Reid Hoffman Quotes

Entrepreneurship is a life idea, not a strictly business one; a global idea, not a strictly American one.

When I'm raising money, this fundraising, I'm thinking about the next fundraising. I'm thinking how I'm set up for it.

A little-known company with a realistic framework that appeals to entrepreneurial employees is going to be more attractive than a famous company that treats its people like disposable assets.

The real secret of Silicon Valley is that it's really all about the people

Unlike John Lasseter's bosses at Disney, Bezos was open to the entrepreneurial contributions of Amazon's individual employees - even when those ideas were outside what Wall Street (and even his own board of directors) considered the company's core business. AWS represents precisely the kind of value creation any CEO or shareholder would want from their employees. Want your employees to come up with multibillion-dollar ideas while on the job? You have to attract professionals with the founder mind-set and then harness their entrepreneurial impulses for your company. As Intuit CEO Brad Smith told us, A leader's job is not to put greatness into people, but rather to recognize that it already exists, and to create the environment where that greatness can emerge and grow.

Good ideas need good strategy to realize their potential.

Great opportunities almost never fit your schedule.

In software, speed to market, speed to learning is really key. In hardware, if you screw it up, you're dead. So accuracy really matters.

If you want to find out how resourceful you can be, shrink your budget. Move your deadlines up. See how you cope. This may make you more resilient to actual hardships that inevitably arise.

Silicon Valley's success comes from the way its companies build alliances with their employees.

Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins. Facebook is ego. Zynga is sloth. LinkedIn is greed.

The most entrepreneurial employees want to establish "personal brands" that stand apart from their employers'. It's a rational, necessary response to the end of lifetime employment.

I am most heartened when I'm talking to a team when they're reasoning to each other.

A networker likes to meet people. I don't. I like accomplishing things in the world. You meet people when you want to accomplish something.

Everything in life has some risk, and what you have to actually learn to do is how to navigate it.

All humans are entrepreneurs not because they should start companies but because the will to create is encoded in human DNA, and creation is the essence of entrepreneurship.

When you have an idea, a classic entrepreneurial impulse is to hold the idea close to you and not tell people and that's almost always a mistake.

Professional loyalty now flows "horizontally" to and from your network rather than "vertically" to your boss, as Dan Pink has noted.

For many people "twenty years of experience" is really one year of experience repeated twenty times.

The HR department is like the soldiers in the movie 300, holding the line. They have no power to say 'yes' but enormous power to say 'no.' Their job is to prevent you from moving forward. Find a way to vault past them by getting introductions to people who can say 'yes.

If you can get better at your job, you should be an active member of LinkedIn, because LinkedIn should be connecting you to the information, insights and people to be more effective.

Whether you want to learn a new skill or simply be better at the job you were hired to do, it's now your job to train and invest in yourself.

Keeping your options open" is frequently more of a risk than committing to a plan of action.

The reason the social-networking phenomenon is something that I invested in early and massively - I led the Series A financing for Friendster; I founded a company called Socialnet in 1997; I founded LinkedIn; and I was part of the first round of financing in Facebook - it sounds trivial, but people matter.

Part of the entrepreneurial thing is there are lots of ways to die.

Jeremy Stoppelman started Yelp. Max Levchin started Slide. I started LinkedIn. It was a mininova explosion of folks jumping out to doing other entrepreneurial activities.

Pay attention to your culture and your hires from the very beginning.

One of the phrases I frequently look for is infinite learning curve.Because each entrepreneurial pattern is to some degree unique and new.

Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location.

A few of the managers we spoke with for this book worried that the tour of duty framework might give employees "permission" to leave. But permission is not yours to give or to withhold, and believing you have that power is simply a self-deception that leads to a dishonest relationship with your employees. Employees don't need your permission to switch companies, and if you try to assert that right, they'll simply make their move behind your back.

You have to be constantly reinventing yourself and investing in the future.

Having a great idea for a product is important, but having a great idea for product distribution is even more important.

So usually you have to have product distribution as more fundamental than what the actual product is.

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.

Entrepreneurs are like visionaries. One of the ways they run forward is by viewing the thing they're doing as something that's going to be the whole world.

My belief and goal is that every professional in the world should be on a service liked LinkedIn.

Until you hear "No," you haven't been turned down.

This is classic when you begin thinking about what is a great founder is, you navigate what is apparent paradoxes.

When he thought about how he wanted to build his career coming out of college, Hahn took inspiration from Theodore Roosevelt's famous dictum, "Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing."5

The reality is: a founder is someone who deals with a ton of different headaches and no one is universally super powered.

World-changing startups need to be premised on accurate contrarian theories.

It's better to be the best connected than the most connected.

These stewards of the company way are the intellectual and emotional foundation of the organization.

Innovation comes from long-term thinking and iterative execution.

Pixar started as a company that sold a special computer for doing digital animation; it took a while till they got into the moviemaking business. Similarly, Starbucks originally sold only coffee beans and coffee equipment; they hadn't planned to sell coffee by the cup.

You need to think and act like you're running a start-up: your career.

It is impossible to dissociate an individual from the environment of which he is a part. No story of achievement should ever be removed from its broader social context.

Data only exists within the framework of a vision you're building to, a hypothesis of where you're moving to.

No one cares who you are or are not dating on LinkedIn.

Be persistent, and hang on to your vision. And at the same time, be flexible.

