Everette Taylor

"what are some things you are interested in? Whatever you want to learn, anything is possible. If you want to be a coder, you can go online and learn how to code. The tools around us to learn are greater than any time before. Anything is at your finger tips if you want to learn"

"What gets me out of bed is that I can make a positive impact on people"

"It has a distinctive feel and culture. You had to be tough, be aware. You had to be able to quickly adjust and maneuver"

"With technology I felt like anybody can do it, that it’s something for regular guys and girls. I loved that. I loved the democratization of success that technology offered"

"I don’t think people are honest and direct in life. My word really matters to me – honestly, that really matters to me. It’s so important"

"I don’t write anything down at all. It comes off the top of my head. It’s very casual. I want to feel like we are sitting in a cafe in Paris, and we are speaking to each other. I want it to be human and real"

"It’s such a surreal moment for me because I grew up 10 minutes away on the south side of the city ... but my whole life has been about doing things that weren’t imaginable for people coming from my background and my situation, and that’s the thing that keeps me going and inspires the work that I do at Kickstarter every single day"

"and so I grew up really having to take care of myself and figure things out for myself ... but growing up independent also meant that I spent a lot of time out in the streets"

"Most of the men in my family were in jail, on drugs, caught up in the wrong things, and those are the things that I saw around me in Richmond"

"And I knew that, as a young kid, I was impressionable. So, some of the people that I saw with the most things, like the nice cars and the Jordans and the jewelry, they were dealing drugs, and they were doing things that they shouldn’t have been doing"

"We were always trying to find different ways where we could hustle and make a little bit of money for ourselves"