Reid Hoffman Quotes

A leader’s job is not to put greatness into people, but rather to recognize that it already exists, and to create the environment where that greatness can emerge and grow.

So play with your assets, aspirations, and the market realities until you see compounding potential in one of the combinations. Sure, being faster, better, or cheaper for a given job will make you more competitive. But if you find a growth loop for the intersection of what you do well, what you value, and what the market wants, then you’ve got something even better.

For life in permanent beta, the trick is to never stop starting.

The person passionate about what he or she is doing will outwork and outlast the guy motivated solely by making money.

it’s not necessarily any easier to sell a low-margin product than a high-margin product.

Once the executive has earned the team’s trust and credibility, consider promoting him or her.

Warren Buffett has a mantra: “Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.

In the Family stage, you should hire only generalists.

What is your organization trying to do? How are you trying to achieve those goals? What acceptable risks are you incurring to achieve those goals more quickly? When you have to trade off certain values, which ones take priority? What kind of behavior do you hire, promote, or fire for?

Slack had spent nearly five years and $ 17 million on development prior to its public launch in February 2014. Just two months later, before the end of April, it had raised another $ 43 million. Both of these investments took place before Slack had proven its revenue model and started generating significant sales. Slack’s freemium business model (offering a free service and encouraging users to upgrade later to becoming paying customers) meant that even after two months of rapid user growth, the company hadn’t proven its ability to make money. Fortunately for Slack and its investors, this aggressiveness paid off. As the initial wave of free users started converting to paid, Slack was able to raise an additional $ 120 million six months later to accelerate its growth even further.

Finally, many people simply think better thoughts when in dialogue with others. Remember I^We: an individual’s power is raised exponentially with the help of a network. This is partly because when information moves back and forth between knowledgeable people who care, the signal strengthens. Two (or more) well-coordinated brains beat one every time.

Great companies and great businesses often seem to be bad ideas when they first appear because business model innovations — by their very definition — can’t point to a proven business model to demonstrate why they’ll work.

One of the challenges you face as you build up your data capabilities is that your strategy can disappear behind the numbers. The numbers might not measure the real health of the business or reveal the real major threats you face.

Yet despite these offensive reasons to scale, the most common driver of blitzscaling is the threat of competition. Even without competition, you would still want to achieve first-scaler advantage and climb the learning curve, but you might prefer the less risky fastscaling approach to growth. Ask yourself, “Can somebody else realize this opportunity before me?” If the answer is yes, moving faster probably reduces the risk of competition more than it raises the risk of failure. The more intense the competition, the faster you should try to move.

it’s better to be in front of a big change than to be behind it.