Sarah Cooper Quotes

Burning Man is a crowning achievement of freedom in festival culture.

I like going to Burning Man, for example. An environment where people can try new things. I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society. What's the effect on people, without having to deploy it to the whole world.

We who work in technology have nurtured an especially rare gift: the opportunity to effect change at an unprecedented scale and rate. Technology, community, and capitalism combine to make Silicon Valley the potential epicenter of vast positive change.

Just because you go to Burning Man doesn't make you Hunter Thompson.

You see this swirl of ideas and interaction of different players. Those interactions are helping to increase the pace of commercial space activity. We are bringing the pace of Silicon Valley to the space program.

The point of Silicon Valley, at least when I moved here, was we're all trying to do stuff, and none of us quite felt like we fit in anywhere else. But we were all trying to do good things. And the money was just the byproduct of good things.

An open-minded and diverse population that readily shares information, encourages experimentation, accepts failure and dispenses with formality and hierarchy is what makes Silicon Valley the successful hub that it is.

I think that's exactly what Silicon Valley was all about in those days. Let's do a startup in our parents' garage and try to create a business.

The more angels we have in Silicon Valley, the better. We are funding innovation. We are funding the next Facebook, Google, and Twitter.

It's not all silliness, as interactive SXSW is filled with aggressive learning, discussing, and a whole lot of futurizing.

Free is really, you know, the gift of Silicon Valley to the world. It's an economic force, it's a technical force. It's a deflationary force, if not handled right. It is abundance, as opposed to scarcity.

Burning Man is like one big giant art installation in the middle of starkly beautiful desert landscape, and the attendees are creative in the way they dress.

I called up a bunch of the CEOs of Silicon Valley companies and said, 'Hey, can I come and see you? And I'd like to learn about what you're doing.' And I don't know, most of them said yes.

When I came to the United States in 2004 to attend university at Stanford, I was instantly inspired by the stories and advice from startup leaders in Silicon Valley and beyond, who had endeavoured to create new opportunities and improve lives around the world.

It's been invigorating being back on the West Coast, being at Alphabet, because there is so much innovation. And the big challenge is, how do you think about resource allocation and priorities when you have so many great options? But wearing jeans instead of suits and popping into driverless cars has also been a lot of fun.

I've always had a passion for technology, photography, startups, and connecting people. Bringing those aspects together made me successful.

First and foremost, I'm fans of the people I'm collaborating with. And collaborations expand who you are.

When I first came to the Bay area, I worked in Silicon Valley in the early to mid-'90s, and I think what mattered then was our ability as designers to create a vision around people's ideas.

Some people in Silicon Valley are as bad as the 'Koch Brothers', you know? Don't be mistaken. For every some of those, though, you get people who come up with something like 'Leafly', which does what 'Yelp' has done, but in a much more specific way, and it's important because it's the dawn of this new era.

We try and reflect that there's a lot of optimism, there's a lot of positive things that are happening in 'Silicon Valley'.

You could use many adjectives to describe Silicon Valley; I don't think 'normal' is one of them.

Democracy tends to be a collaborative process, a committee, a consensus. Silicon Valley tends to believe in the individual who creates a small group and does something big.

The technology we have available is not being used, and we don't have to tell stories in a line anymore. We can tell them in the shape of a tree. I can't stand to see it not happen, and I'm going to make it happen.

The phrase 'change the world' is tossed around Silicon Valley conversations and business plans as freely as talk of 'early-stage investing' and 'beta tests.'

Even by Silicon Valley standards, PayPal's vision was massively ambitious.