Top 35 Tim O'Reilly Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Whoever has the data has the power.”

— Tim O'Reilly

2. “Pursue something so important that even if you fail, the world is better off with you having tried.”

— Tim O'Reilly

3. “Create more value than you capture.”

— Tim O'Reilly

4. “What new technology does is create new opportunities to do a job that customers want done.”

— Tim O'Reilly

5. “Being too early is indistinguishable from being wrong.”

— Tim O'Reilly

6. “Money is like gasoline during a road trip. You don’t want to run out of gas on your trip, but you’re not doing a tour of gas stations.”

— Tim O'Reilly

7. “We’re entering a new world in which data may be more important than software.”

— Tim O'Reilly

8. “The future is always scary to those who cling to the past.”

— Tim O'Reilly

9. “The network is opening up some amazing possibilities for us to reinvent content, reinvent collaboration.”

— Tim O'Reilly

10. “We often get blinded by the forms in which content is produced, rather than the job that the content does.”

— Tim O'Reilly

11. “An invention has to make sense in the world it finishes in, not in the world it started.”

— Tim O'Reilly

12. “Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.”

— Tim O'Reilly

13. “Empowerment of individuals is a key part of what makes open source work, since in the end, innovations tend to come from small groups, not from large, structured efforts.”

— Tim O'Reilly

14. “Just do something that lights you up, and lights up your customers, and lights up the world and scale to that.”

— Tim O'Reilly

15. “The problem for most artists isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.”

— Tim O'Reilly

16. “A book is always a dialogue with other readers and other books.”

— Tim O'Reilly

17. “When you have to prove the value of your ideas by persuading other people to pay for them, it clears out an awful lot of woolly thinking.”

— Tim O'Reilly

18. “Data is the next Intel Inside.”

— Tim O'Reilly

19. “Life is not a tour of gas stations.”

— Tim O'Reilly

20. “There’s not a single business model, and there’s not a single type of electronic content. There are really a lot of opportunities and a lot of options and we just have to discover all of them.”

— Tim O'Reilly

21. “Share what you do profusely, because it will be remixed by others into something new, rich and strange.”

— Tim O'Reilly

22. “You have to pay attention to money, but it shouldn’t be about the money.”

— Tim O'Reilly

23. “The biggest mistake we see companies make when they first hit Twitter is to think about it as a channel to push out information.”

— Tim O'Reilly

24. “Obscurity is a bigger problem for authors than piracy.”

— Tim O'Reilly

25. “My basic belief is you need to ride the horse in the direction that it’s going.”

— Tim O'Reilly

26. “There are more than 21 eBook channels already. Authors can’t possibly get to these and do what they do best.”

— Tim O'Reilly

27. “No matter your sector, chances are that people are already twittering about your products, your brand, your company or at least your industry.”

— Tim O'Reilly

28. “In social networks, you gain and bestow status through those you associate with.”

— Tim O'Reilly

29. “Architecture trumps licensing any time.”

— Tim O'Reilly

30. “Early on, when software was developed by computer scientists, just people working with computers, people passed around software because that was how you got computers to do things.”

— Tim O'Reilly

31. “It’s a great discipline to have to report to somebody, even if you’re the sole owner.”

— Tim O'Reilly

32. “I think that companies always become complacent, over time. Or most companies, that is.”

— Tim O'Reilly

33. “A key function of a publishing brand is the bestowal of status by who and what you pay attention to.”

— Tim O'Reilly

34. “I think that Microsoft will increasingly feel margin pressure from Linux as well as people saying: well actually the applications that really matter to me are not on my PC. And so they’re going to be able to extract less of a monopoly rent, so to speak.”

— Tim O'Reilly

35. “Anyone who puts a small gloss on a fundamental technology, calls it proprietary, and then tries to keep others from building on it, is a thief.”

— Tim O'Reilly

36. “Apple is in a position they’ve been in a lot of times before. They’re like Moses showing the way to the promised land, but they don’t actually go there.”

— Tim O'Reilly

37. “I think Microsoft will have to change. I think that the business of Microsoft, the company of Microsoft, is going to continue to succeed. But I think the business model of Microsoft is going to have to change.”

— Tim O'Reilly

38. “The nice thing about twitter is the architecture of visibility. Email is invisible unless you reach out to someone directly. With Twitter, anyone can follow you and this is one of the big changes that was really introduced by Flickr, was this wonderful idea that you can follow somebody without their permission. Recognizing that relationships are asymmetrical, unlike facebook where we have to acknowledge each other otherwise we can’t see each other.”

— Tim O'Reilly