Quotes from Harper Reed

People are building apps that are doing super-crazy things, and there's a lot of talk about modeling and microtargeting. Facebook can predict when people are going to break up, and Target is able to predict if a woman is pregnant before she knows just based on the type of lotion she bought.

I don't drink coffee; I drink a lot of green tea and water.

What I do think is important is this idea of a 'privacy native' where you grow up in a world where the values of privacy are very different. So it's not that I'm against privacy but that the values around privacy are very different for me and for people who are younger than my parent's generation, for whom it's weird to live in a glass house.

'Data scientist,' as a profession, is largely a fad.

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

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

Startupfest is a very positive conference. I think a lot of it has to do with how different culturally it is from other startup or tech conferences.

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.

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.

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

First of all, a giant corporation probably shouldn't be being hacked by teenagers. I put that on the corporation, not the teenagers. Teenagers are going to do what teenagers are going to do - rebelling. But if they're able to hack a big corporation, that seems like the corporation should be better at security.

Presidential campaign and White House are two aggressively separate things. They still think I'm the weird kid in the corner, so I don't have much power. But I'll definitely do something to help.

Before I was hired by Obama's team as the CTO for his 2012 re-election campaign, I had certainly never been involved with anything of that nature before. Yet, I somehow knew I could do the job. I attribute that confidence to my experience as a hacker and the subsequent willingness to take risks.

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.

My entire career has been based around commerce. The Obama campaign was famous for raising boatloads of money online. My question is how do you make conversions better through mobile and e-mail.

All of this conversation about chat and assistance lays the groundwork for what I would look at as the future of commerce.

My career choice has largely been what I wanted to do. I always knew that technology would be one of the threads.

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.

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.

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

I usually hire people who have very exemplary work experience. Where they went to school, or what degree they have, really has no play into the hiring decision.

I grew up in Greeley, Colorado, in a house without a television set. I was a very nerdy kid: I used to play 'astronaut' and eat bouillon as astronaut food. We also had tons of books.

Ten Internets ago, when PayPal was started, it was all these tools that no one had built yet to bring commerce to the Internet. My first startup used PayPal.

The team that I had built was all white dudes with the same perspective on things that was at times comfortable and easy, but we weren't as innovative as our competitors.