Quotes from Caterina Fake

Do not seek prizes that aren't worth getting.

Ecstasy is almost never discussed anymore, but leaving the earth is one way of attaining it. To exchange ecstasy for death is often the bargain.

I first got online in the late '80s when I was an eccentric teenager in suburban New Jersey, in a town mostly interested in sports, popularity, and clothes. I was a reader, into Jorge Luis Borges, and I found, connected to, and delighted in a group of Borges scholars from Aarhus, Denmark, that I met online.

'Free' is the museum show of our times, presaging the whole Wikileaks dustup, and it shows shifting power dynamics and a glimpse of the human in a world of flowing data.

Because the Internet is a medium, it doesn't care whether it transmits love or hate. It is what we build and who we are that make it what it is. We can build things that diminish our humanity or build things that bring us to human flourishing.

Rob Kalin, Etsy's founder, never finished college. Evan Williams, Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey - the founders of Twitter - are not college graduates. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, is another dropout. And, of course, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

Trade sales are the bulk of exits, and there's no shame in that. Sometimes, it's exactly the right thing to do.

Etsy radically simplified and amended their policies. Sellers of handmade goods can now hire as much help as they need to run their shops. They can apply to sell designs they produce with the help of outside businesses.

My favorite online communities are characterized by their incredible generosity.

One of the many wonderful things about homeschooling is that I am constantly learning alongside my daughter.

If there is a national, secular religion in the United States, it is the belief that America is the Land of Opportunity, that we are a meritocracy, that any kid, no matter who they are, or where they come from, can work hard and move up in the world: that their effort matters.

A co-founder is like being somebody's parent: You want to make sure your offspring thrive.

In my house, there is an old Chinese cabinet full of little figurines on two shelves. They are for my daughter, to tell stories. We have told hours and hours or stories using these figures. There are all kinds of people, children and adults, and all kinds of animals - elephants, tigers, snakes.

Good parents, who are able to maintain the affection and respect of their children and whose offspring admire them and value their good opinion, can be reasonably certain that their values and ways of socialized behaving will be adopted by the next generation.

As a child, I learned hundreds of poems by heart, which I can recite to this day.

It makes me happy to meet other poetry fans. Especially when they recommend poets I'm not familiar with.

If we are not given the chance to forget, we are also not given the chance to recover our memories, to alter them with time, perspective, and wisdom. Forgetting, we can be ourselves beyond what the past has told us we are; we can evolve. That is the possibility we want from the future.

I joined the board of Etsy when it was just three founders, and I helped recruit the COO and CTO, Chad Dickerson, who later became the CEO.

I go to bed early - around 9 P.M. or 10 P.M. - and wake up between 2 A.M. and 5 A.M. and get an extra three hours of work done. Then I have a regular work day. It's very effective.

For a while, I couldn't join Facebook because of my last name. During the registration process, I was asked for my real name, and when I wrote 'Fake,' it rejected me. Finally, a friend working for Facebook took care of me.

I love Hunch, the awesome team, my brilliant cofounders - we're doing great work and building a great company.

When we were making Flickr, we called it the 'Eyes of the World.' The idea was that everybody, everywhere, is looking. It was this sense of being able to penetrate worlds that you had never been able to access before - of global, universal travel.

I'm not good at vacationing. I've repeatedly failed at palapas and mai-tais.

It's becoming increasingly difficult to find kids to hang out with that don't consume a lot of commercial culture.