Caterina Fake quotes: the cofounder of Flickr and Hunch drops gems.
“Dream, struggle, create, prevail. Be daring. Be brave. Be loving. Be compassionate. Be strong. Be brilliant. Be beautiful.”
“You came in this world for a certain purpose without which you can live a meaningful life. It is good to know what your purpose in life is, as this will be the source of your happiness. On the other hand, if you keep doing the wrong thing it will get harder to achieve your dreams. You should know what you were made for and then channel all your mental and physical efforts there.”
“The most successful entrepreneurs I know are optimistic. It’s part of the job description.”
“Sometimes you climb the mountain, and you fall and fail. Maybe there is a different path that will take you up. Sometimes, a different mountain.”
“It’s the building of things that makes you happy. You have to enjoy the process whether you succeed or fail.”
“Failure is part of discovering the problem you need to be working on. If, as an entrepreneur, you are afraid to fail or to admit the failure of your efforts, then you completely lose any chance at being able to adapt and succeed at finding the problem that needs solving.”
“Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.”
“It’s about doing things that you haven’t done before, where you’re still kind of a beginner, and not resting on your laurels.”
“You try a lot of things and you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. If you’re actually inventing something, you shouldn’t know what you’re doing.”
“If you built a successful company the first time, it’s really important not to fall into the trap of resting on your laurels and doing the same thing the next time. It’s stepping into the unknown that enables you to create something fresh, new, and innovative.”
“It’s fairly easy to know when you’ve succeeded because you’re kind of hanging on for dear life. It’s such an unstoppable juggernaut; you’re trying to stay with your head above water because things are moving so fast.”
“Do less. Eliminate activities that are prestigious. Eliminate activities that you know are a waste of time that you keep on doing out of habit. Do things that add meaning to your life. Fulfill your responsibilities.”
“Eliminate activities that require you to be around people you cannot stand. Don’t do things for people who should be doing them themselves—and don’t waste time chasing trophies.”
“Do not seek prizes that aren’t worth getting.”
“No successful company has ever been the product of just one person.”
“A cofounder is like being somebody’s parent: you want to make sure your offspring thrive.”
“A lot is gained through experience, but experience teaches some and not others. Effectiveness and excellence, whether or not they were attained by simply having the knack or through the school of hard knocks, is really what you want to reward.”
“Inspiration is really all around us. I pay attention to a lot of different fields. I stay up on current events. I go to community meetings to see what concerns the people in my neighborhood. Paying attention to social interactions offline really inform interactions online. The real world is a bottomless source of inspiration for what you can build.”
“Being open and observant of people and the world around you is really important. People have the same desires and needs online as they do offline. The way that people are stays constant. You can change the format, make it easier for them to communicate or use photos instead of words but human necessities never change.”
“Entrepreneurship works on the apprenticeship model. The best way to learn how to be an entrepreneur is to start a company and seek the advice of a successful entrepreneur in the area in which you are interested. Or work at a startup for a few years to learn the ropes.”
“Entrepreneurs need to start building today. The barrier to entry in tech is low, so start designing, start coding it, launch it, build prototypes, build a working version of it. The internet has amazing powers of distribution. You can test your ideas. You can see if it works, if it doesn’t work, whether it’s fun, and whether you’re sufficiently motivated. People who go into entrepreneurship to get rich aren’t going to be happy. It’s the building of things that makes you happy. You have to enjoy the process whether you succeed or fail.”
“The internet is full of strangers, generous strangers who want to help you for no reason at all. Strangers post poetry and discographies and advice and essays and photos and art and diatribes. None of them are known to you, in the old-fashioned sense. But they give the internet its life and meaning.”
“Every small action a person takes, their path through a system, what they look at and what they don’t, is meaningful and can be interpreted and used to make a system better.”
“Our successes have been so great and so rapid that, within 20 years, we’ve gotten a third of the world’s population online, shrunk our computers to the size of our hands, and connected each to each.”
“Because the internet is a medium, it doesn’t care whether it transmits love or hate. It is what we build and who we are that make it what it is. We can build things that diminish our humanity or build things that bring us to human flourishing.”
“[Our] brand’s mantra was, ‘You own your own words,’ meaning you have the right to say your piece but must also take responsibility for what you say.”
“I’ve never understood cheating, probably because I never cared much about my grades. I instinctively knew that the grades didn’t measure anything meaningful—usually just my ability to quickly memorize information I’d just as quickly forget.”
“The computers people have are no longer on their desks but in their hands, and that is probably the transformative feature of the technology. These computers are with you, in the world.”
“A lot of things have changed since the days of Flickr. Facebook has concentrated the sociality of the internet within its blue borders, like a Walmart siphoning off the mom-and-pop shops that formerly comprised the internet’s gathering places. Communication, in the age of mobile dominance, has become, of necessity, shorter and snack-sized.”
“My background isn’t in social software; it’s in online community, social networks, personal publishing, blogging, self-expression on the Web. I got on the internet in the 1980s, and the magic moment for me arose from my being a literature geek.”
“My background is in art. I was a painter and an occasional sculptor, and I really like materials—you know, stuff. Physical objects. The world and the trees and the sunshine and the flowers. And all of that doesn’t seem to really exist out in the ether of the internet.”
“A lot of the reason I wanted to become an entrepreneur and avoid working for others is that you get to create the world you want to live in and the company you want to work for, and I’ve loved that. It’s a part of entrepreneurship that women should really embrace.”
“College is an environment designed to encourage openness: the ability to think of things in novel ways and entertain unconventional beliefs.”
“Rob Kalin, Etsy’s founder, never finished college. Evan Williams, Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey (the founders of Twitter) are not college graduates. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, is another dropout. And, of course, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.”
“‘You, too, can be the President,’ every American kid is told. But one unintended consequence of this belief, it is that, as a result of our being a meritocracy, if you have not succeeded, you are of lesser merit. It is shameful to be a failure in this country.”
“The children of less effective, less competent parents will be more likely to adopt the customs and values of the peer group.”
“Good parents, who are able to maintain the affection and respect of their children and whose offspring admire them and value their good opinion, can be reasonably certain that their values and ways of socialized behaving will be adopted by the next generation.”
“Vacations are good, and I come back energized.”
“Make time less precious. We are way too efficient, making use of every hour, every minute. When you were a kid, didn’t you just spend hours poking sticks in the mud, climbing trees and sitting in them, looking at shells and seaweed that washed up on the shoreline? Time was not precious then. We weren’t trying to stuff an accomplishment into every minute every day. We had time for thoughts and feelings. That was good!”
“If we are not given the chance to forget, we are also not given the chance to recover our memories, to alter them with time, perspective, and wisdom. Forgetting, we can be ourselves beyond what the past has told us we are; we can evolve. That is the possibility we want from the future.”
“Every place has a story, or a thousand stories. Findery brings places to life, be they where you stand or where you hope to go.”
“There is great work to be done, and the women will lead us. So I say, astonish us with your genius. Inspire us with your creation. Work with one another. Endure the tribulations.”
