Todd Park Quotes

Data is the new oil? No: Data is the new soil.

All through history, there have always been movements where business was not just about the accumulation of proceeds but also for the public good.

Twitter is an amazing public tool with an incredible capacity for public good.

If I can't do something for the public good, what the hell am I doing?

If you're going to use the public resources, you need the public benefit.

Because primarily of the power of the Internet, people of modest means can band together and amass vast sums of money that can change the world for some public good if they all agree.

It’s hard to have a better job than the government, where you really do have an opportunity to have a broad reaching impact. Very few private sector jobs are going to offer you that.

All government is intended for the benefit of the people.

At the end of the day, politics is meant to do good to the society.

The business of business should not be about money. It should be about responsibility. It should be about public good, not private greed

Data is just like crude. It’s valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used. It has to be changed into gas, plastic, chemicals, etc to create a valuable entity that drives profitable activity; so must data be broken down, analyzed for it to have value.

The only reason I do these interviews - I hate talking about myself, I hate doing this stuff - is because incredibly well-meaning people, whom I respect and trust, tell me that this will help bring about positive changes. It's not going to cause a sea change, but it will benefit the public.

Data is not useful until it becomes information.

Data is like garbage. You'd better know what you are going to do with it before you collect it.

A very good friend of mine spent a fair amount of time doing postmortems and met with a number of the senior folks on the Romney campaign and they spent, what was it, $140, $160 million on data. And this friend of mine, who is a very sharp thinker, asked a series of questions, but the most important one he asked, he said, "What decisions did you make differently because of the data?" And he's coming from the private equity world where he wants to know, OK, and the answer from virtually every single senior Romney person was "nothing."

I believe that the purpose of influence is to speak up for those who have no influence. And fame is not for our own benefit, or notoriety is not for our own benefit, it's for leverage to do good.

A lively blockhead in company is a public benefit. Silence or dulness by the side of folly looks like wisdom.

My job is for the people. It's for the public. It's for their consumption. So I've done a lot in that way, and I see that the hard work has finally paid off.

I'm saying we need to be aware of it, and we need to be able to distinguish when political developments are occurring that are contrary to the public interest.

You can't go home and look at your plaques at the end of the day, because every politician has like a million plaques on their wall. OK? You don't go home and look at - you don't get anything for that. And you can't go home and say, boy, I really served the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. You want to go home and, you know, Fourth of July, you know, any of these special holidays that recognize our country, you want to feel like you've built a stronger nation, which means you helped build the people and put them in a stronger place where everyone's lifted.

Knowing more about the public effects his work will have, the engineer ought to consider himself an "officer of the court" and keep the general interest always in mind.

I think if technology is used in a way that is not responsible, that is a bad thing. I think technology and where it is going inevitable, and there's great benefits that can help an individual in society at large.

Every great example of punishment has in it some injustice, but the suffering individual is compensated by the public good.

It is an easy and vulgar thing to please the mob, and not a very arduous task to astonish them; but essentially to benefit and to improve them is a work fraught with difficulty, and teeming with danger.

Data are becoming the new raw material of business.