Intellectual Ventures CEO Nathan Myhrvold said Seattle is the “Silicon Valley of saving the world”; skydiver Luke Aikins wowed the crowd with his anything-is-possible tale of jumping from an airplane at 25,000 feet with no parachute; and Teddy Goff, chief digital strategist for the Hillary Clinton campaign, said he hopes Donald Trump just keeps on tweeting.
Day 2 of the GeekWire Summit was packed with more enlightening and inspiring tales, and we’ve once again collected some of the tweets and quotes that sum up the story best.
Education Reboot: How Higher-Ed Can Help Solve the Tech Talent Gap
“We don’t know where the next talent is going to come from, and it isn’t always going to be the people who look like us or talk like us.” — Joe Whittinghill, Microsoft GM.
“I think the motivations of corporations are all wrong here. We piss away this money in a zero-sum game stealing engineers from each other.” — Peter Wilson, OfferUp VP.
“We have this square peg round hole approach to our PR systems.” — Scott McKinley, Northeastern dean and CEO.
OfferUp's @peterwil with the line of the day so far at the #gwsummit: "I am over 50. I worked at Facebook. It f***ing sucked!"
— GeekWire (@geekwire) October 5, 2016
Read the full story here.
Fireside Chat: Arati Prabhakar, DARPA
“That was a wake-up for the federal government to think about technological surprise and how to prevent it — by creating surprises of your own.” — Arati Prabhakar, on the Sputnik era.
“We’re right in the middle of this amazing advance that’s happening, this revolution that’s happening. We want to be able to put something on orbit tomorrow.” — Prabhakar, on DARPA’s space ambitions.
“What matters more to national security than understanding social behavior?” — Prabhakar.
Is @DARPA a department of mad scientists? Director says “we’re mostly engineers and we’re not angry at anyone” believe it or not. #GWSummit
— GeekWire (@geekwire) October 5, 2016
“IoT is just one more dimension of our information universe exploding,” says @DARPA's Arati Prabhakar…and an opening for hackers #GWSummit
— GeekWire (@geekwire) October 5, 2016
Without a robust space presence, “we can’t function as a military, frankly we can’t function as a society,” says @DARPA director #GWSummit
— GeekWire (@geekwire) October 5, 2016
Read the full story here.
Fireside Chat: Joel Spolsky, CEO of Stack Overflow
“Facebook’s campus in Silicon Valley is an 8-acre open room, and Facebook was very pleased with itself for building what it thought was this amazing place for developers. But developers don’t want to overhear conversations … developers need to concentrate, to go to a chatroom and ask questions and get the answers later. Facebook is paying 40-50 percent more than other places, which is usually a sign developers don’t want to work there. — Joel Spolsky, on office design for developers.
“In 1950, a LEGO set consisted on these little bricks and you would snap the bricks together and make a house. Today you get the top of Darth Vader and the bottom of Darth Vader and you snap them together and now you have a little Darth Vader. That’s what’s going on with programming today.” — Spolsky, on modern dev tools.
.@spolsky says open offices spaces aren't a great work environment for developers. "That’s ideal for a trading floor." #gwsummit
— GeekWire (@geekwire) October 5, 2016
"Javascript is not a great language it is just dominant" – @spolsky at #GWSummit
— ⎝ EvangelistNinja ⎠ (@EvangelistNinja) October 5, 2016
“I guarantee there are students in college right now that write papers on their phones, b/c that’s how they learned how to type.” #GWSummit
— GeekWire (@geekwire) October 5, 2016
Read the full story here.
Power Talk: Inclusive Innovation: Vikram Jandhyala, UW
“I wasn’t going to pay any money for this app. So that’s when i stopped. — Vikram Jandhyala, on his level 6 Pokémon Go status.
“I was an early employee at a startup company that sold for $850 million. I was not the founder. That’s why I’m standing here.” — Jandhyala.
“You can be comfortable or you can be learning.” @UniversityofWA’s @vikramjandhyala at #GWSummit
— Michael Atalla (@matalla) October 5, 2016
"All of us are innovators, every one of us under the right conditions.” Inspiring talk from @vikramjandhyala on the power of inclusivity.
— GeekWire (@geekwire) October 5, 2016
Fireside Chat: Nathan Myhrvold, Intellectual Ventures CEO
“Some tech companies have embraced the idea of invention… there are other tech companies who have said, ‘Hey, let’s weaken the patent system.” — Nathan Myhrvold.
“I don’t see that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s a tiny fraction of the world’s patent market.” — Myhrvold on Intellectual Ventures’ patent trove.
