Alan Schaaf Quotes

Silicon Valley has some of the smartest engineers and technology business people in the world.

Companies like Google and Facebook may offer jobs allowing or requiring imagination and creativity, but the whole of Silicon Valley accounts for only 3 percent of national income and a smaller percentage of national employment.

Growing up in Silicon Valley, during my time at Morgan Stanley and as a member of Stanford's Board, I've had the opportunity to experience firsthand how tech companies can help people in their daily lives.

Your writers write these pieces about meaningless startups, meaningless apps and meaningless companies.

I'm a Silicon Valley guy. I just think people from Silicon Valley can do anything.

Atari showed that young people could start big companies. Without that example it would have been harder for Jobs and Bill Gates, and people who came after them, to do what they did.

One of the great things about Silicon Valley is, irrespective of how competitive you might be with another company or how closely you might be working with that company, there's a great sort of give and take, and camaraderie from - between - some of the executives in the valley and some of the other investors in the valley.

At times during high school and college I wished to be a sportswriter.

Every kid coming out of Harvard, every kid coming out of school now thinks he can be the next Mark Zuckerberg, and with these new technologies like cloud computing, he actually has a shot.

I'd love a job at Facebook.

I often have said to people that there are really two cities in the country where the outlook is always forward-looking - there is never really a backward-looking tendency. My banking work has taken me out to Palo Alto, what is commonly called Silicon Valley. And you sense out there is always a forward-looking outlook. And New York City.

Before I started Code for America, I spent my career around startups. First it was game developers, small teams trying to make hits in a tough business. Then, when I started working on the Web 2.0 events, it was web startups during times of enormous opportunity and investment.

I would say probably Pirates of Silicon Valley just because I'm proud of the work, playing Gates.

Silicon Valley builds its bridges on abundance. Abundant bits of information floating out there, writing great programs to process it, then giving people a lot of useful tools to use it.

For a first-time entrepreneur, there's nothing better than being in Silicon Valley because there is so much going on, and there's such a large number of inventors, that even a B level idea or a C level idea could be nurtured and be given venture capital there.

My friends are people who like building cool stuff. We always have this joke about people who want to just start companies without making something valuable. There's a lot of that in Silicon Valley.

I have always been very tech-focused, which you may almost say is the traditional CEO in Silicon Valley.

I remember flying in, driving down 101 in a cab, and passing by all these tech companies like Yahoo! I remember thinking, 'Maybe someday we'll build a company. This probably isn't it, but one day we will.'

Something new will always be the source of growth in Silicon Valley.

Geeks are a critical driver of America's innovation ecosystem, from the entrepreneurs launching startups in Silicon Valley to the scientists experimenting in university research labs to the whiz kids building gadgets in their parents' garages.

If you look at where the tried and true of Silicon Valley VC's are investing, it's in people who understand what it takes, who've been through it and have a network of people they can tap and resources to pull together.

I didn't know anything about Silicon Valley.

I'm just more excited about helping new entrepreneurs create the next Facebook or Google.

Jeremy Stoppelman started Yelp. Max Levchin started Slide. I started LinkedIn. It was a mininova explosion of folks jumping out to doing other entrepreneurial activities.

There are lots of people in the Silicon Valley who are interested in working at a fast-moving, dynamic company like Google. Not just my family members.