Very smart people are often tricked by hackers, by phishing. I don't exclude myself from that. It's about being smarter than a hacker. Not about being smart.
Harper Reed
I think there are a lot of hurdles between a normal consumer brand figuring out their mobile strategy - let alone their chat app strategy - and programming a Facebook Messenger chatbot.
I grew up in Greeley, Colorado, in a house without a television set. I was a very nerdy kid: I used to play 'astronaut' and eat bouillon as astronaut food. We also had tons of books.
Before I was hired by Obama's team as the CTO for his 2012 re-election campaign, I had certainly never been involved with anything of that nature before. Yet, I somehow knew I could do the job. I attribute that confidence to my experience as a hacker and the subsequent willingness to take risks.
I'm a white male in power. In many cases, I'm the enemy.
You can tell charlatans when they say 'big' in front of everything.
We were orbiting around the idea of intent and context. We would take the bus into work, and if you said, 'Here's a shirt you might like,' and I open it on my mobile phone, I'm not going to pull out my credit card and wallet. We thought, 'How does someone do this? An e-mail to yourself, or you try to remember?'
When you walk into a field office, you have many opportunities. We'll hand you a call sheet. You can make calls. You can knock on doors, and they'll have these stacks there for you. They'll say: 'Harper, you've knocked on 50 doors. That's great. Here's how you compare to the rest of them.' But it's all very offline.
My entire career has been based around commerce. The Obama campaign was famous for raising boatloads of money online. My question is how do you make conversions better through mobile and e-mail.
This idea of, there's a locked door; how do you open it? You don't necessarily care what's behind it; you're just more excited about opening the lock... It's not about finding the treasure; it's more about defeating the puzzle.
If you get a WhatsApp message, you're probably going to open it. That's the interesting thing.
People are building apps that are doing super-crazy things, and there's a lot of talk about modeling and microtargeting. Facebook can predict when people are going to break up, and Target is able to predict if a woman is pregnant before she knows just based on the type of lotion she bought.
There are a lot of people who are unable to take a break to clear their minds. I imagine they are the ones who need it the most.
I find that I often forget that people come from all over. In interfaces, products, experiences, and building for people, we always forget that people are not us.
Data is what powers all of us and our lives. It is ubiquitous among our now-connected lives. I love how it is now the oxygen of our Internet world.
I wonder which is ultimately more creepy: shopping at Amazon or using Facebook?
Ten Internets ago, when PayPal was started, it was all these tools that no one had built yet to bring commerce to the Internet. My first startup used PayPal.
Taking time to do something slower than you normally would is a privilege that should not be ignored.
Crowdsourcing is the future. However, if you don't trust your users to build/create/upload awesome work, they won't trust you with their crowd capital.
I can only speak to the Democrat side, but for the Democrats, everything is aggressively measured, and what that means is if you're going to use Snapchat, you're going to use it for a reason, not just for fun.
It was on a bulletin board that I first learned about hacker culture, the 'Let's just break through this wall and see what's on the other side' mentality.
Let's say we were a peacekeeping force in some small country that most people had never heard of. And we were there to host a peaceful election, and we then found out a bunch of stuff was hacked. We probably would push to have another election to make sure that would be fair.
I'm not a very patient person in general.
The thing about Snapchat is it is ephemeral, so you don't - it's not like a video that you post to YouTube and then everyone can see it. It's this video that you get to share this kind of very intimate experience again, this very kind of genuine experience with another person in a more one-on-one sort of way. And I really appreciate that.
Books have literally powered most of my life. Whether as a stress relief when doing hard things or as vacation fodder, they are a constant and important part of my life.
The team that I had built was all white dudes with the same perspective on things that was at times comfortable and easy, but we weren't as innovative as our competitors.
We are often celebrating technology and codes, but we don't really think about the creative side.
The advice I used to give to engineers I hired was, 'Don't eat the pizza.' Sometimes when you walk into these high-pressure environments, it's, like, doughnuts everywhere and all these little cakes.
All of this conversation about chat and assistance lays the groundwork for what I would look at as the future of commerce.
When I give talks, I often quote from a button I received at a Google event: Always Be Creative. I use it to illustrate how important creativity is in technology and business.
Oftentimes in tech, people think, 'I'm the only one that has this.' I call them the Atlas People. They're like, 'The weight of the world is on the shoulders. I'm the only person who can solve this problem.' But you can't do that.
Instagram is amazing, and I enjoy sharing photos there. However, I don't think it is where my photos will go to live.
I programmed computers every day. And one of my favourite apps we built was this thing called Awesome Updater, that all it did is send you a tweet randomly that was like, 'Yo, you're awesome.'
Don't eat the pizza; get lots of sleep - you have to take care of yourself. It's about being your tip top self at all times, and if you are unhealthy, or you're sick, or you don't feel good, even it's just because you're sluggish, you're not going to make it because you're not going to be able to react to things.
Mobile usage is going up; mobile conversion is not.
The main ideas for us are scale, stability, and audience.
Google Photos is great. I enjoy using it to curate my photo collection online. The integration on iOS to Apple Photos is a bit too much voodoo for me.
In New York City, they have their own way of doing things. Every city and every region should do its own thing.
When you go from building T-shirts to software for a presidential campaign used by a cast of millions, it's pretty easy to think, 'OK, we can build something pretty big.'
The digital team who were running Twitter, they weren't just going to put out a tweet for fun. They're going to try and figure out how do we measure the impact. Then they'd tweet it, and if it worked, great.
My parents are very supportive: they helped redirect my technology attitude and my punkness into positive things.
'Data scientist,' as a profession, is largely a fad.
In the U.S., it's all about turnout, which means you have to appeal to every single Democrat to get them to vote.
I try and wake up relatively early. I listen to some music and check Twitter. I also make sure I weigh myself and check how long I slept. I do that because knowing that data seems better than not knowing it.
First of all, a giant corporation probably shouldn't be being hacked by teenagers. I put that on the corporation, not the teenagers. Teenagers are going to do what teenagers are going to do - rebelling. But if they're able to hack a big corporation, that seems like the corporation should be better at security.
There is the egoism of technologists. We do it because we can create. I can handle all of the parameters going into the machine, and I know what is going to come out of it.
Chicago's a flyover city. I don't think we should try to change that. But it would be really cool if we had a little more opportunity for investors to come hang out.
My career choice has largely been what I wanted to do. I always knew that technology would be one of the threads.
I would still describe myself as a hacker. I still remember feeling the magic, the sense of discovery, when I first connected to a bulletin board. It seemed like the world was somehow brighter, the greens were greener. Like I'd stepped through a portal to the other side. I knew back then that things would never be the same again for me.
I am patiently waiting for the singularity.
