“Very smart people are often tricked by hackers, by phishing. I don’t exclude myself from that. It’s about being smarter than a hacker. Not about being smart.”
― Harper Reed
“We didn’t want to waste time by sending our volunteers to Republicans; we sent them to the undecided.”
― Harper Reed
“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.”
― Harper Reed
“I don’t drink coffee; I drink a lot of green tea and water.”
― Harper Reed
“This idea of, there’s a locked door; how do you open it? You don’t necessarily care what’s behind it; you’re just more excited about opening the lock… It’s not about finding the treasure; it’s more about defeating the puzzle.”
― Harper Reed
“Taking time to do something slower than you normally would is a privilege that should not be ignored.”
― Harper Reed
“Books have literally powered most of my life. Whether as a stress relief when doing hard things or as vacation fodder, they are a constant and important part of my life.”
― Harper Reed
“I spent a lot of time hacking, doing all this stuff, building websites, building communities, working all the time, and then a lot of time drinking, partying, and hanging out. And I had to choose when to do which.”
― Harper Reed
“I would still describe myself as a hacker. I still remember feeling the magic, the sense of discovery, when I first connected to a bulletin board. It seemed like the world was somehow brighter, the greens were greener. Like I’d stepped through a portal to the other side. I knew back then that things would never be the same again for me.”
― Harper Reed
“You can tell charlatans when they say ‘big’ in front of everything.”
― Harper Reed
“If you get a WhatsApp message, you’re probably going to open it. That’s the interesting thing.”
― Harper Reed
“In the U.S., it’s all about turnout, which means you have to appeal to every single Democrat to get them to vote.”
― Harper Reed
“I can only speak to the Democrat side, but for the Democrats, everything is aggressively measured, and what that means is if you’re going to use Snapchat, you’re going to use it for a reason, not just for fun.”
― Harper Reed
“The digital team who were running Twitter, they weren’t just going to put out a tweet for fun. They’re going to try and figure out how do we measure the impact. Then they’d tweet it, and if it worked, great.”
― Harper Reed
“I am patiently waiting for the singularity.”
― Harper Reed
“In technology startups, there’s a lot of winging it.”
― Harper Reed
“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.”
― Harper Reed
“Not every time you open Messenger do you want an Uber, but when you do want an Uber, it appears. That is the goal.”
― Harper Reed
“We were orbiting around the idea of intent and context. We would take the bus into work, and if you said, ‘Here’s a shirt you might like,’ and I open it on my mobile phone, I’m not going to pull out my credit card and wallet. We thought, ‘How does someone do this? An e-mail to yourself, or you try to remember?’”
― Harper Reed
“There is the egoism of technologists. We do it because we can create. I can handle all of the parameters going into the machine, and I know what is going to come out of it.”
― Harper Reed
“I’m not a very patient person in general.”
― Harper Reed
“If there’s a wall, we break it down and go through it.”
― Harper Reed
“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.”
― Harper Reed
“Myself, I have a philosophy degree and a fake computer-science degree. I say fake because I really didn’t learn anything.”
― Harper Reed
“’Data scientist,’ as a profession, is largely a fad.”
― Harper Reed
“I wonder which is ultimately more creepy: shopping at Amazon or using Facebook?”
― Harper Reed
“PayPal’s been around forever. How do we use that platform to solve the future of commerce?”
― Harper Reed
“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.”
― Harper Reed
“We developed our product called Dashboard, which was a software tool that was designed to be a virtual campaign office to help volunteers communicate and collaborate through emails and interacting online. It was our attempt to take an offline field office and merge it online.”
― Harper Reed
“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.”
― 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.”
― Harper Reed
“Our goal is to solve a problem for the retailer, not to solve a problem for my ego – which is big.”
― Harper Reed
“Mobile usage is going up; mobile conversion is not.”
― Harper Reed
“It was on a bulletin board that I first learned about hacker culture, the ‘Let’s just break through this wall and see what’s on the other side’ mentality.”
― Harper Reed
“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.”
