Reid Hoffman Quotes

During the early stages of blitzscaling — Family and Tribe — it’s easier to take risks because you don’t have much to lose.

Necessity is the mother of invention,

In a sentence, as you meet your friends and new people, shift from asking yourself the very natural question of “What’s in it for me?” and ask instead, “What’s in it for us?” All follows from that.

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.

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.

What got you here won’t get you there.

No business can grow forever, simply because no market is infinite. You blitzscale when your market is big or growing fast

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.

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.

REGULARLY CHECK IN ON HOW THE TOUR IS EVOLVING. This is not a onetime conversation. Remember that trust is built by consistency over time.

Network effects generate a positive feedback loop that can allow the first product or service that taps into those effects to build an unassailable competitive advantage.

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.

In public market investing, as in many things, you achieve big success when you’re both contrarian and right.

In the Family stage, you should hire only generalists.

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.