Sarah Lacy Quotes

I physically need to make art. Art isn't just a hobby for me. It's not something that I like. It's an intense passion, an ecstatic love affair, with as much turmoil, frustration, exasperation and need as a forbidden liaison.

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

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

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.

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.

This 'oh let's hug it out' without taking any responsibility is exactly the problem ... We are not silly irrational little girls. We are running a serious business with investments from the biggest VCs in the Valley.

Dying venture firms are like the walking dead. They can have years of staggering around with stakes in still active portfolio companies, hoping they're still holding a lottery ticket that could put them back in the game. If not, they just slowly wind down.

Lesson to would-be fame seekers: It's not really a new world when it comes to celebrity. There are no shortcuts. It's still talent, perseverance and hard work. Even the speed and reach of the Net can't create lasting value and income overnight.

I always want to have San Francisco as my home and my base. I'm a business reporter - that's what I do and what I enjoy - and I don't know another place on the planet that would be as fascinating to cover.

When a PR person asks why is it a big deal that they got your name wrong or sent you a pitch on something you would never cover, it's because when you get hundreds of those a day, it's incredibly annoying. It's basically like having telemarketers call you all day long for something you never want to buy.

You know that American dream and American spirit of innovation we always talk about? Turns out, the bulk of it was built by people who came to America from somewhere else, not people born American. We have no birthright or natural lock on these things.

You can keep your privacy in the world by keeping your product, not your personality, the star.

The roots of Silicon Valley are full of stories of immigrants and minority groups who experienced bigotry and made it anyway. Why should women be any different?

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

To me, the last mile of the Internet that very few people have successfully really done. And this is like micro local. Things that really impact your life. And noone's leveraging that yet.

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.

You know what works in venture capital? A group of incredibly smart, connected people who have the financial wherewithal and risk appetite to make multi-million dollar bets on unproven ideas and inexperienced founders. People who can make decisions quickly, and who spend their time trying to help entrepreneurs make the most of that cash.

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.

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.

It may be easier than ever to start a product, but building a company is just as hard as its ever been.

People always tell me the next stage of my career means moving to New York, but I never will. I don't care how that affects my career, and I think it's stupid that it would.

Art is the most important thing to me in the entire world. It is my passion. Nothing else. End of story.

I'm not really comfortable unless there's some kind of risk - either physical or mental.

The best entrepreneurs know when to ignore sage advice.

I did interviews with most of the TechCrunch50 experts backstage and there was a common gripe about the companies launching there: Not enough passion, not enough swinging for the fences, not enough trying to change the world ... One big exception was CitySourced - a company that excited Kevin Rose precisely because it was trying to build something that doesn't really exist today and would make a huge difference in people's lives. It was the most excited I saw an expert about anything over the two-day event.

Everything about Mark Zuckerberg is pure hacker. Hackers don't take realities of the world for granted; they seek to break and rebuild what they don't like. They seek to outsmart the world.

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

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.

One of the great ironies of the social media era is that some of the least social people in the world created it.

My husband and I own half a dozen iPods, a Mac desktop, and four Mac laptops. We're clearly fans of Mr. Jobs' work.

The thought for a long time was that banks needed to be too controlled, too regulated to be turned over to the Wild West of the Net. Then the credit meltdown hit, and we saw just how reckless these so-called safe and regulated institutions were.