Reid Hoffman Quotes

“Everything in life has some risk, and what you have to actually learn to do is how to navigate it.”

— Reid Hoffman

“For many people "twenty years of experience" is really one year of experience repeated twenty times.”

— Reid Hoffman

“Easy success had transformed the American auto companies into risk-averse, nonmeritocratic, bloated bureaucracies.”

— Reid Hoffman

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

These stewards of the company way are the intellectual and emotional foundation of the organization.

— Reid Hoffman

No one cares who you are or are not dating on LinkedIn.

— Reid Hoffman

“Professional loyalty now flows "horizontally" to and from your network rather than "vertically" to your boss, as Dan Pink has noted.”

— Reid Hoffman

Unfortunately, for far too many, focused learning ends at college graduation. They read about stocks and bonds instead of reading books that improve their mind. They compare their cash salary to their peers' instead of comparing lessons learned. They invest in the stock market and neglect investing in themselves. They focus, in short, on hard assets instead of soft assets. This is a mistake.

— Reid Hoffman

“A business without loyalty is a business without long-term thinking. A business without long-term thinking is a business that's unable to invest in the future. And a business that isn't investing in tomorrow's opportunities and technologies-well, that's a company already in the process of dying.”

— Reid Hoffman

“Pixar started as a company that sold a special computer for doing digital animation; it took a while till they got into the moviemaking business. Similarly, Starbucks originally sold only coffee beans and coffee equipment; they hadn't planned to sell coffee by the cup.”

— Reid Hoffman

“They scribbled observations in notebooks.”

— 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

“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

“Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location.”

— 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

“Your network is the people who want to help you, and you want to help them, and that's really powerful.”

— Reid Hoffman

“And people who take risk intelligently can usually actually make a lot more progress than people who don't.”

— 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

“Relatively few people should start companies.”

— 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

“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

“In this sense, the world of tomorrow will be more like the Silicon Valley of today: constant change and chaos.”

— Reid Hoffman

“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

“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

“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

“The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be.”

— Reid Hoffman

“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.”

— Reid Hoffman

“An entrepreneur is someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down.”

— 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.

— Reid Hoffman

“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

The entrepreneurial journey starts with jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.

— Reid Hoffman

“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

Not only CAN anyone be an entrepreneur, but they MUST be.

— Reid Hoffman

This is classic when you begin thinking about what is a great founder is, you navigate what is apparent paradoxes.

— Reid Hoffman

“You should have an investment thesis that essentially says why you think this is potentially a good idea.”

— Reid Hoffman

Trust and mutual value creation helps both employer and employee compete in the marketplace.

— Reid Hoffman

“By 2030 over 2 billion jobs will disappear.”

— Reid Hoffman

“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

“When you're doing work you care about, you are able to work harder and better.”

— Reid Hoffman

It's actually pretty easy to be contrarian. It's hard to be contrarian and right.

— Reid Hoffman

“Help the people in your network. And let them help you.”

— Reid Hoffman

“We don't celebrate failure in Silicon Valley. We celebrate learning”

— Reid Hoffman

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.

— Reid Hoffman

“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

“Great opportunities almost never fit your schedule.”

— Reid Hoffman

“We believe that when the right talent meets the right opportunity in a company with the right philosophy, amazing transformation can happen.”

— Reid Hoffman

“World-changing startups need to be premised on accurate contrarian theories.”

— Reid Hoffman

“If I ever hear a founder talk about oh this is how I have a balanced life so on and so forth - they're not committed to winning.”

— Reid Hoffman

So usually you have to have product distribution as more fundamental than what the actual product is.

— Reid Hoffman

“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