Startup Quotes

“People didn’t used to take pole-dancing classes with their coworkers; they maybe got drunk with their coworkers, and that was the extent of it. But now you were expected to engage in forced, organized fun with people you worked with, and it seemed to her that the definition of fun had been majorly stretched. When”
― Doree Shafrir, Startup

“It’s not that being happy is bad,” Dan said. “It’s the fetishization of happiness and productivity above all else that I take issue with.”
― Doree Shafrir, Startup

“She also felt like there was something slightly more insidious going on, about how you were now supposed to feel like your work was your everything: where you got your paycheck, yes, but also where you got fed and where you found your social circle. Everything had started bleeding into everything else. These kids—she felt no compunction about calling them kids—expected that their workplaces would provide all this for them, as if work were an extension of college, with its own clubs and student organizations. Even more disconcerting was that many TakeOff employees lived together or had roommates who were in some way connected to other TakeOff employees, and now there were even apartment buildings that were actual dorms for grown-ups, where you lived in a suite with a few other people and had common areas and nightly activities. It was almost like a return to the days of Henry Ford, when a company provided you with housing and meals and social events. What had happened to having to figure out life on your own?”
― Doree Shafrir, Startup

“She gestured with her head toward Andrew. “You know how they are. I’m basically invisible right now.” Katya wasn’t totally sure who they meant—startup guys? men in general?—but she nodded in agreement.”
― Doree Shafrir, Startup

“Couldn’t thirty-nine-year-olds just be old and tired and not talk about it constantly? Having”
― Doree Shafrir, Startup

“Natalie, who was the author of a series of wildly successful Hunger Games meets Gossip Girl YA books about a clique of girls at a postapocalyptic prep school who have to simultaneously fight for popularity and for the survival of the planet—hadn”
― Doree Shafrir, Startup

“marriage was, inevitably, death by a thousand little cuts; the”
― Doree Shafrir, Startup

“Like most company failures, it had happened slowly and then all at once. A”
― Doree Shafrir, Startup

“The need for approval from Twitter users was something that her younger self probably would have sneered at, but now she saw it as the cost of doing business. It was fine to get likes, but what she really wanted was either a retweet or, even better, a completely original tweet commending her for a job well done, preferably one from someone in the tech world whose work she respected and who, ideally, had hundreds of thousands of followers. If the only people who liked the tweet were “eggs”—people whose Twitter presence was so lame that they hadn’t even bothered uploading avatars, or spambots, or both—she sometimes deleted the tweet.”
― Doree Shafrir, Startup

“Every so often she’d see a reporter complaining on Twitter about how far the quality of journalism had tumbled, thanks to the internet, and that journalists with real skills and experience who knew how to write original stories were getting shoved aside in favor of young people who leeched off the hard work of these allegedly hardworking journalists, and it was all because their greedy overlords were obsessed with clicks and traffic—again, at the expense of “real” journalists. Aggregation had become a dirty word, and the people who suffered were the readers, who were now faced with piles of online news dreck, according to this line of thinking, and every story was the same, and no one checked sources, and eventually everyone was just going to die under a pile of clickbait, which was the dirtiest word of all.”
― Doree Shafrir, Startup

“It was probably that YouTube compilation of dog Snapchats that everyone had been tweeting about for the last four minutes.”
― Doree Shafrir, Startup

“So Mack got kind of a late start in the startup world—he founded TakeOff at the ripe old age of twenty-five”
― Doree Shafrir, Startup

“In its place had arisen a Promised Land of Duane Reades and Chase ATMs on every corner, luxury doorman buildings, Pilates studios and spin classes, eighteen-dollar rosemary-infused cocktails and seven-dollar cups of single-origin coffee—all of which were there to cater to a new generation of twentysomethings, the data scientists and brand strategists and software engineers and social media managers and product leads and marketing associates and IT coordinators ready to disrupt the world with apps. And today, like every day, they would work until it was dark again, and then they would go to dinner parties or secret cocktail bars or rooftop events, and most of them would end the night watching Netflix on their laptops in bed" - Prologue, Save Your Generation, in Doree Shafrir's Startup”
― Doree Shafrir, Startup

“It wasn’t who I wanted to be anymore. Where did Isabel Taylor get the idea that identity was so malleable? Not that Katya wanted her identity to be malleable, but it was fascinating how some people thought that the world would just go along with whatever they decided their lives were like at any given moment.”
― Doree Shafrir, Startup

“Now it seemed like these guys had all gone to the same school of “call women crazy whenever they do something that makes you uncomfortable.” But”
― Doree Shafrir, Startup

“The stakes were just higher for her. She couldn’t afford to lose this story. She couldn’t afford to lose this job. People like Teddy, people like Mack—they could afford to make mistakes. They were forgiven. Young women with immigrant parents who went to college on scholarship and were one paycheck away from not being able to pay rent—they couldn’t.”
― Doree Shafrir, Startup

“Nighttime Twitter was different from daytime Twitter only in that the content shifted from people in her timeline making dumb jokes about tech news to people making dumb jokes about TV. Katya”
― Doree Shafrir, Startup

“He was out of a job because his company, StrollUp—“like Uber for strollers,” she’d heard him say approximately five thousand times—had gone out of business last week. Like”
― Doree Shafrir, Startup

“Mack considered his ears his secret weapon in that they made him just slightly unattractive, a characteristic that he found made him irresistibly disarming to women.”
― Doree Shafrir, Startup

“They were all in agreement that adulthood could, and should, be fun.”
― Doree Shafrir, Startup

“She usually operated under the assumption that quantity tended to beget not only quality, but also traffic. The more you wrote, the more you figured out what people liked to read, and then you could just write more of that, and presumably each post would be better than the last one. And there was definitely a point where, if your posts got really shitty, people stopped reading. The secret was learning how to churn out posts that were just good enough quality-wise, and do a lot of them.”
― Doree Shafrir, Startup