“Some people mistake grit for sheer persistence – charging up the same hill again and again. But that’s not quite what I mean by the word ‘grit.’ You want to minimize friction and find the most effective, most efficient way forward. You might actually have more grit if you treat your energy as a precious commodity.”
― Reid Hoffman
“As an entrepreneur and investor, I prioritize construction and collaboration. Whether it’s a five-person start-up or a global giant, the companies that are most productive are the ones whose employees operate with a shared sense of purpose and a clear set of policies for responding to changing conditions and new opportunities.”
― Reid Hoffman
“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.”
― Reid Hoffman
“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.”
― Reid Hoffman
“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
“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.”
― Reid Hoffman
“’Founder’ is a state of mind, not a job description, and if done right, even CEOs who join after day 1 can become founders.”
― Reid Hoffman
“We need to invest in technologies that amplify human capacity, not replace it.”
― Reid Hoffman
“Sometimes freedom from normal rules is what gives you competitive advantage.”
― Reid Hoffman
“You have to be constantly reinventing yourself and investing in the future.”
― Reid Hoffman
“The key thing is to invest in the future, and what that means is – when you’re deploying technology or you’re a technology business – is to make sure that you’re keeping on the innovation cycle, where you’re both creating and adopting the new business practices and the new techniques in order to drive your business the right way.”
― Reid Hoffman
“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.”
― Reid Hoffman
“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.”
― Reid Hoffman
“I actually think every individual is now an entrepreneur, whether they recognize it or not.”
― Reid Hoffman
“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.”
― Reid Hoffman
“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.”
― Reid Hoffman
“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
“Everything in life has some risk, and what you have to actually learn to do is how to navigate it.”
― Reid Hoffman
“I’m a little unusual: I’m a six-person-or-less extrovert.”
― Reid Hoffman
“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
“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.”
― Reid Hoffman
“To have your parents get divorced at a young age, there’s a lot of turbulence. We all grew up together, in some way. It was not idyllic. It was intense, vibrant, sometimes oppressive. I felt I was very much in a world of my own. I didn’t meld much in school. I was kind of a loner.”
― Reid Hoffman
“For me, the ethical arguments that resonate strongest are the ones that oppose the death penalty.”
― Reid Hoffman
“The death penalty and the arguments it inspires don’t only involve ethics, morals, and justice. There are bureaucratic and economic aspects to it as well. All these different aspects commingle in ways that convince me we should take whatever steps we can to abolish the death penalty.”
― Reid Hoffman
“If you contrast the productivity that comes from a networked or capitalist distribution of resources versus a centralized planning system, frequently referred to as communism or socialism, the network approach does much better when it’s applied accurately.”
― Reid Hoffman
“If you could train an AI to be a Buddhist, it would probably be pretty good.”
― Reid Hoffman
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“My belief and goal is that every professional in the world should be on a service liked LinkedIn.”
― Reid Hoffman
“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
“And people who take risk intelligently can usually actually make a lot more progress than people who don’t.”
― Reid Hoffman
“Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location.”
― Reid Hoffman
“I get energy from one-on-one conversations most often, and I lose energy from group conversations most often.”
― Reid Hoffman
“Relatively few people should start companies.”
― Reid Hoffman
“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
“Your network is the people who want to help you, and you want to help them, and that’s really powerful.”
― Reid Hoffman
“As a child, I wondered often, ‘Why are we? What is the meaning of life?’ These questions made me realize that life is what has meaning – not just individual lives, but all of our lives.”
― Reid Hoffman
“Even by Silicon Valley standards, PayPal’s vision was massively ambitious.”
― Reid Hoffman
“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.”
― Reid Hoffman
“Blitzscaling is what you do when you need to grow really, really quickly. It’s the science and art of rapidly building out a company to serve a large and usually global market, with the goal of becoming the first mover at scale. This is high-impact entrepreneurship.”
― Reid Hoffman
“Blitzscaling is always managerially inefficient – and it burns through a lot of capital quickly. But you have to be willing to take on these inefficiencies in order to scale up. That’s the opposite of what large organizations optimize for.”
― Reid Hoffman
“One of the metaphors that I use for start-ups is, you throw yourself off a cliff and assemble your airplane on the way down. If you don’t solve the right problem at the right time, that’s the end. Mortality puts priorities into sharp focus.”
― Reid Hoffman
“The world’s better off the more Silicon Valleys there are and the more scaled companies there are.”
― Reid Hoffman
“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.”
― Reid Hoffman
“Your customers are always a bottomless well of surprises.”
― Reid Hoffman
“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.”
― Reid Hoffman
“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.”
― Reid Hoffman
“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.”
― Reid Hoffman
“Business is the systematic playing of games.”
― Reid Hoffman
“The way you deal with bullies is you change their economic equation. Make it more expensive for them to hassle you.”
