Tim O’Reilly Sez: “Choose the Cookie!”

On the few occasions I’ve had to hear Tim O’Reilly speak, I’ve never failed to come away inspired.

A couple of choice anecdotes and quotes from his opening keynote at Etech last night:

• “Hackers change the world while having fun”
• On Col. Kittinger, the guy who went up in a weather balloon, skydove out, hit the speed of sound without a vehicle, and was laying out of it on the ground — his friend ran up and gave him the finger to celebrate his statement: “There are always people who say it can’t be done. Just give ‘em the one-finger salute and keep on going.”
• Wrestle with the angels. Attack the hard problems.
• Things they are paying attention to at O’Reilly (and represented at the show):
• open-source hardware
• sensors and ambient computing / data mining open platforms and implicit web
• bionics / people hacking / brain hacking
• personal genomics
• collective intelligence (”Larry Lessig is the Matt Cutts of government.”)
• climate change
• Rilke’s “The Man Walking”

In talking to an entrepreneur considering several projects of various levels of commercial strength, he was reminded of the Cookie Monster winning a game show on Sesame Street. Behind Door #1: a million dollars in cash. Door #2, a castle and a yacht. Behind Door #3: a cookie. You know where Tim’s going. . as the audience starts chanting like the Cookie Monster. . .

“Choose the cookie!”

posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 at 10:59 am Category: Uncategorized, startup, innovation. Comment or trackback.