The Top 18 Quotes from Web 2.0
18. "The best way to build a successful business is to help other people make money." - Rich Skrenta, Topix.net, paraphrases some AOL exec
17. "I'll go to multiple news sites because I don't trust any one site." - Sean, age 17, on how he gets news online
16. "When you get to college, MySpace isn't a big deal anymore." - Sasha, age 18, on how high school is so last year
15. "Build, learn, and make mistakes as you go--you'll know more about what you're doing as you're doing it, instead of before you do it." - Jason Fried, 37 Signals, advocating iterative development
14. "[In 5-10 years, the value in media] will be in the companies who can grow audiences, not in those who control content." - Vinod Khosla, former General Partner at Kleiner Perkins
13. "For me, transparency is a competitive weapon." - Sun COO Jonathan Schwartz, on why he blogs
12. "eBay has 150M customers, in the nicest terms, that's 150M people who have learned to trust strangers." - eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, on how business can be an engine of positive social change
11. "I like Google the best, they're the cleanest. Others are trying to take your attention away from what you're trying to focus on so it's counter productive to go to those sites." - Sasha, age 18, explains why it's smart to adapt to your customers instead of forcing them to adapt to you
10. "A lot of our successes don't have anything to do with anything our executives thought were a good idea." - Google founder Sergey Brin likes the wisdom of crowds
9. "We don't know what we're doing 96% of the time." - Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield, on how 4% can make a lot of people very happy
8. "Hiring lawyers and suing is a hell of a lot easier for the average corporation than being creative." - former FCC head Michael Powell, on why content companies are suing their customers
7. "I tell our engineers, 'no matter how bright you are, there will always be more people outside the company's walls that are brighter so we need to provide them with tools to innovate.'" - Omidyar likes the wisdom of crowds, too
6. "Traditionally, people think more is better. More may work, but it's painful, expensive, very cold-war. Think about one-downing people, underdoing your competitors." - Fried coins some new verbs
5. Illustrating that the world is really different for digital natives:
Moderator: Let's say you want to buy a CD player, where would you go?
Sean, age 17 (puzzled): Ummm, a CD player...? (laugher)
4. "The more money you give a company, the less likely they are to be successful." - Khosla
3. "Ther average consumer does not know the difference between the browser, the internet, and the search box." - Mitchell Baker, Mozilla Foundation, provides some perspective
2. "We thought that anybody who came to a concert had equity. They took part in the creation of the music." - Mickey Hart, Grateful Dead
1. "The #1 factor that contributed to our success is luck. We followed our hearts, and worked on search because it was useful and an interesting problem." - Brin, on founding Google
Tags: web2con, web2.0, web2, quotes
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