The team that I had built was all white dudes with the same perspective on things that was at times comfortable and easy, but we weren't as innovative as our competitors.

The opportunity to step away from everything and take a break is something that shouldn't be squandered.

I've had a lot of bosses that I didn't agree with, but the worst boss was very much me myself. So, I can't let myself slack off, and if I do slacking off, I'm the one that's yelling at myself. I've worked with a lot of different employers, and none of them have been as aggressive as I have been.

I grew up in Greeley, Colorado, in a house without a television set. I was a very nerdy kid: I used to play 'astronaut' and eat bouillon as astronaut food. We also had tons of books.

I'm a white male in power. In many cases, I'm the enemy.

I have to say that you don't really know stress until you know that the path of the free world is resting a little bit on your shoulders.

When I called people and said, 'Hey! Do you want to work for the president?' they usually said yes. I had 2 people say no. One person said no because they were a Republican; one person said no because they're a Libertarian.

We are often celebrating technology and codes, but we don't really think about the creative side.

I am patiently waiting for the singularity.

I'm not a very patient person in general.

Books have literally powered most of my life. Whether as a stress relief when doing hard things or as vacation fodder, they are a constant and important part of my life.

Google Photos is great. I enjoy using it to curate my photo collection online. The integration on iOS to Apple Photos is a bit too much voodoo for me.

Oftentimes in tech, people think, 'I'm the only one that has this.' I call them the Atlas People. They're like, 'The weight of the world is on the shoulders. I'm the only person who can solve this problem.' But you can't do that.

The digital team who were running Twitter, they weren't just going to put out a tweet for fun. They're going to try and figure out how do we measure the impact. Then they'd tweet it, and if it worked, great.

First of all, a giant corporation probably shouldn't be being hacked by teenagers. I put that on the corporation, not the teenagers. Teenagers are going to do what teenagers are going to do - rebelling. But if they're able to hack a big corporation, that seems like the corporation should be better at security.

When you walk into a field office, you have many opportunities. We'll hand you a call sheet. You can make calls. You can knock on doors, and they'll have these stacks there for you. They'll say: 'Harper, you've knocked on 50 doors. That's great. Here's how you compare to the rest of them.' But it's all very offline.

I think there are a lot of hurdles between a normal consumer brand figuring out their mobile strategy - let alone their chat app strategy - and programming a Facebook Messenger chatbot.

I try and wake up relatively early. I listen to some music and check Twitter. I also make sure I weigh myself and check how long I slept. I do that because knowing that data seems better than not knowing it.

Data is what powers all of us and our lives. It is ubiquitous among our now-connected lives. I love how it is now the oxygen of our Internet world.

Mobile usage is going up; mobile conversion is not.

In the U.S., it's all about turnout, which means you have to appeal to every single Democrat to get them to vote.

Before I was hired by Obama's team as the CTO for his 2012 re-election campaign, I had certainly never been involved with anything of that nature before. Yet, I somehow knew I could do the job. I attribute that confidence to my experience as a hacker and the subsequent willingness to take risks.

Very smart people are often tricked by hackers, by phishing. I don't exclude myself from that. It's about being smarter than a hacker. Not about being smart.

You can tell charlatans when they say 'big' in front of everything.