Dream, struggle, create, prevail. Be daring. Be brave. Be loving. Be compassionate. Be strong. Be brilliant. Be beautiful.

Sometimes you climb the mountain, and you fall and fail. Maybe there is a different path that will take you up. Sometimes a different mountain.

In 2001, the hard disk on my laptop crashed, and everything on it was lost. I'd been using the computer for two, almost three years, and had all my work on it - email, which was stored locally; photos; fragments of poems; presentations; sketches; ideas; love letters; everything. I lamented the loss to my friends and got lectured on doing backups.

If we are not given the chance to forget, we are also not given the chance to recover our memories, to alter them with time, perspective, and wisdom. Forgetting, we can be ourselves beyond what the past has told us we are; we can evolve. That is the possibility we want from the future.

Every place has a story - or a thousand stories. Findery brings places to life, be they where you stand or where you hope to go.

I learned most of what I knew about online communities on The Well, and it was a good place to learn. The group of people in Sausalito and Bolinas who'd gotten the Whole Earth Catalog off the ground - a bunch of boomer hippies, intellectuals and nerds - established the 'Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link', and showed us what online communities were.

The children of less effective, less competent parents will be more likely to adopt the customs and values of the peer group.

Trade sales are the bulk of exits, and there's no shame in that. Sometimes, it's exactly the right thing to do.

Vacations are good, and I come back energized, with the whiff of Hawaiian Tropic in the air and 2,000 messages in my Inbox.

Eliminate activities that require you to be around people you cannot stand. Don't do things for people who should be doing them themselves... and don't waste time chasing trophies.

When I die and my memories die with me, all that will remain will be thousands of yellowing photographs and 35mm negatives in my filing cabinets.

I wanted to become a writer and felt that poetry was perfected language, so having it in my subconscious mind would make the music of language always available to me.

If you built a successful company the first time, it's really important not to fall into the trap of resting on your laurels and doing the same thing the next time. It's stepping into the unknown that enables you to create something fresh, new, and innovative.

If you looked at my resume in the years leading up to Flickr, I worked in a dive shop in landlocked Arkansas; I was a starving artist. I just arrived at the thing I love to do accidentally.

I'm an accidental business person. I just love the medium. I love the Internet.

There is great work to be done, and the women will lead us. So I say, Astonish us with your genius. Inspire us with your creation. Work with one another. Endure the tribulations.

If you look at all the companies I've been involved with - Flickr, Etsy, Findery - communities are a significant part of them. Connecting people to each other, user-generated content, building interactions. That's what I've cared about most.

A lot of the reason I wanted to become an entrepreneur and avoid working for others is that you get to create the world you want to live in and the company you want to work for, and I've loved that. It's a part of entrepreneurship that women should really embrace.

I joined the board of Etsy when it was just three founders, and I helped recruit the COO and CTO, Chad Dickerson, who later became the CEO.

I've had two IPOs: with Etsy in 2015 and Cloudera in 2016. There have also been a ton of trade sales in my portfolio.

When you have a failed pitch, you meet many more venture capitalists than you really want to.

Do not seek prizes that aren't worth getting.

Facebook is a powerful company, yes, but so was IBM.

If the business were a play, Act One is, 'Woohoo, bright and bushy-tailed. We're going to make something great!' Act Two is, 'We're six months behind on back-end development.'

It's fairly easy to know when you've succeeded because you're kind of hanging on for dear life. It's such an unstoppable juggernaut; you're trying to stay with your head above water because things are moving so fast.

I work really hard. My daughter asks me what I do, and it's mostly calls, emails, and meetings. We have our office in Hayes Valley, a nice part of town, because we're all about place being important.

I go to bed early - around 9 P.M. or 10 P.M. - and wake up between 2 A.M. and 5 A.M. and get an extra three hours of work done. Then I have a regular work day. It's very effective.

A co-founder is like being somebody's parent: You want to make sure your offspring thrive.

I stay up on current events. I read 'The New Yorker' and 'The Economist.' I go to community meetings to see what concerns the people in my neighborhood. I studied literature in college, so I also continue to read poetry, literature, and novels.

I approached Yahoo as a learning experience. Everything at every stage of the game affects what you do next. At Yahoo, I learned a lot about social search and met a lot of amazing people - some are now entrepreneurs with companies I subsequently invested in.

The single thing I've found it valuable to memorize is poetry.

As a child, I learned hundreds of poems by heart, which I can recite to this day.

College is an environment designed to encourage openness - the ability to think of things in novel ways and entertain unconventional beliefs.

One of the issues we face here in San Francisco and Silicon Valley is a sense that the people all around us are as conversant in startup and tech culture as we are. But we need to remember, and remind ourselves repeatedly, that we're a small minority in a larger population.

I had never understood why the farmlands of the U.S. had been settled in such a sparse and isolated way, whereas the farming communities in Europe seemed closer, more convivial, centered around village life.

I wish we didn't have to be nude to be noticed... But given the game as it exists, women make decisions. For instance, the Miss America contest is, in all of its states... the single greatest source of scholarship money for women in the United States.

Good parents, who are able to maintain the affection and respect of their children and whose offspring admire them and value their good opinion, can be reasonably certain that their values and ways of socialized behaving will be adopted by the next generation.

The Internet is full of strangers, generous strangers who want to help you for no reason at all. Strangers post poetry and discographies and advice and essays and photos and art and diatribes. None of them are known to you, in the old-fashioned sense. But they give the Internet its life and meaning.

I first got online in the late '80s when I was an eccentric teenager in suburban New Jersey, in a town mostly interested in sports, popularity, and clothes. I was a reader, into Jorge Luis Borges, and I found, connected to, and delighted in a group of Borges scholars from Aarhus, Denmark, that I met online.

A lot of things have changed since the days of Flickr. Facebook has concentrated the sociality of the Internet within its blue borders, like a Walmart siphoning off the mom-and-pop shops that formerly comprised the Internet's gathering places. Communication, in the age of mobile dominance, has become, of necessity, shorter and snack-sized.

Our successes have been so great and so rapid that, within 20 years, we've gotten a third of the world's population online, shrunk our computers to the size of our hands, and connected each to each.

Because the Internet is a medium, it doesn't care whether it transmits love or hate. It is what we build and who we are that make it what it is. We can build things that diminish our humanity or build things that bring us to human flourishing.

If there is a national, secular religion in the United States, it is the belief that America is the Land of Opportunity, that we are a meritocracy, that any kid, no matter who they are, or where they come from, can work hard and move up in the world: that their effort matters.

'You, too, can be the President,' every American kid is told. But one unintended consequence of this belief, it is that, as a result of our being a meritocracy, if you have not succeeded, you are of lesser merit. It is shameful to be a failure in this country.

Ecstasy is almost never discussed anymore, but leaving the earth is one way of attaining it. To exchange ecstasy for death is often the bargain.

The wall at Le Philosophe is covered with French philosophers, and supposedly, if you are able to name all of them, they will pay for your meal. I was only able to identify Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre, Descartes and, I think, Foucault. And, I think, Luce Irigaray.

I'm sure there was some amazing art at the Frieze Art Fair, but I wasn't able to find it. However, found some friends there, which was even better. And the boat to and from was lovely.

'Apartamento,' a magazine out of Spain but written in English, is one of my favorite magazines.

One of the many wonderful things about homeschooling is that I am constantly learning alongside my daughter.

After reading about the Al Ain Oasis by ECWC, I became curious about cultivating dates, and browsed about the web a bit, learning.