Words matter. These are the best Reid Hoffman Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Over the last 20 years, I’ve worked on or invested in many companies that scaled to 100 million users or more. But here’s the thing: You don’t start with 100 million users. You start with a few. So, stop thinking big, and start thinking small.
The key thing for me has always been how we realize the mission – enabling every professional in the world to change their own economic curve by the strength of their alliances and connections with other people.
People are still very focused on the startup story: Risk-taking founders, with a bold idea, some capital and a network supportive environment, go out and take the shot on goal. But the problem is, this is no longer the truth about what makes Silicon Valley so special.
Our polling methodology has gotten outdated, and, in fact, it’s not really telling us what it needs to be telling us.
Simply writing a Ph.D. or academic book was unlikely to play much of a role in helping shape people’s lives as I wanted.
Everything in life has some risk, and what you have to actually learn to do is how to navigate it.
Your customers are always a bottomless well of surprises.
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.
A startup, to a some degree, is a set of those challenges of, ‘If you don’t solve this, you’re dead.’
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.
Hard work isn’t enough. And more work is never the real answer. The sort of grit you need to scale a business is less reliant on brute force. It’s actually one part determination, one part ingenuity, and one part laziness.
Sometimes freedom from normal rules is what gives you competitive advantage.
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.
PayPal was disruptive, it was democratizing, and it had universal appeal. It gave power to millions and millions of individuals and reduced monopolist control from nations, banks, and other huge corporations.
The American people deserve to know what’s on Trump’s tax returns. And Trump must show that he truly embraces accountability and transparency and understands what it means to work on behalf of the public interest.
The best ideas make you want to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in the same breath.
Many employer-employee relationships are built on a lie that starts from the first interaction: neither party automatically conceives of the relationship as something that will last a lifetime, but both interact as if it is. This lie of omission bases the relationship on distrust.
When thinking about how to deploy kind of professional and social networking into your business, it’s really not a question of if – it’s a question of when.
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.
Trump often says he needs to keep his tax returns private until the IRS finishes auditing him. But the IRS itself has said this isn’t necessary. And recently, Trump changed his tune, saying he’ll release his returns as soon as Hillary Clinton releases the 33,000 emails she deleted from her email server.
What happens during recessions, is you have less windfalls just helping you cover mistakes. You have to be more careful about not making mistakes.
Death Row inmates are almost twice as expensive to house each year as other inmates. Death penalty trials are much costlier than trials where execution is not a potential punishment and consume more time from judges, public defenders, and other legal personnel.
I do think there are some irreducible inefficiencies in government. But we still need to have government; we still need to make government effective if we can.
And people who take risk intelligently can usually actually make a lot more progress than people who don’t.
Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location.
‘Founder’ is a state of mind, not a job description, and if done right, even CEOs who join after day 1 can become founders.
For Trump, the reasons to release his tax returns have always been compelling. Doing so would show the American people he doesn’t just talk about accountability and transparency but also walks the walk.
Broadly, the meaning of life comes from how we interact with each other. The Internet can reconfigure space so that the right people are always next to each other.
Any effort to make the death penalty speedier and less costly – more ‘efficient’ – will inevitably make it less just.
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.
If performance management were a movie, it will become less ‘Gladiator’ and more ‘Moneyball.’
I really like the ‘Silicon Valley’ show. It’s good to do a little rib-poking and not take yourself too seriously, so I think it’s awesome the show does that.
As a candidate, Trump could make outlandish statements with little regard for their Constitutional implications. As President, he is pledged to respect the Constitution’s authority, and the specific rights and protections it guarantees to every American citizen.
We need to invest in technologies that amplify human capacity, not replace it.
Silicon Valley tends to be very myopic – to be focused on one or two things – which has some strengths as well as weaknesses.
It’s unprecedented in the post-World War II era to have the leader of Germany say, ‘Oh we can’t rely on America anymore.’
Observe, orient, decide, act. It’s fighter pilot terminology. If you have the faster OODA loop in a dogfight, you live. The other person dies. In Silicon Valley, the OODA loop of your decision-making is effectively what differentiates your ability to succeed.
The opportunity to build an enduring product far outweighs the cost of alienating a few users along the way. And the sooner you internalize that trade-off, the faster you’ll move along the path to scale.
LinkedIn allows professionals, including the middle class, to invest in themselves in order to find the right jobs. That essentially can help make them prosperous.
You have to be constantly reinventing yourself and investing in the future.
