Sarah Lacy

“Get a lawyer to look at your contract or beware. Because no company - evil or not - is going to do it for you.”

“I've been reading a lot about Silicon Valley history recently and was struck by just how core the lack of unions has been to the American tech industry's evolution. It's enabled the constant creative destruction that keeps Silicon Valley relevant and thriving in a rapidly changing world.”

“Sometimes the hardest thing about committing the perfect crime can be keeping your genius to yourself.”

“I don't care if Facebook's valuation goes to one gillion. It can go so high we have to make up numbers. It is still not a bubble because there is still not another Facebook in the pipeline.”

“As I've written before, China's ability to be the assembly line to the world wasn't where its role in the global economy ended; it was where it began. An ability to make products cheaper than anywhere else gave way to an ability to make high end products more nimbly than anywhere else.”

“Being in Silicon Valley is like playing for the Yankees. You get knocked around more than anywhere else, the glare of the media spotlight is more brutal, and the expectations are higher than they'd be in any other city.”

“It's almost a cliche that great Silicon Valley entrepreneurs don't go sit on a beach when they make a lot of money; they get back to work building another company or at least investing in other people's companies.”

“Unions inherently create an 'us versus them' dynamic that makes winning against a company's management the top goal, not serving customers, innovating, or in the case of education, teaching kids.”

“I am a meat-loving Southern girl. Add in being a writer, and that means I drink more than I should, too.”

“What created Silicon Valley was a culture of openness, and there is no future to Silicon Valley without it.”

“What's awesome about the Internet is how it breaks up monopolistic markets where middlemen unfairly gobble up outsized fees, leaving us little choice but to keep paying them.”

“Like patents - which also seek to protect the little guy - unions were started for all the right reasons. But like patents, they can be twisted into something that hurts innovation, competition, and ultimately consumers and the country as a whole.”

“A lot of Americans desperately want to believe that China is full of poor people who can't innovate, and the only goods they make are cheap, toxic rip-offs our Western brands. They want to believe the only reason the Chinese economy is surging is because the West wants cheap goods and China knows how to make them that way.”

“Benefitting from a job bubble is not only a first world problem, it's an upper-class-educated-lucky-to-be-in-the-right-industry-at-the-right-time kind of first world problem.”

“The best entrepreneurs know when to ignore sage advice.”

“The biggest barrier to starting a company isn't ideas, funding or experience. It's excuses.”

“For all the billions of dollars created here, Silicon Valley is remarkably stingy when it comes to giving.”

“One of the nice things about being a private company is operating without the intensity of public glare. It's hard to grow a company under a microscope of constant second guessing.”

“The one thing I didn't do that was kind of controversial was go work for a daily paper, because I didn't like that kind of journalism, and I'm glad I didn't because that's the business model that's going totally extinct.”

“I think everyone has their own style in journalism. Look, I'm a girl from the South! Sometimes I laugh. Someone can pejoratively call it giggling. But if you look at the body of my work, I ask lots of hard questions and break a lot of hard news.”