Quotes from Caterina Fake

I wanted to become a writer and felt that poetry was perfected language, so having it in my subconscious mind would make the music of language always available to me.

If you look at all the companies I've been involved with - Flickr, Etsy, Findery - communities are a significant part of them. Connecting people to each other, user-generated content, building interactions. That's what I've cared about most.

My life project is humanizing technology: making technology more real and bringing it back into human interactions.

I approached Yahoo as a learning experience. Everything at every stage of the game affects what you do next. At Yahoo, I learned a lot about social search and met a lot of amazing people - some are now entrepreneurs with companies I subsequently invested in.

The computers people have are no longer on their desks but in their hands, and that is probably the transformative feature of the technology. These computers are with you, in the world.

In 2001, the hard disk on my laptop crashed, and everything on it was lost. I'd been using the computer for two, almost three years, and had all my work on it - email, which was stored locally; photos; fragments of poems; presentations; sketches; ideas; love letters; everything. I lamented the loss to my friends and got lectured on doing backups.

I joined a meetup group called Bay Area Parents for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which I had searched for, as I was going to start a group like it myself.

I stay up on current events. I read 'The New Yorker' and 'The Economist.' I go to community meetings to see what concerns the people in my neighborhood. I studied literature in college, so I also continue to read poetry, literature, and novels.

There is great work to be done, and the women will lead us. So I say, Astonish us with your genius. Inspire us with your creation. Work with one another. Endure the tribulations.

I've never understood cheating, probably because I never cared much about my grades. I instinctively knew that the grades didn't measure anything meaningful - usually just my ability to quickly memorize information I'd just as quickly forget.

I can't tell you how many times I've booked an air ticket only to get to the airport and find out they killed my ticket because it goes into the system, and the program tosses a ticket that says 'fake' on it. Twice I've gone to the counter for a KLM flight through Northwest and have been rejected.

'Apartamento,' a magazine out of Spain but written in English, is one of my favorite magazines.

So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.

College is an environment designed to encourage openness - the ability to think of things in novel ways and entertain unconventional beliefs.

In building a social network, the standards and mores of a community are its lifeblood; one does not lightly 'experiment' with these, and LinkedIn is exactly right to defend them.

'You, too, can be the President,' every American kid is told. But one unintended consequence of this belief, it is that, as a result of our being a meritocracy, if you have not succeeded, you are of lesser merit. It is shameful to be a failure in this country.

If you built a successful company the first time, it's really important not to fall into the trap of resting on your laurels and doing the same thing the next time. It's stepping into the unknown that enables you to create something fresh, new, and innovative.

Entrepreneurship works on the apprenticeship model. The best way to learn how to be an entrepreneur is to start a company and seek the advice of a successful entrepreneur in the area in which you are interested. Or work at a startup for a few years to learn the ropes.

If you looked at my resume in the years leading up to Flickr, I worked in a dive shop in landlocked Arkansas; I was a starving artist. I just arrived at the thing I love to do accidentally.

I'm happy we're about to start inviting people into the thing we've been working on!! It's called Pinwheel, and it's a way to find and leave notes all around the world.

On Pinwheel, you can find and leave notes all around the world. The notes can be public or private, shared with an individual, a group, or everyone.

I wish we didn't have to be nude to be noticed... But given the game as it exists, women make decisions. For instance, the Miss America contest is, in all of its states... the single greatest source of scholarship money for women in the United States.

The Internet is full of strangers, generous strangers who want to help you for no reason at all. Strangers post poetry and discographies and advice and essays and photos and art and diatribes. None of them are known to you, in the old-fashioned sense. But they give the Internet its life and meaning.

I learned most of what I knew about online communities on The Well, and it was a good place to learn. The group of people in Sausalito and Bolinas who'd gotten the Whole Earth Catalog off the ground - a bunch of boomer hippies, intellectuals and nerds - established the 'Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link', and showed us what online communities were.