Top 100 Reid Hoffman Quotes
#1. The person passionate about what he or she is doing will outwork and outlast the guy motivated solely by making money.
Reid Hoffman
#2. 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.
Reid Hoffman
#3. World-changing startups need to be premised on accurate contrarian theories.
Reid Hoffman
#4. Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location.
Reid Hoffman
#5. I get energy from one-on-one conversations most often, and I lose energy from group conversations most often.
Reid Hoffman
#6. In this sense, a business is far more like a sports team than a family.
Reid Hoffman
#7. These stewards of the company way are the intellectual and emotional foundation of the organization.
Reid Hoffman
#8. The underpinnings of the alliance: the company helps the employee transform his career; the employee helps the company transform.
Reid Hoffman
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. Your network is the people who want to help you, and you want to help them, and that's really powerful.
Reid Hoffman
#13. Great opportunities almost never fit your schedule.
Reid Hoffman
#14. Good ideas need good strategy to realize their potential.
Reid Hoffman
#15. 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
#16. We believe that when the right talent meets the right opportunity in a company with the right philosophy, amazing transformation can happen.
Reid Hoffman
#17. So usually you have to have product distribution as more fundamental than what the actual product is.
Reid Hoffman
#18. Innovation comes from long-term thinking and iterative execution.
Reid Hoffman
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. And people who take risk intelligently can usually actually make a lot more progress than people who don't.
Reid Hoffman
#22. The entrepreneurial journey starts with jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.
Reid Hoffman
#23. The reality is: a founder is someone who deals with a ton of different headaches and no one is universally super powered.
Reid Hoffman
#24. 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
#25. Silicon Valley's success comes from the way its companies build alliances with their employees.
Reid Hoffman
#26. 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
#27. Society flourishes when people think entrepreneurally.
Reid Hoffman
#28. Part of the entrepreneurial thing is there are lots of ways to die.
Reid Hoffman
#29. Keeping your options open" is frequently more of a risk than committing to a plan of action.
Reid Hoffman
#30. You gotta be both flexible and persistent.
Reid Hoffman
#31. 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.
Reid Hoffman
#33. Be persistent, and hang on to your vision. And at the same time, be flexible.
Reid Hoffman
#34. Until you hear "No," you haven't been turned down.
Reid Hoffman
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. It's better to be the best connected than the most connected.
Reid Hoffman
#38. 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
#39. I'm a little unusual: I'm a six-person-or-less extrovert.
Reid Hoffman
#40. By 2030 over 2 billion jobs will disappear.
Reid Hoffman
#41. Start a personal blog and begin developing a public reputation and public portfolio of work that's not tied to your employer.
Reid Hoffman
#42. 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
#43. I am most heartened when I'm talking to a team when they're reasoning to each other.
Reid Hoffman
#44. Before dreaming about the future or marking plans, you need to articulate what you already have going for you - as entrepreneurs do.
Reid Hoffman
#45. The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be.
Reid Hoffman
#46. 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
#47. Help the people in your network. And let them help you.
Reid Hoffman
#48. The challenge when you think about product distribution is: how are you competing for potential customers or potential members time.
Reid Hoffman
#49. First mover Advantage doesn't go to the company that starts up, it goes to the company that scales up
Reid Hoffman
#51. 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
#52. This is classic when you begin thinking about what is a great founder is, you navigate what is apparent paradoxes.
Reid Hoffman
#53. 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.
Reid Hoffman
#54. Remember: If you don't find risk, risk will find you.
Reid Hoffman
#55. 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
Reid Hoffman
#56. 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
Reid Hoffman
#57. In public market investing, as in many things, you achieve big success when you're both contrarian and right.
Reid Hoffman
#58. The question is: how you cross uneven ground, how you assemble networks around you.
Reid Hoffman
#59. You have to be constantly reinventing yourself and investing in the future.
Reid Hoffman
#60. 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
#61. 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.
Reid Hoffman
#62. No one cares who you are or are not dating on LinkedIn.
Reid Hoffman
#63. In this sense, the world of tomorrow will be more like the Silicon Valley of today: constant change and chaos.
Reid Hoffman
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. When the Naysayers Are Loud, Turn Up the Music
Reid Hoffman
#67. 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.
Reid Hoffman
#68. My belief and goal is that every professional in the world should be on a service liked LinkedIn.
Reid Hoffman
#69. 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
#70. Entrepreneurship is a life idea, not a strictly business one; a global idea, not a strictly American one.
Reid Hoffman
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. It's very conventional to say that you're a contrarian these days.
Reid Hoffman
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. You should have an investment thesis that essentially says why you think this is potentially a good idea.
Reid Hoffman
#80. When you're doing work you care about, you are able to work harder and better.
Reid Hoffman
#81. Professional loyalty now flows "horizontally" to and from your network rather than "vertically" to your boss, as Dan Pink has noted.
Reid Hoffman
#82. 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
#83. 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.
Reid Hoffman
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. Not only CAN anyone be an entrepreneur, but they MUST be.
Reid Hoffman
#87. You need to think and act like you're running a start-up: your career.
Reid Hoffman
#88. 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
#89. Trust and mutual value creation helps both employer and employee compete in the marketplace.
Reid Hoffman
#90. You remake yourself as you grow and as the world changes. Your identity doesn't get found. It emerges.
Reid Hoffman
#91. 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
#92. If you are not receiving or making at least one introduction a month, you are probably not fully engaging your extended professional network.
Reid Hoffman
#93. 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
#94. A lot of smart people are prone to over-analysis and tend to become paralyzed by indecision
Reid Hoffman
#95. Relatively few people should start companies.
Reid Hoffman
#96. 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
#97. For many people "twenty years of experience" is really one year of experience repeated twenty times.
Reid Hoffman
#98. I actually think every individual is now an entrepreneur, whether they recognize it or not.
Reid Hoffman
#99. 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
#100. If you aren't embarrassed by the first version of your product, you shipped too late.
Reid Hoffman
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