“I’m like a salmon. I came back to the home stream to spawn.” — Seattle native Myhrvold, on returning to the NW from California.
"Seattle is absolutely the Silicon Valley of saving the world." Nathan Myhrvold says, mentions @gatesfoundation @fredhutch #GWSummit
— GeekWire (@geekwire) October 5, 2016
"It's never been easier to create a company, I want to make it easier to make new inventions." – @IVinvents @geekwire #gwsummit
— Fuel Talent (@FuelTalentSEA) October 5, 2016
"People love bacon, but if the pig producer dumps all of the pig manure in a river in one spot, that’s a problem." Nathan Myhrvold #GWSummit
— GeekWire (@geekwire) October 5, 2016
"I think self driving cars will change a lot of our lives. It won’t change our lives by next Thursday." — Nathan Myhrvold #GWSummit
— GeekWire (@geekwire) October 5, 2016
"We should slay them all," Nathan Myhrvold on invasive mosquitoes. #GWSummit
— Dina Bass (@dinabass) October 5, 2016
"I love the tech industry. But the tech industry is for making tools and toys for rich people …" — Nathan Myhrvold #GWSummit
— GeekWire (@geekwire) October 5, 2016
Read the full stories here and here.
Power Talk: Luke Aikins, skydiver
“I would much rather jump out of an airplane without a parachute than stand in front of you guys and talk.” — Luke Aikins, on his public-speaking nerves.
“I really didn’t want to experience a car crash. That wasn’t part of the deal.” — Aikins, on determining how much G-force his body could withstand.
“We’re not responsible if this doesn’t work.” — Bainbridge Island, Wash., maker of Aikins’ landing net.
“I wanted to show that anything is possible. Whether my son wants to be a doctor, a dancer, an astronaut, whatever. If he sets his mind to it he can do anything.” — Aikins on why he did the jump.
“Man, Dad. That wasn’t very good." — @LukeAikins’ 4-year-old son after a dummy ate it during a test for his jump. #GWSummit
— GeekWire (@geekwire) October 5, 2016
Half way up in the airplane, @LukeAikins started to think, “What the hell am I doing?” He jumped anyway. #GWSummit
— GeekWire (@geekwire) October 5, 2016
“My medical examination was a high-five,” — @LukeAikins on his remarkable, parachute-less landing. #GWSummit
— GeekWire (@geekwire) October 5, 2016
Inside AI: Oren Etzioni and Shivon Zilis
“We love when machine learning companies are able to supply expertise while taking complexity out of it.” — Shivon Zilis, Bloomberg Beta.
“I really like to separate science from science fiction.” — Oren Etzioni, Allen Institute for AI.
“He’s a database kid.” — Etzioni, on his 6-year-old son loves talking to Amazon’s Alexa.
AI2 Director Oren @etzioni: “We’re all guilty of anthropomorphizing without a license.” So true. #GWSummit
— GeekWire (@geekwire) October 5, 2016
“There is no industry out there that isn’t being transformed by these learning algorithms.” — Bloomberg Beta partner @shivon #GWSummit
— GeekWire (@geekwire) October 5, 2016
“It’s amazing how much we’re willing to give up privacy when there’s an actual benefit.” — Zilis.
“There is no privacy. There are two kinds of people: The kind who have given up, and the kind who are deluding themselves.” — Etzioni.
“So, even in the age of AI, duct tape still fixes everything.” — Zilis.
“I’m really tied of AI being cast as the villain.” — Etzioni, on Hollywood movies.
Tech and Politics: Teddy Goff, Clinton campaign
“I hope he tweets more. I think he should tweet every day, multiple times a day, 3 in the morning, 5 in the morning.” — Teddy Goff, on Donald Trump’s Twitter habits.
“He comes with a history that is just bonkers. Donald Trump is really an aberration.” — Goff, on why this election is so “weird.”
“There’s an increasingly meaningless distinction between old media, like The New York Times, and new media, like Buzzfeed.” — Goff, on modern media.
"Everything we’re doing with tech is designed to make the old-school stuff more efficient. We don’t have new goals as a campaign”—@teddygoff
— GeekWire (@geekwire) October 5, 2016
Shout out to good old fashioned email. @HillaryClinton’s chief tech strategist calls it “the most powerful tool in our toolkit.” #GWSummit
— GeekWire (@geekwire) October 5, 2016
Teddy Goff says the media’s millennial freakout is nothing new. “Our support is actually highest with millennials, overall.” #GWSummit
— GeekWire (@geekwire) October 5, 2016
Read the full story here.
Check out the memorable quotes from Day 1 of the Summit.