― Harper Reed
“I find that I often forget that people come from all over. In interfaces, products, experiences, and building for people, we always forget that people are not us.”
― Harper Reed
“We are often celebrating technology and codes, but we don’t really think about the creative side.”
― Harper Reed
“When I give talks, I often quote from a button I received at a Google event: Always Be Creative. I use it to illustrate how important creativity is in technology and business.”
― Harper Reed
“I want to involve creativity more in technology and business. It is obvious that for us to be successful, a healthy relationship with creativity is needed.”
― Harper Reed
“Advice is always awesome because it never makes any sense when you compare it all together. It always contradicts other advice. I love advice.”
― Harper Reed
“Instagram is amazing, and I enjoy sharing photos there. However, I don’t think it is where my photos will go to live.”
― Harper Reed
“Google Photos is great. I enjoy using it to curate my photo collection online. The integration on iOS to Apple Photos is a bit too much voodoo for me.”
― Harper Reed
“Photo management software is terrible. Mylio is pretty good – but disrupts the ‘natural’ flow of things: i.e. Apple Photos.”
― Harper Reed
“The thing about Snapchat is it is ephemeral, so you don’t – it’s not like a video that you post to YouTube and then everyone can see it. It’s this video that you get to share this kind of very intimate experience again, this very kind of genuine experience with another person in a more one-on-one sort of way. And I really appreciate that.”
― Harper Reed
“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.”
― Harper Reed
“I programmed computers every day. And one of my favourite apps we built was this thing called Awesome Updater, that all it did is send you a tweet randomly that was like, ‘Yo, you’re awesome.’”
― Harper Reed
“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.”
― Harper Reed
“When you have a good vision and a very large capability of impact, that’s very powerful.”
― Harper Reed
“When you read Trump’s tweets or see candidates interact online like Jeb did with Hillary, you’re like, ‘Yes, it’s just like my friends.’ That’s the magic.”
― Harper Reed
“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.”
― Harper Reed
“I never would wish technology failing on any sort of opponent or enemy.”
― Harper Reed
“TechStars offers a network, and being a part of that network is an awesome opportunity.”
― Harper Reed
“If there’s one thing about Chicago, we take care of our own.”
― Harper Reed
“Chicago’s a flyover city. I don’t think we should try to change that. But it would be really cool if we had a little more opportunity for investors to come hang out.”
― Harper Reed
“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.”
― Harper Reed
“All of this conversation about chat and assistance lays the groundwork for what I would look at as the future of commerce.”
― Harper Reed
“I really think we have a future ahead of us where chat is obviously a big part of it, but I don’t think the context of having that little assistant in your pocket is necessarily the only place where it will be.”
― Harper Reed
“I have to say that you don’t really know stress until you know that the path of the free world is resting a little bit on your shoulders.”
― Harper Reed
“Data is what powers all of us and our lives. It is ubiquitous among our now-connected lives. I love how it is now the oxygen of our Internet world.”
― Harper Reed
“If you want to go and build a company that exists in Silicon Valley, then you should go and do it there. But if you want to build a company that is Australian, that represents your culture and your being, then you should do it in Sydney.”
― Harper Reed
“I’m a white male in power. In many cases, I’m the enemy.”
― Harper Reed
“When you walk into a field office, you have many opportunities. We’ll hand you a call sheet. You can make calls. You can knock on doors, and they’ll have these stacks there for you. They’ll say: ‘Harper, you’ve knocked on 50 doors. That’s great. Here’s how you compare to the rest of them.’ But it’s all very offline.”
― Harper Reed
“Crowdsourcing is the future. However, if you don’t trust your users to build/create/upload awesome work, they won’t trust you with their crowd capital.”
― Harper Reed
“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.”
― Harper Reed
“Let’s not project our fears onto others.”
― Harper Reed
“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.”
― Harper Reed
“The main ideas for us are scale, stability, and audience.”
