Sarah Lacy Quotes

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Sarah Lacy

Profession : Journalist

Birth : December 29, 1975

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.

Sarah Lacy

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.

Sarah Lacy

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

Sarah Lacy

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.

Sarah Lacy

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.

Sarah Lacy

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.

Sarah Lacy

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.

Sarah Lacy

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.

Sarah Lacy

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.

Sarah Lacy

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.

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.

Sarah Lacy

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.

Sarah Lacy

I am a huge fan of using social media to connect with people because I think there was this 'ivory tower' aspect of journalism where people might read a byline for years but have no idea about the person who was behind it and never get to communicate with them or ask them a question.

Sarah Lacy

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.

Sarah Lacy

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

Sarah Lacy

Few people would doubt that Mark Zuckerberg would build a great product. But I, at least, would never have expected him to become so great at hiring, motivating, managing, and ultimately getting whatever it is his company needs from people.

Sarah Lacy

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?

Sarah Lacy

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

Sarah Lacy

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.

Sarah Lacy

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

Sarah Lacy