I have never seen anyone drink like he did. To say he drank with a vengeance is almost understating it: it was almost as if there was a thirst there, a deep and insatiable craving that made the man ke...
Watching a parent die is a terrible task. My father, faced with something he could not talk down or browbeat into submission, spent his days with the bottle, as if he determined to drink himself to de...
What strange and thoughtless creatures we were, back in those days. We would go up to the rooftops to smoke, Wurth and I; and there in the company of other insomniac souls we would look out at the vas...
On some days it felt like we owned the Earth, and the only place left to expand to was the next planet down the line.
Discrimination is not just racial now. It’s also about the kind of body parts you have.
What did journalists know of tech, anyway? Who gave a damn about the press? We were the Good Guys. Changing the World. Doing the Important Stuff.
Julius used to say that we stood on the shoulders of giants. To me it always seemed like we were in their shadow. It never occurred to me that we were the shadow that they projected, and that one day...
We’re going to tell these people that they dropped because Facebook dropped us. We're going to say the Number needs the data and it's their right to share it with us. And we’re going to drop their Num...
This is the Number. It is in the things we do, the people we meet, the ID cards that we carry. It's part of our identities, our credit cards, our social interactions. It takes our influences, our bias...
Sri Lanka is a beautiful little island nation parked perilously close to India; a little too hot, a little too humid, and perhaps too expensive, but to its credit are fantastic beaches, strangely mela...
I recounted my adventures, just as I recount them to you now. I told him about Bombay, which glowed in the night like a lamp. I told him about Bangalore, about the beaches of Goa, of Pune, where elabo...
We have every piece of data on 200 million people,” he said, ticking off his fingers. “We have their bank accounts. We know how much they make and how much they spend and where. We have their social m...
Sometimes respect is as hard a currency as money is
This is how we progress as humans. We went from horseless carriages to self-driving, self-organizing transport in a hundred and fifty years. We went from powered flight to putting a man on the moon in...
Beautiful women have a following all their own. If that sounds misogynistic, I’m sorry, that’s the way the world works. Homer said the Greeks went to war over a woman. I can’t get a battle, but I can...
The only things I can’t offer you are children and politicians: the first is illegal and the second is expensive
The world I grew up in was a brutal one. The murder rate was once seven people for every hundred thousand. The average American on minimum wage could barely afford to keep themselves alive on canned f...
We would sneer sometimes at how pointless it all was, all those bourgeois souls wrapping themselves in luxury, isolating themselves from the raw edges of the word; and in between puffs, we would smile...
Every New Yorker thinks they’re automatically better than everyone else in every other city on the planet: even their unnems were a better class of beggars.
Here was a particular kind of energy in those early days, something I've only really found in startups. The regulars - the boring 9-to-5 people - haven’t invaded the world yet. All around you are peop...
