It's no secret that in our society, and many before, people are trend followers. For some reason, they feel better about themselves if they are dressed in the latest fashion or have the newest tech gadget.
When I started my company in the U.S. I was always told by my mentors, 'If you want to start a tech company, you need a technical co-founder,' because outsourcing just doesn't work. It is too slow, it is too expensive, and the product is going to change a lot.
There tends to be a lot of autism around the tech centers... when you concentrate the geeks, you're concentrating the autism genetics.
Prosperity in human society is misunderstood. The difference between a rich and poor society is the number of problems that society solves for its citizens. That means technological innovation is the source of all prosperity, but with every tech innovation, you also get disruption - ultimately, social and civic disruption.
In tech in particular, everyone is so serious all the time and has these grand visions.
Although the tech industry is very open to change, many people still have a closed-off mentality where, in the interest of protecting their ideas, they keep them hidden in dark caves.
State funds, private equity, venture capital, and institutional lending all have their role in the lifecycle of a high tech startup, but angel capital is crucial for first-time entrepreneurs. Angel investors provide more than just cash; they bring years of expertise as both founders of businesses and as seasoned investors.
No one in tech has ever been as sexist toward me as teachers and rabbis before I was 12 years old.
What I learned with tech companies is I gotta give people room to experiment, and also to make what might later on be a mistake. This is the attitude I want to build within San Francisco - give some time to the tech community.
The tech company needs to win in the war for talent. This means much greater focus on the employee, not simply as cog in the machine, but vital member of a programming team in a race against time and competitors. Wall Street is up-or-out, dog-eat-dog, survival of the fittest.
The tech community has taken the first step by recognizing that diversity is a strength and realizing that many of them have to work on their culture.
High tech is for a short time. But art is forever. People still admire a Picasso or a Van Gogh. But they don't admire the steam locomotive anymore.
At the end of the day, tech workers are not robots: they feel, they think, they have values.
I'll do manicures, but I won't wear nail polish because I don't have time to change it, and I chip my nail polish so quickly. I cannot last three days! I think it's the typing and the use - or overuse - of tech. I'm the chip queen!
In August of 2011, Steve Jobs, the tech icon who disrupted a string of traditional industries, called me and told me he thought he'd figured out a way to revolutionize TV. He invited me to come see it at Apple in a few months, but he died just six weeks later, and that meeting never came to pass.
I was a little bit of a tech lord. Not a lord. More of a duke or a nobleman. I was into that stuff as a kid. Nothing too crazy.
I feel like I've forcefully been thrust into the tech world, and I've enjoyed every minute of it.
Silicon Valley is the best place to start a tech company in so many ways.
Recognizing that female participation in technology is lower than it should be, we are committed to bolstering female tech talent, eliminating obstacles and challenges they face, and fostering diversity.
When you come to a place like Kauai, you don't go for a high tech world.
As hardware doubles its density every 18-24 months, courtesy of Moore's Law, and as software eats the world, technology will replace a broad swathe of jobs outright - from burger-flippers to diagnosticians - and atomize many others from full-time positions into gigs performed by many fungible workers. Tech, in short, will eat jobs.
Nothing new is on the earth right now. Technology, the things that we're discovering, it's been sitting here just waiting for someone to brush it off and go, 'Oh, let me read that. Let me see how I can use this information.' And it doesn't matter if it's from a tech perspective or a philosophical perspective.
There's so much innovation going on, and there are lots of people funding that innovation, but there's very little innovation on that infrastructure for innovation itself, so we like to do that ourselves to help companies create more tech companies.
One of the consistent characteristics of the tech industry is an endless labelling of technology and approaches.
I know about the tech industry in that I follow what apps are hot and software development. I know my way around different browsers. I know how to restart a computer.
One of the cool things we're seeing at TaskRabbit is local tech and gaming startups hiring TaskRabbits to test their products and deliver immediate user feedback. As the founder of a tech startup, I can tell you that this type of focus group testing is paramount - and usually really pricey and difficult to coordinate.
Shutterstock has the tech ethos. Rex has the relationships, packaging, and merchandising know-how.
You can fake a lot in a startup these days, what with Amazon Web Services and all sorts of off-the-shelf back-end components that let any even minimally competent duffer set up a Web app that does something. Intelligent planning for growth is rare among early startups, but it's the name of the game at a large, rapidly scaling tech company.
When I was growing up, there was no one. There were very few black women in tech; there were very few black women in the fashion game. We didn't have our Grace Jones - Grace Jones was before my time. We didn't really have a lot of black women in electronic and punk who were celebrated in the same levels as, say, your big mega-superstars.
Given my venture capital background, I know the tech sector well.
It's strange that we create tech and then we apply it to machines, when we could apply it to ourselves. Cars can now detect if something is behind them, but we don't have this ability. Why are we applying such a simple sense to a car when we could apply it to ourselves?
High tech companies that focus on research, development and production will learn that they can be the perfect complement to our world-renowned agriculture heritage.
The way we'll get more jobs is by creating new industries, new companies, businesses that are higher tech and therefore can compete.
Many tech company execs who visit to pitch products take time to peruse the shelves and exclaim upon various devices they owned in younger days.
Facebook is not a company of grass-roots tech enthusiasts. Facebook is not a game tech company. Facebook has a history of caring about building user numbers, and nothing but building user numbers.
Obama will win the 2012 election, thanks in part to the tech community rallying behind him due to issues like SOPA, visas, and free speech.