Reid Hoffman
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.Collection: People
Probably the biggest mistake that I made personally is I knew early on that I wanted to go into start-ups and creating kind of software that could help change the lives of millions of people. And basically what I did is I kind of went, okay, well, I need a set of titles and I need a checklist of skills, and I ran through all that, and that wasn't a useless thing, but what I didn't realize, and, you know, and no one gave me the right advice for doing this, is that actually your network, in essentially, is your career.Collection: Mistake
Be persistent, and hang on to your vision. And at the same time, be flexible.Collection: Vision
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.Collection: Nice
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.Collection: Careers
Good ideas need good strategy to realize their potential.Collection: Ideas
Trust and mutual value creation helps both employer and employee compete in the marketplace.Collection: Helping
The future is sooner and stranger than you think.Collection: Thinking
Before dreaming about the future or marking plans, you need to articulate what you already have going for you - as entrepreneurs do.Collection: Dream
Society flourishes when people think entrepreneurally.Collection: Thinking
Not only CAN anyone be an entrepreneur, but they MUST be.Collection: Entrepreneur
Democracy tends to be a collaborative process, a committee, a consensus.Collection: Democracy
It’s actually pretty easy to be contrarian. It’s hard to be contrarian and right.Collection: Easy
You remake yourself as you grow and as the world changes. Your identity doesn’t get found. It emerges.Collection: Identity
You gotta be both flexible and persistent.Collection: Persistent
When you turn a company profitable you've gone from a company whose days are numbered to a company whose days can be infinite.Collection: Gone
There are two reasons [ business people are not publicly anti-Donald Trump ], one is well-intentioned, which is the classic kind of American notion. 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."Collection: Two
Part of what being a great founder is, is being both able to hold the belief, to think about where it is you want to be doing and want to be going, but also be smart enough that you are essentially listening to criticism, negative feedback, competitive entries.Collection: Smart
...Silicon Valley's success comes from the way its companies build alliances with their employees.Collection: Valleys
Most of the ethical dilemmas that I have faced have all been in the category of, you know, I know something and what's my obligation to disclose it. So, for example, you see people make a mistake in the contract that you're making between the businesses and do you disclose it or do you reveal it? And generally speaking, the way that I solve these is I kind of go through a list of, you know, what's the most, what are the obligations and constituencies and in what order?Collection: Mistake
Well, well-run companies always have a focus on growth and the two lines, which includes profit. The key thing during, I think, tough times, is to make sure that you've covered the basis for when something, you know, essentially things taking longer, bad luck, adversity, other kinds of circumstances may occur. Make sure that you can monitor to win, it's potentially, you know, something is going to go wrong, monitor early enough, and then take appropriate action to essentially counteract that or shift your strategy or plan, even if in fact something is not working out as well as it is.Collection: Running
One of the phrases I frequently look for is infinite learning curve.Because each entrepreneurial pattern is to some degree unique and new.Collection: Unique
I am most heartened when I'm talking to a team when they're reasoning to each other.Collection: Team
The metaphor that I frequently use for entrepreneurship is jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane plane on the way down.Collection: Airplane
I find that the interesting challenges, because there's obvious things where, you know, don't be unethical, don't be evil, you know, don't break the law, don't do immoral things, those are all straightforward and don't create ethical dilemmas. The thing that's interesting is when you actually have multiple interests at stake and you have to kind of navigate your way through it.Collection: Law
I think the right way to do this is just to step up and do it, so I actually think we'll see more of that over the next coming weeks, because I think they'll say, "We'd like to be good for business and quiet on politics, but this is too urgent, it is too much of a key crisis in who we are going to become as Americans. We can risk too much, and so we have to step forward." And I think you will see more and more people stepping forward, like Howard Schultz, Steve Case and other folks, in order to try to make a difference in this [Donald Trump] election.Collection: Thinking
This is classic when you begin thinking about what is a great founder is, you navigate what is apparent paradoxes.Collection: Thinking
I think the randomness by Donald Trump's governing, by tweeting, sloganeering, attacking, will create great chaos in the entire market. I think people will have difficulties in predicting the future. I think capital will recede.Collection: Thinking
Entrepreneurship is a life idea, not a strictly business one; a global idea, not a strictly American one.Collection: Ideas
