Reid Hoffman Quotes & Sayings

Good ideas need good strategy to realize their potential. — Reid Hoffman

This formal philosophy of learning treats knowledge like a fixed asset: learn, then you have it forever! But as a modern professional, you can't acquire knowledge this way, because the knowledge you need isn't static - it's always changing. Stockpiling facts won't get you anywhere. What will get you somewhere is being able to access the information you need, when you need it. — Reid Hoffman

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. — Reid Hoffman

What great founders do is seek the networks that will be essential to their task . Usually it's best to have two or three people on a team, rather than a solo founder. — Reid Hoffman

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. — Reid Hoffman

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

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. — Reid Hoffman

One thing I learned in '97, when I thought the right time to found a company was during a swing-up, is that it's much better to start during an economic downturn. Partnerships are easier; hiring is easier; and the competition starts later. — Reid Hoffman

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. — Reid Hoffman

Most often I am only interested in an idea if it's going to get hundreds of millions of users. That's the scale that I am always trying to play to. — Reid Hoffman

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. — Reid Hoffman

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. — Reid Hoffman

Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location. — Reid Hoffman

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

Before dreaming about the future or marking plans, you need to articulate what you already have going for you - as entrepreneurs do. — Reid Hoffman

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

More on this in chapters 7 and 8.) Getting Value from Entrepreneurial Talent We three authors come from a business environment where the employment alliance — Reid Hoffman

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. — Reid Hoffman

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. — Reid Hoffman

It's actually pretty easy to be contrarian. It's hard to be contrarian and right. — Reid Hoffman

Zynga is about fun. Fun is important. Fun is good. And to have the ability to do something fun for 10 or 15 minutes that's right at your fingertips and involves your friends, well, that's better than television in terms of social connectivity. — Reid Hoffman

The metaphor that I frequently use for entrepreneurship is jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane plane on the way down. — Reid Hoffman

In public market investing, as in many things, you achieve big success when you're both contrarian and right. — Reid Hoffman

Remember: If you don't find risk, risk will find you. — Reid Hoffman

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

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

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

Great opportunities almost never fit your schedule. — Reid Hoffman

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

Get busy livin', or get busy dyin'. If you're not growing, you're contracting. If you're not moving forward, you're moving backward. — Reid Hoffman

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. — Reid Hoffman

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. — Reid Hoffman

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

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. — Reid Hoffman

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. — Reid Hoffman

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

I actually think every individual is now an entrepreneur, whether they recognize it or not. — Reid Hoffman

If you aren't embarrassed by the first version of your product, you shipped too late. — Reid Hoffman

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. — Reid Hoffman

Part of what being a great founder is, is being both able to hold the belief, to think about what it is you want to be doing and where ... you want to be going, but also be smart enough that you're essentially listening to criticism, negative feedback, competitive entries. — Reid Hoffman

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. — Reid Hoffman

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

People will be discovering that the Internet helps their career. One of my theses is that every individual is now a small business; how you manage your own personal career is the exact way you manage a small business. Your brand matters. That is how LinkedIn operates. — Reid Hoffman

Your network is the people who want to help you, and you want to help them, and that's really powerful. — Reid Hoffman

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

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

You remake yourself as you grow and as the world changes. Your identity doesn't get found. It emerges. — Reid Hoffman

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. — Reid Hoffman

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 — Reid Hoffman

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. — Reid Hoffman

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. — Reid Hoffman

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. — Reid Hoffman

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

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

It's useful to be able to recognize whether you're on track or not. To have that belief, but also paranoia about am I tracking against my investment thesis. — Reid Hoffman

Unfortunately, for far too many, focused learning ends at college graduation. They read about stocks and bonds instead of reading books that improve their mind. They compare their cash salary to their peers' instead of comparing lessons learned. They invest in the stock market and neglect investing in themselves. They focus, in short, on hard assets instead of soft assets. This is a mistake. — Reid Hoffman

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. — Reid Hoffman

Innovation comes from long-term thinking and iterative execution. — Reid Hoffman

The question is: how you cross uneven ground, how you assemble networks around you. — Reid Hoffman

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

They scribbled observations in notebooks. — Reid Hoffman

Not only CAN anyone be an entrepreneur, but they MUST be. — Reid Hoffman

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

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

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

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

Employee networks are extremely valuable to companies as a source of information. As Bill Gates wrote more than a decade ago, "The most meaningful way to differentiate your company from your competition, the best way to put distance between you and the crowd, is to do an outstanding job with information. How you gather, manage, and use information will determine whether you win or lose."1 — Reid Hoffman

One lunch is worth dozens of emails. — Reid Hoffman

The future is sooner and stranger than you think. — Reid Hoffman

All human beings are entrepreneurs. — Reid Hoffman

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

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

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. — Reid Hoffman

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

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. — Reid Hoffman

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

The underpinnings of the alliance: the company helps the employee transform his career; the employee helps the company transform. — Reid Hoffman

And people who take risk intelligently can usually actually make a lot more progress than people who don't. — Reid Hoffman

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. — Reid Hoffman

We don't celebrate failure in Silicon Valley. We celebrate learning — Reid Hoffman

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. — Reid Hoffman

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

It's very conventional to say that you're a contrarian these days. — Reid Hoffman

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

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. — Reid Hoffman

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

You gotta be both flexible and persistent. — Reid Hoffman

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. — Reid Hoffman

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 — Reid Hoffman

By 2030 over 2 billion jobs will disappear. — Reid Hoffman

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

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

Start a personal blog and begin developing a public reputation and public portfolio of work that's not tied to your employer. — Reid Hoffman

It's nice to be happy. But the meaning of life is meaning - what's the impact you're having on the world. Suffering to accomplish that is a perfectly fine thing. — Reid Hoffman

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. — Reid Hoffman

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

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

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

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. — Reid Hoffman

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