The best comments, quotes, and random zingers we heard this week…
“Do you have to turn off *this* phone during takeoff and landing?” —GeekWire reader Lawrence Lam commenting on news that aerospace giant Boeing plans to develop a new phone based on the Android operating system.
“I hope the phone takes off. Pun intended.”–GeekWire reader chupchap commenting on the same story.
“My developer friends and I joke that you can raise $2 million for anything in Silicon Valley, no matter how hare-brained. But it stands to reason that such a large disparity in capital is bound to have real-world consequences.” —GeekWire reader Starr Horne commenting on a survey that ranked Silicon Valley as the No. 1 startup hub in the world. Seattle ranked 13th.
“What’s really hard about this job is knowing when to be crazy and when to be calculating, because you can’t just be one or the other.”–Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman in a blog post titled “Never Tell Me the Odds” in which he described the importance of following your emotions in business.
“This reminds me of the quote from Steve Jobs, only those who are crazy enough to think that they could change the world, are the ones who actually do. Steve was known for his intuitive ability to identify opportunities and talent and he was crazy about numbers/specifics.”–GeekWire reader Syed Naimath responding to a GeekWire poll and story on Kelman’s comments in which we asked whether number crunchers or emotional leaders made the best startup CEOs.
“We will continue to grow as quickly as we can, and we will continue to challenge our facilities team to find room to put all the people that we’re going to hire.”– Facebook’s Ari Steinberg at an open house for the company’s new Seattle office, which has quickly grown to 90 employees.
“This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.”–Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announcing the $1 billion acquisition of mobile photo sharing app Instagram.
“A billion dollars of money? For a thing that kind of ruins your pictures? The only Instagram worth a billion dollars would be an app that instantly gets you a gram…”–Comedian Jon Stewart commenting on the hefty price tag for the 13-person company.
“And I would say a lot of the thinking behind Metro and this flat, clean, open world came in reaction to a lot of the shiny buttons in Apple, a lot of the glassy floors and brushed metal, using all these industrial design metaphors for software. I thought, software is mature enough now to stand on its own, and we’ve got screen resolution now that can accommodate a lot more content, and we’ve got bandwidth that can handle content, so at some point, it felt like with some of these things, we can take a different approach.”–Former Microsoft design guru Bill Flora speaking at the GeekWire Meetup in Seattle.
“I’ve definitely had to do my share of elevator pitches. I’ve never done one in an actual elevator.”–PetHub founder Tom Arnold in the inaugural episode of GeekWire’s “Elevator Pitch,” a new Web video series where entrepreneurs pitch their business plans in the 43 seconds it takes to get to the top of Seattle’s Space Needle.