― Harper Reed
“I read a lot of books. I read because it inspires me and shows me paths that I could never imagine. Sometimes those paths are horrible and sad, and sometimes they are hopeful and amazing. Not always are they paths to the future, and sometimes the paths are actually about the past but make sense when applied to the future. Books are amazing.”
― Harper Reed
“I love books that stand the test of time.”
― Harper Reed
“When I look for new books, I often struggle to find things that challenge and entertain me. This has caused me to spend a number of cycles thinking about where I can get the serendipitous book discovery experience that we had in physical book stores.”
― Harper Reed
“When you go from building T-shirts to software for a presidential campaign used by a cast of millions, it’s pretty easy to think, ‘OK, we can build something pretty big.’”
― Harper Reed
“I think there are a lot of hurdles between a normal consumer brand figuring out their mobile strategy – let alone their chat app strategy – and programming a Facebook Messenger chatbot.”
― Harper Reed
“We make interesting companies and real businesses. It’s not social networks for cats.”
― Harper Reed
“In New York City, they have their own way of doing things. Every city and every region should do its own thing.”
― Harper Reed
“The advice I used to give to engineers I hired was, ‘Don’t eat the pizza.’ Sometimes when you walk into these high-pressure environments, it’s, like, doughnuts everywhere and all these little cakes.”
― Harper Reed
“Don’t eat the pizza; get lots of sleep – you have to take care of yourself. It’s about being your tip top self at all times, and if you are unhealthy, or you’re sick, or you don’t feel good, even it’s just because you’re sluggish, you’re not going to make it because you’re not going to be able to react to things.”
― Harper Reed
“One of the things that I used to make sure I’d do was to always make sure I’d have dinner at home because I needed that disconnect from work. Even when it was crazy, I’d go home at, like, 10 o’clock and have dinner. That way, I had time where I could decompress a little bit and then go back in.”
― Harper Reed
“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.”
― Harper Reed
“Let’s say we were a peacekeeping force in some small country that most people had never heard of. And we were there to host a peaceful election, and we then found out a bunch of stuff was hacked. We probably would push to have another election to make sure that would be fair.”
― Harper Reed
“Donald Trump won the election. I think that’s true. I also think there was interference. If this was another country, I think we’d be demanding another election.”
― Harper Reed
“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.”
― Harper Reed
“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.”
― Harper Reed
“Security is very difficult. You have to be very careful about security, and I think oftentimes people just forget; they don’t invest in the right things.”
― Harper Reed
“My parents are very supportive: they helped redirect my technology attitude and my punkness into positive things.”
― Harper Reed
“One of my favourite books about hackers is ‘Masters of Deception’ about this hacking group in the 1990s. Many of them didn’t come from wealthy families. These are kids that are very intelligent; they just happen to be misdirected.”
― Harper Reed
“The information diet of a senior campaign staffer is insane. We were all addicted to our chosen email delivery devices and were aggressively tethered to them. It made sense and wasn’t an issue during the campaign because of the importance of the situation. However, once the campaign was over and we were successful, the information flow dried up.”
― Harper Reed
“The opportunity to step away from everything and take a break is something that shouldn’t be squandered.”
― Harper Reed
“There are a lot of people who are unable to take a break to clear their minds. I imagine they are the ones who need it the most.”
― Harper Reed
“I would say Silicon Valley and New York have inflated salaries.”
― Harper Reed
“A lot of people are buying things on the Internet – not just white men.”
― Harper Reed
“I try and wake up relatively early. I listen to some music and check Twitter. I also make sure I weigh myself and check how long I slept. I do that because knowing that data seems better than not knowing it.”
― Harper Reed
“My career choice has largely been what I wanted to do. I always knew that technology would be one of the threads.”
― Harper Reed
“I’ve had a lot of bosses that I didn’t agree with, but the worst boss was very much me myself. So, I can’t let myself slack off, and if I do slacking off, I’m the one that’s yelling at myself. I’ve worked with a lot of different employers, and none of them have been as aggressive as I have been.”
― Harper Reed
“Campaigns are crazy things. They’re half startup, half enterprise.”
― Harper Reed
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