Megan Smith Quotes

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

To succeed in the tech industry, you start businesses, make money, and make smart investments. But to succeed in the tech community, you do and build awesome things, are generous with your time and efforts, and make a point of making space for strangers - without any expectation of payback.

I look forward to doing everything I can in my new role to help bring more and more of the best talent and best ideas from Silicon Valley and across the nation into government.

We could go work on curing cancer. We could go work on building spaceships. We could go work on art projects. What's fun about working at Asana is we get to work on all of them at the same time.

Mozilla has one foot in the Valley, Silicon Valley product technology, and partly one foot in the social enterprise space.

Innovation is all about people. Innovation thrives when the population is diverse, accepting and willing to cooperate.

My friends are people who like building cool stuff. We always have this joke about people who want to just start companies without making something valuable. There's a lot of that in Silicon Valley.

An open-minded and diverse population that readily shares information, encourages experimentation, accepts failure and dispenses with formality and hierarchy is what makes Silicon Valley the successful hub that it is.

Really, having people who have different mental perspectives is what's important.

From the outside, there's a perception Silicon Valley is full of really young, geeky guys. The reality is there are lots of different types of people there.

The reason why Silicon Valley is a worldwide innovation center is because it is a open culture that embraces diversity. You see people from all over the world. When you have many people from different backgrounds gathered together, that is where innovation comes from.

Traditional hackathons are fun and focused on skill and competition, but we believe that events which focus on the positive social impact of technology engage a wider and more diverse set of participants.

Startups are often best at solving the personal problems of their founders. The more diverse the founders, the more types of problems can be solved - and the more people who will be positively impacted by technology.

I don't think it's any secret that there's a lack of diversity in Silicon Valley. But that, to me, is actually quite beautiful. It allows me to be fully me because there is no one else to look at and say, 'Oh, I should be more like that.'

Being surrounded by diverse points of view pushes us beyond our comfort zones. And when people and teams bring multiple perspectives and experiences to the table, the discussions are deeper, the decision-making process is better, and the solutions are stronger.

I'm a big fan of having a team with different thoughts and backgrounds and experiences; that makes for a better enterprise and better decision-making.

In addition to encouraging failure, I would also encourage companies to broadly create a culture of innovation. That should mean more than just technology and invention; it should mean something millennials know well: Ingenuity.

You need to listen to the people experiencing the problems, and their ideas need to crowd out the words of the 'can't be done-ers.'

In an age of exponential change, we need the power of diverse thinking, and we cannot afford to leave any talent untapped.

Senior men have no monopoly on great ideas. Nor do creative people. Some of the best ideas come from account executives, researchers and others. Encourage this, you need all the ideas you can get.

The real secret of Silicon Valley is that it's really all about the people

Coding is the language of the future, and every girl should learn it. As I've learned from watching girls grow and learn in our classrooms, coding is fun, collaborative and creative.

That's what we do when we work in Silicon Valley tech startups: We think about who's going to benefit from this. That's almost the only thing we think about.

Never...stop at the boundaries of what you think your knowledge or training would suggest. If a problem grabs you, run with it and try to understand it from beginning to end, even if that means learning new techniques or developing them yourself.

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.