Intellectual Ventures CEO Nathan Myhrvold said Seattle is the “Silicon Valley of saving the world”; skydiver Luke Aikins wowed the crowd with his anything-is-possible tale of jumping from an airplane at 25,000 feet with no parachute; and Teddy Goff, chief digital strategist for the Hillary Clinton campaign, said he hopes Donald Trump just keeps on tweeting.
Day 2 of the GeekWire Summit was packed with more enlightening and inspiring tales, and we’ve once again collected some of the tweets and quotes that sum up the story best.
Education Reboot: How Higher-Ed Can Help Solve the Tech Talent Gap
“We don’t know where the next talent is going to come from, and it isn’t always going to be the people who look like us or talk like us.” — Joe Whittinghill, Microsoft GM.
“I think the motivations of corporations are all wrong here. We piss away this money in a zero-sum game stealing engineers from each other.” — Peter Wilson, OfferUp VP.
“We have this square peg round hole approach to our PR systems.” — Scott McKinley, Northeastern dean and CEO.
https://twitter.com/geekwire/status/783689548542992384
Read the full story here.
Fireside Chat: Arati Prabhakar, DARPA
“That was a wake-up for the federal government to think about technological surprise and how to prevent it — by creating surprises of your own.” — Arati Prabhakar, on the Sputnik era.
“We’re right in the middle of this amazing advance that’s happening, this revolution that’s happening. We want to be able to put something on orbit tomorrow.” — Prabhakar, on DARPA’s space ambitions.
“What matters more to national security than understanding social behavior?” — Prabhakar.
https://twitter.com/geekwire/status/783700063360995328
https://twitter.com/geekwire/status/783703324671352832
https://twitter.com/geekwire/status/783709157668990976
Read the full story here.
Fireside Chat: Joel Spolsky, CEO of Stack Overflow
“Facebook’s campus in Silicon Valley is an 8-acre open room, and Facebook was very pleased with itself for building what it thought was this amazing place for developers. But developers don’t want to overhear conversations … developers need to concentrate, to go to a chatroom and ask questions and get the answers later. Facebook is paying 40-50 percent more than other places, which is usually a sign developers don’t want to work there. — Joel Spolsky, on office design for developers.
“In 1950, a LEGO set consisted on these little bricks and you would snap the bricks together and make a house. Today you get the top of Darth Vader and the bottom of Darth Vader and you snap them together and now you have a little Darth Vader. That’s what’s going on with programming today.” — Spolsky, on modern dev tools.
https://twitter.com/geekwire/status/783712752489500672
https://twitter.com/EvangelistNinja/status/783714889034452992
https://twitter.com/geekwire/status/783717439833903104
Read the full story here.
Power Talk: Inclusive Innovation: Vikram Jandhyala, UW
“I wasn’t going to pay any money for this app. So that’s when i stopped. — Vikram Jandhyala, on his level 6 Pokémon Go status.
“I was an early employee at a startup company that sold for $850 million. I was not the founder. That’s why I’m standing here.” — Jandhyala.
https://twitter.com/matalla/status/783721826526466048
https://twitter.com/geekwire/status/783722615982600192
Fireside Chat: Nathan Myhrvold, Intellectual Ventures CEO
“Some tech companies have embraced the idea of invention… there are other tech companies who have said, ‘Hey, let’s weaken the patent system.” — Nathan Myhrvold.
“I don’t see that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s a tiny fraction of the world’s patent market.” — Myhrvold on Intellectual Ventures’ patent trove.
“I’m like a salmon. I came back to the home stream to spawn.” — Seattle native Myhrvold, on returning to the NW from California.
https://twitter.com/geekwire/status/783744915293429760
https://twitter.com/FuelTalentSEA/status/783735796608094208
https://twitter.com/geekwire/status/783738147435716608
https://twitter.com/geekwire/status/783737716949213184
https://twitter.com/dinabass/status/783740794368774144
https://twitter.com/geekwire/status/783744040617390081
Read the full stories here and here.
Power Talk: Luke Aikins, skydiver
“I would much rather jump out of an airplane without a parachute than stand in front of you guys and talk.” — Luke Aikins, on his public-speaking nerves.
“I really didn’t want to experience a car crash. That wasn’t part of the deal.” — Aikins, on determining how much G-force his body could withstand.
“We’re not responsible if this doesn’t work.” — Bainbridge Island, Wash., maker of Aikins’ landing net.
“I wanted to show that anything is possible. Whether my son wants to be a doctor, a dancer, an astronaut, whatever. If he sets his mind to it he can do anything.” — Aikins on why he did the jump.
https://twitter.com/geekwire/status/783765317663072256
https://twitter.com/geekwire/status/783766884055343104
https://twitter.com/geekwire/status/783767044046983169
Inside AI: Oren Etzioni and Shivon Zilis
“We love when machine learning companies are able to supply expertise while taking complexity out of it.” — Shivon Zilis, Bloomberg Beta.
“I really like to separate science from science fiction.” — Oren Etzioni, Allen Institute for AI.
“He’s a database kid.” — Etzioni, on his 6-year-old son loves talking to Amazon’s Alexa.
https://twitter.com/geekwire/status/783770992535494656
https://twitter.com/geekwire/status/783769709720113152
“It’s amazing how much we’re willing to give up privacy when there’s an actual benefit.” — Zilis.
“There is no privacy. There are two kinds of people: The kind who have given up, and the kind who are deluding themselves.” — Etzioni.
“So, even in the age of AI, duct tape still fixes everything.” — Zilis.
“I’m really tied of AI being cast as the villain.” — Etzioni, on Hollywood movies.
Tech and Politics: Teddy Goff, Clinton campaign
“I hope he tweets more. I think he should tweet every day, multiple times a day, 3 in the morning, 5 in the morning.” — Teddy Goff, on Donald Trump’s Twitter habits.
“He comes with a history that is just bonkers. Donald Trump is really an aberration.” — Goff, on why this election is so “weird.”
“There’s an increasingly meaningless distinction between old media, like The New York Times, and new media, like Buzzfeed.” — Goff, on modern media.
https://twitter.com/geekwire/status/783787655284658176
https://twitter.com/geekwire/status/783785913683849216
https://twitter.com/geekwire/status/783788947067383808
Read the full story here.
Check out the memorable quotes from Day 1 of the Summit.