People change. You change. Some relationships just aren't meant to last beyond a certain point. It's okay to simply let those friendships fade. This is a natural evolution of some relationships. Unlike romantic relationships, with friendships there's rarely a reason to have a full-on breakup. Even if people go in different directions and the friendship slowly peters out, trust can endure. And unlike most exes, it is possible to rekindle/reactivate friendships later on when your lives are more aligned.

While you don't want to make career moves on 0 percent information, you also don't want to wait till you have 100 percent information - or else you'll wait forever. Jetting off to vacation in Hawaii with no set itinerary introduces many uncertainties about what will transpire, but it's not particularly risky. After all, how likely are you to have a bad time in Hawaii? But the biggest and best opportunities frequently are the ones with the most question marks. Don't let uncertainty lull you into overestimating the risk.

Psychologist Arthur Aron of SUNY Stony Brook discovered that asking participants in an experiment to share their deepest feelings and beliefs for a single hour could generate the same sense of trust and intimacy that typically takes weeks, months, or years to form.

You jump off a cliff and you assemble an airplane on the way down.

Relatively few people should start companies.

A product needs to be sufficiently innovative to distinguish itself from the pack, but not so forward thinking as to alienate the user.

MySpace is like a bar, Facebook is like the BBQ you have in your back yard with friends and family, play games, share pictures. Facebook is much better for sharing than MySpace. LinkedIn is the office, how you stay up to date, solve professional problems.

A business without loyalty is a business without long-term thinking. A business without long-term thinking is a business that's unable to invest in the future. And a business that isn't investing in tomorrow's opportunities and technologies - well, that's a company already in the process of dying.

The future is sooner and stranger than you think.

Success ... is no longer a simple ascension of steps. You need to climb sideways and sometimes down, and sometimes you need to swing from the jungle gym and establish your own turf somewhere else on the playground.

The person passionate about what he or she is doing will outwork and outlast the guy motivated solely by making money.

Ideally, most of the top executives of a company should be on Foundational tours.

The challenge when you think about product distribution is: how are you competing for potential customers or potential members time.

I'm a little unusual: I'm a six-person-or-less extrovert.

One of the tests that I frequently use in an interaction is I push on the idea and what I'm looking for is both flexibility & persistence.

Help the people in your network. And let them help you.

One of the challenges in networking is everybody thinks it's making cold calls to strangers. Actually, it's the people who already have strong trust relationships with you, who know you're dedicated, smart, a team player, who can help you.

It is like the feeling you have when someone says your first name all the time in conversation and you know he's been reading Carnegie.

A lot of smart people are prone to over-analysis and tend to become paralyzed by indecision

Entrepreneurial employees possess what eBay CEO John Donahoe calls the founder mind-set. As he put it to us, People with the founder mind-set drive change, motivate people, and just get stuff done.

Making a decision reduces opportunities in the short run, but increases opportunities in the long run. To move forward in your career, you have to commit to specific opportunities as part of an iterative plan, despite doubt and despite inconvenience.

In this sense, a business is far more like a sports team than a family.

Your competitive advantage is formed by the interplay of three different, ever-changing forces: your assets, your aspirations/values, and the market realities, i.e., the supply and demand for what you offer the marketplace relative to the competition. The

I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture - I'd write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be.

Relationship builders, on the other hand, try to help other people first. They don't keep score. They're aware that many good deeds get reciprocated, but they're not calculated about it. And they think about their relationships all the time, not just when they need something.

They scribbled observations in notebooks.

Think of a Foundational tour as a form of marriage - a long-term relationship that both parties anticipate will be permanent, in which both parties assume a moral obligation to try hard to make it work before ending the relationship.

An entrepreneur is someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down.

Many people think you get career stability by minimizing all risk. But ironically, in a changing world, that's one of the riskiest things you can do.

With the consumer Internet, if you're not embarrassed by your first product release, you've launched too late. Everyone wants their product to be shiny, great, and revolutionary, so they take too long in the development cycle to build this really shiny thing, when in fact time really matters.

You gotta be both flexible and persistent.

The entrepreneurial journey starts with jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.

Finally, many people simply think better thoughts when in dialogue with others. Remember I^We: an individual's power is raised exponentially with the help of a network. This is partly because when information moves back and forth between knowledgeable people who care, the signal strengthens. Two (or more) well-coordinated brains beat one every time.

Finished ought to be an F-word for all of us. We are all works in progress. Each day presents an opportunity to learn more, do more, be more, grow more in our lives and careers.

The value of being connected and transparent is so high that the roadbumps of privacy issues are much lower in actual experience than people's fears.

Trust and mutual value creation helps both employer and employee compete in the marketplace.

What makes the meaning of life is people, so you try to be good to people immediately around you and in your broader community. So a lot of my projects are about how I can affect the world in the hundreds of millions.

We believe that when the right talent meets the right opportunity in a company with the right philosophy, amazing transformation can happen.

When the Naysayers Are Loud, Turn Up the Music

When you're doing work you care about, you are able to work harder and better.

If you're in permanent beta in your career, twenty years of experience actually is twenty years of experience because each year will be marked by new, enriching challenges and opportunities. Permanent beta is essentially a lifelong commitment to continuous personal growth. Get busy livin', or get busy dyin'. If

Throwing your heart into something is great, but when any one thing becomes all that you stand for, you're vulnerable to an identity crisis when you pivot to a Plan B.

Often it's when you come in contact with challenges other people find hard but you find easy that you know you're in possession of a valuable soft asset.3

One lunch is worth dozens of emails.

Society flourishes when people think entrepreneurally.

You should have an investment thesis that essentially says why you think this is potentially a good idea.

No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you're playing a solo game, you'll always lose out to a team.