Top 100 Reid Hoffman Quotes
#1. you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late." Reid Hoffman
Dan Norris
#2. It seems counterintuitive, but the more altruistic your attitude, the more benefits you will gain from the relationship," writes LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman. "If you set out to help others," he explains, "you will rapidly reinforce your own reputation and expand your universe of possibilities.
Adam M. Grant
#3. 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
#4. I am most heartened when I'm talking to a team when they're reasoning to each other.
Reid Hoffman
#5. 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
#6. Remember: If you don't find risk, risk will find you.
Reid Hoffman
#7. 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
#8. Easy success had transformed the American auto companies into risk-averse, nonmeritocratic, bloated bureaucracies.
Reid Hoffman
#9. 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
#10. Having a great idea for a product is important, but having a great idea for product distribution is even more important.
Reid Hoffman
#11. The real secret of Silicon Valley is that it's really all about the people
Reid Hoffman
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. This is classic when you begin thinking about what is a great founder is, you navigate what is apparent paradoxes.
Reid Hoffman
#15. 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
#17. First mover Advantage doesn't go to the company that starts up, it goes to the company that scales up
Reid Hoffman
#18. 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
#19. The challenge when you think about product distribution is: how are you competing for potential customers or potential members time.
Reid Hoffman
#20. Help the people in your network. And let them help you.
Reid Hoffman
#21. 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
#22. Data only exists within the framework of a vision you're building to, a hypothesis of where you're moving to.
Reid Hoffman
#23. 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
#24. The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be.
Reid Hoffman
#25. Before dreaming about the future or marking plans, you need to articulate what you already have going for you - as entrepreneurs do.
Reid Hoffman
#26. The future is sooner and stranger than you think.
Reid Hoffman
#27. You should have an investment thesis that essentially says why you think this is potentially a good idea.
Reid Hoffman
#28. My belief and goal is that every professional in the world should be on a service liked LinkedIn.
Reid Hoffman
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. We don't celebrate failure in Silicon Valley. We celebrate learning
Reid Hoffman
#32. It's very conventional to say that you're a contrarian these days.
Reid Hoffman
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#38. Entrepreneurship is a life idea, not a strictly business one; a global idea, not a strictly American one.
Reid Hoffman
#39. 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
#40. In public market investing, as in many things, you achieve big success when you're both contrarian and right.
Reid Hoffman
#41. 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
#42. When the Naysayers Are Loud, Turn Up the Music
Reid Hoffman
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. In this sense, the world of tomorrow will be more like the Silicon Valley of today: constant change and chaos.
Reid Hoffman
#46. Pay attention to your culture and your hires from the very beginning.
Reid Hoffman
#47. No one cares who you are or are not dating on LinkedIn.
Reid Hoffman
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. You have to be constantly reinventing yourself and investing in the future.
Reid Hoffman
#51. The question is: how you cross uneven ground, how you assemble networks around you.
Reid Hoffman
#52. 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
#53. The entrepreneurial journey starts with jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.
Reid Hoffman
#54. And people who take risk intelligently can usually actually make a lot more progress than people who don't.
Reid Hoffman
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. Innovation comes from long-term thinking and iterative execution.
Reid Hoffman
#58. So usually you have to have product distribution as more fundamental than what the actual product is.
Reid Hoffman
#59. We believe that when the right talent meets the right opportunity in a company with the right philosophy, amazing transformation can happen.
Reid Hoffman
#60. 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
#61. Good ideas need good strategy to realize their potential.
Reid Hoffman
#62. Great opportunities almost never fit your schedule.
Reid Hoffman
#63. Your network is the people who want to help you, and you want to help them, and that's really powerful.
Reid Hoffman
#64. If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.
Reid Hoffman
#65. Ideally, most of the top executives of a company should be on Foundational tours.
Reid Hoffman
#66. Whether you want to learn a new skill or simply be better at the job you were hired to do, it's now your job to train and invest in yourself.
Reid Hoffman
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. The underpinnings of the alliance: the company helps the employee transform his career; the employee helps the company transform.
Reid Hoffman
#70. These stewards of the company way are the intellectual and emotional foundation of the organization.
Reid Hoffman
#71. In this sense, a business is far more like a sports team than a family.
Reid Hoffman
#72. I get energy from one-on-one conversations most often, and I lose energy from group conversations most often.
Reid Hoffman
#73. Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location.
Reid Hoffman
#74. World-changing startups need to be premised on accurate contrarian theories.
Reid Hoffman
#75. 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
#76. The person passionate about what he or she is doing will outwork and outlast the guy motivated solely by making money.
Reid Hoffman
#77. Everything in life has some risk, and what you have to actually learn to do is how to navigate it.
Reid Hoffman
#78. Start a personal blog and begin developing a public reputation and public portfolio of work that's not tied to your employer.
Reid Hoffman
#79. By 2030 over 2 billion jobs will disappear.
Reid Hoffman
#80. I'm a little unusual: I'm a six-person-or-less extrovert.
Reid Hoffman
#81. 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
#82. It's better to be the best connected than the most connected.
Reid Hoffman
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. Until you hear "No," you haven't been turned down.
Reid Hoffman
#86. Be persistent, and hang on to your vision. And at the same time, be flexible.
Reid Hoffman
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. You gotta be both flexible and persistent.
Reid Hoffman
#91. Keeping your options open" is frequently more of a risk than committing to a plan of action.
Reid Hoffman
#92. Part of the entrepreneurial thing is there are lots of ways to die.
Reid Hoffman
#93. Society flourishes when people think entrepreneurally.
Reid Hoffman
#94. 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
#95. It's actually pretty easy to be contrarian. It's hard to be contrarian and right.
Reid Hoffman
#96. Silicon Valley's success comes from the way its companies build alliances with their employees.
Reid Hoffman
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. The reality is: a founder is someone who deals with a ton of different headaches and no one is universally super powered.
Reid Hoffman
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