Everything about Mark Zuckerberg is pure hacker. Hackers don’t take realities of the world for granted; they seek to break and rebuild what they don’t like. They seek to outsmart the world.

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

My husband and I own half a dozen iPods, a Mac desktop, and four Mac laptops. We’re clearly fans of Mr. Jobs‘ work.

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.

Art is the most important thing to me in the entire world. It is my passion. Nothing else. End of story.

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

I always want to have San Francisco as my home and my base. I’m a business reporter – that’s what I do and what I enjoy – and I don’t know another place on the planet that would be as fascinating to cover.

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.

If Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t understand something, it’s not defeat. It’s not even something he has to accept. It’s merely a challenge he needs to engineer his way out of, and that includes human emotions and relationships.

For all the billions of dollars created here, Silicon Valley is remarkably stingy when it comes to giving.

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.

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.

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.

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

One of the nice things about being a private company is operating without the intensity of public glare. It’s hard to grow a company under a microscope of constant second guessing.

I am honest enough with myself to admit it. I rarely offer strong opinions, I have a backbone like a pair of bifold doors, and I am terrified of not being approved of.

A lot of the books that have been written about Silicon Valley are really good. Michael Malone’s books are incredible. I think his ‘Infinite Loop‘ is the best book that’s been written about Apple.

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.

Lesson to would-be fame seekers: It’s not really a new world when it comes to celebrity. There are no shortcuts. It’s still talent, perseverance and hard work. Even the speed and reach of the Net can’t create lasting value and income overnight.

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

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

I physically need to make art. Art isn’t just a hobby for me. It’s not something that I like. It’s an intense passion, an ecstatic love affair, with as much turmoil, frustration, exasperation and need as a forbidden liaison.

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.

This ‘oh let’s hug it out’ without taking any responsibility is exactly the problem. … We are not silly irrational little girls. We are running a serious business with investments from the biggest VCs in the Valley.

I’ve got a whole lotta questions, and not so many answers.

The one thing I didn’t do that was kind of controversial was go work for a daily paper, because I didn’t like that kind of journalism, and I’m glad I didn’t because that’s the business model that’s going totally extinct.

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

As smartphones have allowed us to have our computers, emails, social media feeds, and a full surveillance system in our pockets at all times, stories of the law enforcement‘s unease with that have been popping up in the press. And of course, the ones that become viral videos aren’t exactly flattering for law enforcement.

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.

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.