Same roles, different waves — the people who prove it

“Talk is cheap. Show me the code.”

“The hottest new programming language is English.”

“The scope of challenges I can take on has gone up by a significant amount because I've got the support of these tools.”

“My competitive advantage is shipping before things are ready.”

“Play long-term games with long-term people.”

“In the age of information abundance, we're all maintainers now.”

“The most dangerous phrase in the language is: We've always done it this way.”

“There is nothing artificial about AI. It's made by humans, intended to behave like humans and, ultimately, to impact human lives and human society.”

“Greatness is not intelligence. Greatness comes from character, and character is formed out of people who suffered.”

“Open source hardware is our best shot at getting more people involved in learning and sharing electronics.”

“Make the thing you wish you had found when you were learning.”

“Software is eating the world.”

“I wanted my AI to remember the way I remember — not just the conclusions, but the journey.”

“Decentralization must evolve from a catchphrase to a concrete set of user guarantees.”

“UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.”

“To me, there is nothing more motivating than making people smarter. Even if it is through the help of machines.”

“The most pressing problem is the diversity and inclusion of who's at the table from the start. All the other issues fall out from there.”

“Optimizing for happiness is perhaps the most formative key to Ruby on Rails.”

“The ability to create something and make it useful for others is what technology is all about. It's like open source. Everyone has good ideas, but not everyone has the means to bring them to life.”

“The use of connectivity is still only just beginning; many areas that will be transformed by software and the internet in the next decade or two have barely been touched.”

“If it feels like we're all drinking from a data firehose, it's because we are.”

“AI is the new electricity. Electricity transformed countless industries; AI will now do the same.”

“I thought, someone has to tell people what these people were like, historically, and tell the truth.”

“Personal computers are just too hard to use, and it isn't your fault.”

“At its best, technology should be additive to the human experience.”

“Web3 is Going Just Great is a project to track some examples of how things in the crypto/web3 space aren't actually going as well as its proponents might like you to believe.”

“In every issue I cover Big Tech and startups through the lens of senior engineers and engineering leaders.”

“Focused, hard work is the real key to success.”

“There's nothing wrong with finding the right size and then focusing on being better. Small can be a long-term plan, not just a stepping-stone.”

“I'd rather build a great company than a big one. Don't get permission. Just get started — stay focused on profitability and the customers you're serving.”

“Blitzscaling is prioritizing speed over efficiency in an environment of uncertainty — because you might not have a 'later on' if you take too long.”

“It's better to have 100 people who love you than a million who just sort of like you. First do things that don't scale — then figure out how to scale.”

“Increase the GDP of the internet. Zero-sum games are bad — we want to enable new businesses, new customers, and new economic activity that isn't already occurring.”

“The best product teams don't start with the solution. They start by ensuring they're solving a meaningful problem for the customer.”

“A manager's job is to get better outcomes from a group of people through purpose, people, and process — the why, the who, and the how.”

“The best product managers are willing to do whatever it takes — no job is beneath you. If the PM doesn't bring the donuts, who else will?”

“The business of business is improving the state of the world. Companies can no longer separate business objectives from the social issues around them.”

“You don't need to cold-call to grow. Specialize your sales roles and build a repeatable, scalable process — that's how you turn a business into a sales machine.”

“Customers don't buy products; they hire them to do a job. Understanding that job to be done is the right unit of analysis for innovation.”

“The chasm sits between the visionaries and the pragmatists. Crossing it needs a compelling use case, a whole product, and a word-of-mouth community.”

“Sustainable competitive advantage is over. The winners exploit temporary advantages — capture the opportunity fast, exploit it decisively, and move on before it's exhausted.”

“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.”

“The Three Ways are flow, feedback, and continual experimentation and learning — the principles that let organizations turn technology change into reliable delivery.”

“I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits. Make the change easy, then make the easy change.”

“Poor situational awareness kills businesses. The first thing you need to get out of a bad situation is a map — you can't strategize on stories and gut feel.”

“Trading time for money is absurd. Charge for the value you create for clients, not the hours you spend creating it.”

“You have to help the client make more money than they spend contracting you. Charge for the value you deliver — not the time it takes.”

“Even before Ethereum, I made it my mission to build the tools to empower people to be in control of their digital lives.”

“Our responsibility is to get everyone onto the playing field with the skills they need to succeed.”

“Building a community starts with trust. Especially now, when there's so much noise to compete with.”

“Create more value than you capture.”

“The rise of web video is driving a worldwide phenomenon I call Crowd Accelerated Innovation — but to tap into its power, organizations will need to embrace radical openness.”

“Always make new mistakes.”

“The currency of real networking is not greed but generosity.”

“It's better to reject a good candidate than to hire a bad one.”

“You don't need permission, you don't need warm intros. You just apply.”

“Make something people want. Being cheap is almost interchangeable with iterating rapidly — most startups fail before they make something people want.”

“We invest in thunder lizards — companies with the ambition to crawl across the ocean, take over the city and reshape an entire category.”

“Run toward the hardest problems — not walk, run. That's where you find the biggest opportunities, where you learn the most, and where you grow.”

“Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.”

“Patterns of price movement are not random. However, they're close enough to random that getting some excess, some edge out of it, is not easy.”

“The blackjack tables are an amazingly good training ground for learning how to invest. Gambling can teach you more about the stock market than the other way around.”

“The harder something is to do, the more plausible it is that not enough people do it to make it go away.”

“Our engineers loved really blowing the socks off our customers — really delivering value to them. Enterprise software doesn't have to be layers of screens.”

“The mission of the U.S. Chief Data Scientist, simply put, is to responsibly unleash the power of data to benefit all Americans.”

“The innovation we're doing has to be about helping people, not just creating cool stuff. More people doing things innovatively will solve more problems faster.”

“When I invented the web, I didn't have to ask anyone's permission. The internet must remain a permissionless space for creativity, innovation and free expression.”

“Freedom of connection, with any application, to any party, is the fundamental social basis of the Internet. The system grows organically because it has no central control.”

“When your technology changes the world, you bear a responsibility to help address the world you have helped create.”

“New technologies always lead to new laws. The future of ideas depends on keeping culture free — a public domain of ideas we can all build upon.”

“Any technology I've been aware of has definite pros and cons. The societal benefits I see with crypto vastly outweigh the downsides — but you must have the conversation about them.”

“My goal is to cut through the hype and make the complex world of data and AI accessible to everyone.”

“Why not start now? It will only get easier. You're basically guaranteed a return on investment by just upskilling yourself.”