Maciej Cegłowski, Pinboard - XOXO Festival (2013)

I do like this idea of complexity sneaking into our lives and having to actively fight it, almost like it's roaches or something.

Great talk. Funny and candid. A thoughtful rebuke of many commonplace ideas in tech today:

I mentioned perseverance because there's this pernicious idea that comes from startup world that you should "fail quickly". I've always been a proponent of failing really really slowly because if you aren't in it for the money you don't know when you've succeeded or if you might succeed. Success doesn't come labeled in any way to distinguish it from failure—unless you're in it for money in which case it's really easy to count your success.

Later he talks about how Thoreau wasn’t much of a success in his lifetime. Only later were the insights of his writings recognized as ahead of their time. Maciej then weaves that narrative into his own points about perseverance and being open with money when he sarcastically points out the absurdity of financials as a measure for his definition of “success”:

I earned $181,000 from pinboard last year, which is 23,000 times as successful as Henry David Thoreau. Not bad at all.

And then this:

[You should write things down because] experience is hard-won knowledge and you don't want to just let it get away.

And lastly this:

We can't depend on big companies to take a stand for us.