― Reid Hoffman
“What happens during recessions, is you have less windfalls just helping you cover mistakes. You have to be more careful about not making mistakes.”
― Reid Hoffman
“In crisis times, it’s actually not more difficult to motivate your staff, because everyone gets much more focused on how they control their own economic destiny.”
― Reid Hoffman
“If performance management were a movie, it will become less ‘Gladiator’ and more ‘Moneyball.’”
― Reid Hoffman
“There’s a lot of people in the world that would love to trade places with American citizens, and we are very fortunate to be here.”
― Reid Hoffman
“Democracy tends to be a collaborative process, a committee, a consensus. Silicon Valley tends to believe in the individual who creates a small group and does something big.”
― Reid Hoffman
“So benevolent, enlightened, wise dictators are the most efficient form of government. The problem is what comes afterwards, right?”
― Reid Hoffman
“We want to be inclusive. We want to have our shareholders, our employees, our customers, whether they are Democrat, Republican, Green or Libertarian, to feel comfortable with how we’re doing business. And so that tends to be apolitical. People say, ‘No, no, I just simply shouldn’t get involved in politics.’”
― Reid Hoffman
“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.”
― Reid Hoffman
“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.’”
― Reid Hoffman
“I would have volunteered to work at Netscape. It was the center node of this new technology and the commercial ecosystem of the Internet.”
― Reid Hoffman
“I’ve long believed that if you’re not embarrassed by your first product release, you’ve released too late.”
― Reid Hoffman
“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.”
― Reid Hoffman
“If Trump’s actions as President reflect his campaign rhetoric, the ACLU and other capable organizations like it will be critical for defending the Bill of Rights for all Americans.”
― Reid Hoffman
“Any effort to make the death penalty speedier and less costly – more ‘efficient’ – will inevitably make it less just.”
― Reid Hoffman
“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.”
― Reid Hoffman
“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.”
― Reid Hoffman
“In democracies, we aren’t always governed by the people or the parties that we voted for. But when officials are elected, we must respect their authority, as long as they’re exercising that authority within the bounds of whatever regulatory frameworks are in place to guide them.”
― Reid Hoffman
“Our elected officials must understand that we, the American people, expect them to perform the duties of their office, even when that means working with other elected officials from different parties.”
― Reid Hoffman
“Leaders, whether in the public or the private sphere, must understand the responsibilities that come with their role. They are the most visible standard-bearers of their organizations. Holding them accountable to this responsibility protects the promise of our organizations and our communities.”
― Reid Hoffman
“The best ideas make you want to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in the same breath.”
― Reid Hoffman
“Starting a company is like throwing yourself off the cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.”
― Reid Hoffman
“A startup, to a some degree, is a set of those challenges of, ‘If you don’t solve this, you’re dead.’”
― Reid Hoffman
“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.”
― Reid Hoffman
“One of the things that happens that’s challenging within the democratic process is that people say, ‘Look at this failure, so we should totally change this whole thing.’ And then you add in tons of bureaucratic process and checks and balances, and all of a sudden, it doesn’t work that well.”
― Reid Hoffman
“I think I have a good track record, both in commercial investing and in philanthropic investing. I don’t have any interest in creating a named foundation; I have an interest in really good impact for capital. I think I’m pretty good at doing it, so I’m going to apply myself to doing it in my lifetime.”
― Reid Hoffman
“The same instincts that make us good students can make us lousy entrepreneurs.”
― Reid Hoffman
“Silicon Valley tends to be very myopic – to be focused on one or two things – which has some strengths as well as weaknesses.”
― Reid Hoffman
“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.”
― Reid Hoffman
“Each year, I ask, ‘Now that I have this knowledge, these resources, what can I do?’”
― Reid Hoffman
“The business of America is business, but it’s about high-integrity business. It’s about a business where you keep your word, where you make square deals.”
― Reid Hoffman
“Our polling methodology has gotten outdated, and, in fact, it’s not really telling us what it needs to be telling us.”
― Reid Hoffman
“In the past, individuals and companies envisioned a lifetime mutual commitment. That’s not realistic anymore – nor is it in the interest of either party. So both parties need a more adaptable way to engage each other and co-invest over shorter periods of time for mutual benefit.”
― Reid Hoffman
“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.”
― Reid Hoffman
“I usually allocate time each week to work on topics outside of the normal workflow. These topics can be multi-year strategies for work, theories of how the world is changing, or just something refreshingly different or new.”
― Reid Hoffman
“I think ‘Settlers of Catan’ is such a well-designed board game – it’s the board game of entrepreneurship – that I made a knockoff called ‘Startups of Silicon Valley.’ It’s literally – it’s the same rules but just a different skin set to it.”
― Reid Hoffman
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