Reid Hoffman Quotes

Having “extra” capital gives you a cushion for when outcomes do not in fact follow your plan. Moreover, it increases your optionality — if you need to invest in growth, you can do much more without having to go through the time-consuming process of raising another round. As Mariam Naficy, CEO of Minted, told me, “Act like you’ve got half the amount you have in the bank because you’ve got to factor in all the failures and all the optimizations that kill great entrepreneurs and businesses all the time. Both of us know so many people who had good ideas and were on the right track, but just ran out of money.” At both PayPal and LinkedIn, we raised large financing rounds right before a market meltdown (2000, 2008), and we sure were glad we did. In the case of PayPal, that money allowed us to keep growing during the dot-com bust; without it, we wouldn’t have made it to our IPO. In the case of LinkedIn, the situation wasn’t as dire, but I realized that the value of the optionality from additional funding far outweighed the potential negatives of equity dilution.

The only time that it makes sense to blitzscale is when (whether for offensive or defensive reasons) you have determined that speed into the market is the critical strategy to achieve massive outcomes.

Because traditional drilling techniques didn’t work on shale rock formations, the land above those formations had never been leased, which meant that when fracking made those hydrocarbons accessible for the first time, the market to acquire those mineral rights was completely wide open.

When you blitzscale, you deliberately make decisions and commit to them even though your confidence level is substantially lower than 100 percent. You accept the risk of making the wrong decision and willingly pay the cost of significant operating inefficiencies in exchange for the ability to move faster. These risks and costs are acceptable because the risk and cost of being too slow is even greater.

Teams win when their individual members trust each other enough to prioritize team success over individual glory; paradoxically, winning as a team is the best way for the team members to achieve individual success.

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.

Get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’. If you’re not growing, you’re contracting. If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward.

Weak cultures are diffuse; people act differently, and don’t understand each other, and it becomes political.

Bring the new executive in at a lower level initially and let the executive prove himself or herself. John gave himself the title “Director of Business Development and Operations” and only took on bigger titles after he had demonstrated his ability and value to existing teams. He employed the same technique when he hired Schrep, bringing him in as “Director of Engineering

Your teams need the ability — and the manpower — to relentlessly pursue a specific objective; asking a team to split its time between two different business lines is likely to result in the failure of both.

Instead, you need to learn as you go, solving more and more complex problems. And with luck, learning the answers to your questions just in time.

WORK TOGETHER TO ALIGN EMPLOYEE, MANAGER, AND COMPANY. Once everyone’s values and aspirations have been articulated, all parties should work together to strengthen the alignment between them. This is a collaborative rather than top-down effort. It’s not just a job for you, but for the employee as well. The good news is, working together on this can actually help build the long-term relationship.

To achieve massive success, you need to have a big new opportunity — one where the market size and gross margins intersect to create enormous potential value, and there isn’t a dominant market leader or oligopoly. A big new opportunity often arises because a technological innovation creates a new market or scrambles an existing one.

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

The truth is, most entrepreneurs pivot many times before they find their footing. And often, even after they find their footing. And it can feel perilous. You have to steer toward a new opportunity, often before it comes into clear focus. And, equally challenging, you have to turn away from something — specifically, an idea that previously inspired hopes, dreams, and investment of time and money. Human beings don’t let go of old ideas easily. In pivoting, you risk blowback from your co-founders, your staff, your investors, and your users. For those reasons, it can be the single greatest test of your leadership skills.