MAYBE WE SHOULD HAVE SPLURGED ON THE UPGRADE

“It’s like flying a plane, and you’re trying to find the right altitude and you’re doing it with a four-year-old company and four-year-old processes and four-year-old systems.”

Groupon co-CEO Eric Lefkofsky, offering a not-so-reassuring mix of metaphors for how he’s steering the daily-deals company, Fast Company, 13 March 2013

THE GAME IS AFOOT IN MOUTH

“Zynga is often accused of copying games, which is mostly true.”

Zynga New York general manager and former OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter, on selling his Pictionary clone to the world’s foremost maker of Poker and Scrabble clones, Quartz, 8 March 2013

WE LOVE YOU, NOW PLEASE GO AWAY

“The startup and venture capital space is of major interest to all the creative industries that are at the core of the SXSW family of events.”

SXSW managing director Roland Swenson, on exiling the blue-shirts-and-khakis crowd to a spinoff event in Las Vegas, SXSW.com, 23 October 2012

HUNTING THE SNARKY

I realized my algorithms were so far from having a snarky detector that this was a better approach.”

Google executive Bradley Horowitz, on the time at Yahoo when he discovered Flickr users were better at tagging photos than his machines, VentureBeat, 22 May 2012

SORRY IS THE HARDEST WORD TO SAY

“As I told you on Friday, the board is reviewing the issue and I will provide whatever they need from me. In the meantime, I want you to know how deeply I regret how this issue has affected the company and all of you.”

Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson, expressing how sorry he is that he was caught lying on his résumé, AllThingsD, 7 May 2012