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.
My belief and goal is that every professional in the world should be on a service liked LinkedIn.
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.
I actually think every individual is now an entrepreneur, whether they recognize it or not.
I'm a little unusual: I'm a six-person-or-less extrovert.
I get energy from one-on-one conversations most often, and I lose energy from group conversations most often.
Relatively few people should start companies.
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.
You have to be constantly reinventing yourself and investing in the future.
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.
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.
Even by Silicon Valley standards, PayPal's vision was massively ambitious.
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes freedom from normal rules is what gives you competitive advantage.
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.
The world's better off the more Silicon Valleys there are and the more scaled companies there are.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Business is the systematic playing of games.
The way you deal with bullies is you change their economic equation. Make it more expensive for them to hassle you.
What happens during recessions, is you have less windfalls just helping you cover mistakes. You have to be more careful about not making mistakes.
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.
If performance management were a movie, it will become less 'Gladiator' and more 'Moneyball.'
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.
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.
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.'
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.
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.'
'Founder' is a state of mind, not a job description, and if done right, even CEOs who join after day 1 can become founders.
I would have volunteered to work at Netscape. It was the center node of this new technology and the commercial ecosystem of the Internet.
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.
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.
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.
The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be.Collection: Motivational
No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you're playing a solo game, you'll always lose out to a team.Collection: Teamwork
If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.Collection: Business
What is an entrepreneur? Someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down.Collection: Inspiring
Great opportunities almost never fit your schedule.Collection: Opportunity
Ironically, in a changing world, playing it safe is one of the riskiest things you can do.Collection: Playing It Safe
First mover Advantage doesn't go to the company that starts up, it goes to the company that scales upCollection: Firsts
Innovation comes from long-term thinking and iterative execution.Collection: Thinking
People who take risk intelligently can usually actually make a lot more progress than people who don't.Collection: People
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.Collection: Opportunity
When you’re doing work you care about, you are able to work harder and better.Collection: Hard Work
Having a great idea for a product is important, but having a great idea for product distribution is even more important.Collection: Ideas