Reid Hoffman Quotes

The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be.

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

What is an entrepreneur? Someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down.

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

Ironically, in a changing world, playing it safe is one of the riskiest things you can do.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location.

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

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

Society flourishes when people think entrepreneurally.

Great opportunities almost never fit your schedule.

Opportunities do not float like clouds in the sky. They're attached to people. If you're looking for an opportunity, you're really looking for a person.

First mover Advantage doesn't go to the company that starts up, it goes to the company that scales up

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

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

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.

If you have to conduct layoffs, which is always a regrettable thing, there's kind of three things that are very important. One is to communicate well with your employees in order to help them understand why it is you're doing, and how. Second is to make sure that the employees who are part of the go forward, understand kind of what happened and are not like the ground doesn't keep moving. It's like, okay, we did that, we're moving forward, here we go. And then for the employees that you unfortunately have to let go, try to provide as much support for them as possible.

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

Every individual is essentially now a small business and entrepreneur.

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.

Innovation comes from long-term thinking and iterative execution.

There are opportunities that you get during crises times. Crises times are a great time to start a business.

The key thing for a CEO to keep their head in the game is recognize that there's turbulent times, plan for, you know, bad luck as well as good luck, keep people focused on what the key, you know, business wins are, and you know, provide the energy that people always need in order to, you know, to go into battle because, you know, work is hard and go into work and do that well. And provide a good leadership beacon for that. In other words, it's the same thing that makes good leadership in any other time.

By 2030 over 2 billion jobs will disappear.

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

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.

I think the randomness by Donald Trump's governing, by tweeting, sloganeering, attacking, will create great chaos in the entire market. I think people will have difficulties in predicting the future. I think capital will recede.

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.

The first set of questions to ask yourself when you're doing cost cutting is relatively straightforward, which is, you know, can you use the necessity of cost cutting as an opportunity to do pruning or trimming for projects that aren't being as successful? But, you know, frequently those are the easy ones. I mean, there's always some kind of social costs internal to the company, but that's the easy way of looking at the future.

All humans are entrepreneurs not because they should start companies but because the will to create is encoded in human DNA.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

The future is sooner and stranger than you think.

People generally worry about social networking more than they need to. In kind of consumer internet investing and on social and professional networks, I kind of look at time spending and time efficiency. You know, time saving sites. So on time spending sites, things where you play lots of games or that sort of thing, you might worry about a productivity loss if people are spending a lot of time doing that. So if there's a lot of kind of addictive gaming going on during work hours, that won't be as helpful to you.

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

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

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

Good ideas need good strategy to realize their potential.

People who take risk intelligently can usually actually make a lot more progress than people who don't.

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.