Reid Hoffman Quotations

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

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

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

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.

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

Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I get energy from one-on-one conversations most often, and I lose energy from group conversations most often,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If I ever hear a founder talk about oh this is how I have a balanced life so on and so forth - they're not committed to winning.

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

All human beings are entrepreneurs.

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.

Great opportunities almost never fit your schedule.

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

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

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

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.

It’s actually pretty easy to be contrarian. It’s hard to be contrarian and right.

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.

Innovation comes from long-term thinking and iterative execution.

The future is sooner and stranger than you think.

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

If you don't start out aiming for the big game, you almost never can get there.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

You remake yourself as you grow and as the world changes. Your identity doesn’t get found. It emerges.

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.

Good ideas need good strategy to realize their potential.

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

By 2030 over 2 billion jobs will disappear.

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

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

We don't celebrate failure in Silicon Valley. We celebrate learning

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

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

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

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

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.

There's an ability to learn & adapt, an ability to constantly have a vision that's driving you, but to be taking input from all sources.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

When you think about being contrarian, you have to think about - how is it that smart people will disagree with me, disagree with me ...from a position of intelligence, and there is something that I know that they don't know, that will actually in fact play out to be true.

You gotta be both flexible and persistent.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

Society flourishes when people think entrepreneurally.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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