The real secret of Silicon Valley is that it's really all about the peopleCollection: Real
Part of the reason we like democracy is it's the portfolio of decades, which is to say you don't also get the disastrous dictator who completely destroys a society, engages you in wars and so forth.Collection: War
I'm sympathetic to the people who go, "Whoa, we'd like to have the benevolent, wise dictator. It will all work much more efficiently," but the reason that we remain staunch democrats - with a small d - is it's a decades long, it's a centuries long, it's a country long process for being inclusive.Collection: Wise
Donald Trump has shown that he will essentially attack individuals, make Second Amendment jokes.Collection: Second Amendment
Times of economic crises can change what the competitive landscape looks like, because when, for example, you have boom times, capital is easy to come by, growth is easy, sometimes what you focus on is, you know, how to accelerate in the boom. During economic crises, the question is, the companies that come out of, you know, that are sailing through that with the best liquidity, both assets on the balance sheet, making money, ability to grow their businesses, get a disproportionate competitive advantage.Collection: Focus
People are legitimately worried about Donald Trump, almost like a schoolyard bully, if I step up, am I going to be targeted, too?Collection: People
I think Hillary [Clinton] has [woken up to the plight of the middle class] and is working toward it in a democratic process.Collection: Thinking
Benevolent, enlightened, wise dictators are the most efficient form of government. The problem is what comes afterwards.Collection: Wise
The key thing in any kind of guiding of the business is how do you create a strong organization that is kind of accelerating into the future. And when you're in trouble, the question is, what are the techniques that you can, you know, trim, refinance, sell, et cetera, in order to get this business back to that characteristic.Collection: Strong
The actual, the forming of ties with a group of people around you where they help you grow as a professional, solve problems, get opportunities, and you help them, is actually the constitutive base of the foundation of a strong, modern career.Collection: Strong
[Hillary Clinton] is also smart, she talks to people, she hears, and she says, "OK, I need to update, we need some much bigger changes."Collection: Smart
I think the boarding schools are like miniature versions of "Lord of the Flies."Collection: School
I think Hillary [Clinton] hears the anger in a broad swath of the American people, and she says, "OK, how do I help create a future that's good for you?"Collection: Thinking
I wish to be focused on kind of the business stuff I'm doing, how do I contribute to our economic progress, how do I help create a future for American industry, American middle class, these kind of things. Those things actually really matter to me.Collection: Wish
The other reason why people don't take a stand, which is very true in this election, is looking at [Donald] Trump and fearing reprisal, fearing reprisal from someone who is seeking the highest, most powerful role in the land, who has had a history of doing everything from attacks, threats and lawsuits and who has a complete kind of vengeful, narcissistic behavior, which makes people legitimately worried, almost like a schoolyard bully, that if I step up, am I going to be targeted, too?Collection: Powerful
One of the things is when you think, "Wait, I'm fearful of retaliation, I'm fearful of oppression because of someone who is going into a public office, who might be vengeful for their own personal reasons, that's actually not a reason to hide - that's a reason to step up, right?"This is part of what we learned from the 1920s.Collection: Thinking
Now, in economic crises times, the kind of things you're looking at is it's generally harder to get capital, revenue growth may be more, revenue lines may be unstable or growth may be less easy to predict that you're going to get to. And so what you do is you take a certain conservative approach of when, as all entrepreneurs should do, you plan for both good luck and bad luck, you put extra time on, "Okay, if I have bad luck, what do I do about that?"Collection: Good Luck
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. And the reason is, just think about the fact that those businesses that adopt new technologies to operate efficiently and use them to get a competitive edge are the businesses that in fact, you know, it becomes one more competitive advantage. Whether it's a fax machine or a mobile phone or a new way of doing financing or any of these things, you know, these are key things to do.Collection: Technology
I think we realized the depth of frustration through the current political process. So we said, "OK, we know there's a serious problem here, we know we need to work on it," and now it's "Oh, we need to work on it a lot faster."Collection: Thinking
People generally worry about social networking more than they need to. In kind of consumer internet investing and on social and professional networks, I kind of look at time spending and time efficiency. You know, time saving sites. So on time spending sites, things where you play lots of games or that sort of thing, you might worry about a productivity loss if people are spending a lot of time doing that. So if there's a lot of kind of addictive gaming going on during work hours, that won't be as helpful to you.Collection: Loss