ‘see’ what’s around it.

Some people don’t have a sense of humor.

We like the John Gruber model – he writes some long stuff that’s very thoughtful and analytical, and then other stuff, he just adds a bit of commentary. I like that.

With the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, and iMac, Apple is the most powerful tech company in the world. It’s also the No. 1 music retailer in the U.S. and among the top sellers of online movies, too.

There’s no special technological wizardry involved in what Groupon does.

The office-as-playground trend was made famous by Google and has spread like an infection across the tech industry. Work can’t just be work; work has to be fun.

If we didn’t have Net neutrality, carriers could do things like penalize companies that use a lot of bandwidth or create high-speed lanes and charge Internet companies extra fees to send their stuff over them. That would give an advantage to big companies and make life harder for startups.

I feel like Valleywag has been different things with different writers over the years. Up and down. I think it’s at their best when they get a legitimate scoop, like when someone leaks them documents. I feel like we could do more of that, breaking stories.

Hubspot’s leaders were not heroes but rather a pack of sales and marketing charlatans who spun a good story about magical transformation technology and got rich by selling shares in a company that still has never turned a profit.

Facebook’s position with rival tech companies boils down to this: if you want access to all the information we’ve collected, strike a deal with us.

People in startup-land live inside it. They see themselves as really good people even when they’re doing something that’s very bad. There’s a huge disconnect from reality in the tech world.

I was working at ‘Forbes,’ and I covered big enterprise companies – IBM, Sun, and EMC – and it was kind of boring. ‘Forbes’ only came out every other week, so it was not the most fast-paced job in the world. It was very nice, comfortable.

The iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player. Nor were the iPhone and iPad the first in their categories. The real reason for the success of these devices – the true unsung hero at Apple – is the iTunes software and iTunes Store. Because Apple provided them, it wasn’t just selling hardware.

The iPhone is like ‘omakase’, the style of sushi where the chef chooses what you’re going to eat, and might even tell you how to eat it – no wasabi allowed on this, no soy sauce allowed on that. Definitely no California rolls.

What if the Big Three automakers made products that were simple and easy to use – imagine a car with a user interface made by Apple – while also constantly trying to push the state of the art? What if they constantly sought out new technologies and ideas, and incorporated them into their products?

I guess I always had made some assumptions about what it would be like to work in a tech company, and some were right, and some were wrong. I had a lot of, looking back on it, now naive ideas about how companies build their brands, and a lot of those notions I ended up realizing were kind of wrong.

Since 2011, Groupon has lost $730 million, and Zynga has lost just over $1 billion. Twitter has been in business for 10 years and went public in 2013. Since then, the company has lost $2 billion.

Carrier networks were originally built for connecting phone calls. Now they’re getting swamped with bandwidth-hogging data applications. Keeping up will require huge investments. Who’s going to pay for that?

Every new HubSpot employee has to go through training to learn how to use the software. That’s a good idea, and it also keeps me from having to worry about what I’m supposed to be doing here or why Cranium, who hired me, still has never come by to say hello or talk about what he wants me to work on.

Fixing mistakes is one thing. Apple’s bigger strength has been its ability to keep improving hit products.

What needs to change is the nature of advertising itself. That business hasn’t really evolved since the days of Don Draper.

There are two types of young people – the partiers and the people who wanted a sense of purpose in their life.

For the most part, cookies aren’t dangerous. They were created so advertisers could get a better idea of who you are and what you’re interested in, so they could send you ads you’re more likely to find relevant.