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.Collection: Death
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.Collection: Business
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.Collection: Business
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.Collection: Age
For me, the ethical arguments that resonate strongest are the ones that oppose the death penalty.
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.
Any effort to make the death penalty speedier and less costly - more 'efficient' - will inevitably make it less just.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The best ideas make you want to say 'yes' and 'no' in the same breath.
Starting a company is like throwing yourself off the cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.
A startup, to a some degree, is a set of those challenges of, 'If you don't solve this, you're dead.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The same instincts that make us good students can make us lousy entrepreneurs.
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.
Each year, I ask, 'Now that I have this knowledge, these resources, what can I do?'
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.
Our polling methodology has gotten outdated, and, in fact, it's not really telling us what it needs to be telling us.
We need to invest in technologies that amplify human capacity, not replace it.
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.
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.
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.
If you could train an AI to be a Buddhist, it would probably be pretty good.
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.
Everything in life has some risk, and what you have to actually learn to do is how to navigate it.
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.
Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location.
Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins. Facebook is ego. Zynga is sloth. LinkedIn is greed.
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.
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.
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.
I've long believed that if you're not embarrassed by your first product release, you've released too late.
And people who take risk intelligently can usually actually make a lot more progress than people who don't.
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.
Your network is the people who want to help you, and you want to help them, and that's really powerful.
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.
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.
Your customers are always a bottomless well of surprises.
So benevolent, enlightened, wise dictators are the most efficient form of government. The problem is what comes afterwards, right?
Silicon Valley tends to be very myopic - to be focused on one or two things - which has some strengths as well as weaknesses.
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.
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.