Silicon Valley Funny Quotes

Aleks Totić: Jamie—he was temperamental. He coded well. He was different from us. He was more flamboyant. We were just pretty much corn. Straight corn. He had the funny look, he had an image, he had a sense of style which was fairly foreign to us. Jim Clark: He had half of his head shaved. Some stylistic statement on his part. I completely ignored it. It did not matter to me; I did not give a hoot. He was a great programmer, brilliant young guy. I do not think anyone bothered. People have just got to realize that a computer geek is respected on the basis of how much code he can write and the quality of code he can write. People do not give a crap what he looks like. If you generate good code quickly, no one cares. Jamie made everyone a lot of money.

Cash, as always, is the poor man’s credit. It would actually have been more expensive to go with the cheaper lawyer, as that bill would be paid in crisp, green benjamins, rather than equity funny money.

Chris Cean: It's funny. Now everyone talks about Apple, but people don't remember how big and pervasive Atari was. At one point Atari was twenty-seven buildings in six cities. You could almost trace the outline of Silicon Valley by connecting the dots. We used to call Highway 101 "Via Atari" because you'd be driving to meetings up and down 101, and all around you there are cars with Atri parking stickers. It was that first magical wave of Silicon Valley.

The comedian toys with our rational minds and brings about a "momentary fusion between two habitually incompatible matrices." The punch line comes a surprise but makes perfect sense. The sudden click of logic makes a joke funny; humor is reasonable. Someone without a strongly developed sense of logic is unlikely to have a good sense of humor either.

Jon Rubinstein: It was a beautiful service. Clearly it had been stage-managed by Steve from beyond the grave. John Markoff: Yo-Yo Ma played first and wonderfully. Andy Hertzfeld: It was really deep, just heartbreakingly beautiful, one of the most emotional pieces of music I’ve ever heard. John Markoff: Afterward he briefly introduced the event and told a short, funny story about how Steve had wanted him to play at his funeral and how he had asked Steve to speak at his. As usual, he noted, “Steve had gotten his way.” Mike Slade: So then Laurene spoke and had written this beautiful speech about Steve that was surprisingly analytical. Ron Johnson: She’s just a very professional, poised, intelligent, articulate person who had a long time to prepare for this. She had a message to convey, and she delivered it very gracefully. Mike Slade: She was like, “Look, if you guys think he was a dick, it’s because he was in pursuit of beauty, and that sort of trumped everything, and most people didn’t really get that about him.” And so almost everything that was dickish—she didn’t use those words—was because he was in pursuit of beauty. I’ve been to lots of funerals where the grieving widow was the grieving widow, and that’s not what she did. So it was wonderful—really brilliant, and I actually learned a lot from it—but it was surprising, right?

Kate Losse: He had kind of an ironic way of saying it. It wasn’t a totally flat, scary “domination.” It was funny. It’s only when you think about a much bigger scale of things that you’re like, Hmmmm: Are people aware that their interactions are being architected by a group of people who have a certain set of ideas about how the world works and what’s good? Ezra Callahan: “How much was the direction of the internet influenced by the perspective of nineteen-, twenty-, twenty-one-year-old well-off white boys?” That’s a real question that sociologists will be studying forever. Kate Losse: I don’t think most people really think about the impact that the values of a few people now have on everyone.

Scott Hassan: I remember going to this one meeting at Excite, with George Bell, the CEO. He selects Excite and he types “internet,” and then it pops up a page on the Excite side, and pretty much all of the results are in Chinese, and then on the Google side it basically had stuff all about NSCA Mosaic and a bunch of other pretty reasonable things. George Bell, he’s really upset about this, and it was funny, because he got very defensive. He was like, “We don’t want your search engine. We don’t want to make it easy for people to find stuff, because we want people to stay on our site.” It’s crazy, of course, but back then that was definitely the idea: Keep people on your site, don’t let them leave. And I remember driving away afterward, and Larry and I were talking: “Users come to your website? To search? And you don’t want to be the best damn search engine there is? That’s insane! That’s a dead company, right?

He laughed, but in the way people do who want to prove they get the joke. The Dutch do this a lot. They appear to live in terror of being mistaken for Germans, and to compensate by finding a funny side to life where none exists. Tell a Dutchman that your dog just died, and he will pretend that you have just made some impossibly witty remark.