Reid Hoffman Quotes

When the Naysayers Are Loud, Turn Up the Music

A good mission and values statement should be specific and rigorous enough so that some competent players will feel a strong alignment, while others will understand that the company just isn’t a good fit. You may lose people who do not feel strong alignment with your company or group, but you want to lose those people — this allows you to build much stronger alignment with those who choose to join.

Technology innovation is a key factor in retaining the gains produced by business model innovation. After all, if one technology innovation can create a new market, another technology innovation can render it obsolete, seemingly overnight. While Uber has achieved massive scale, the greatest threat to its future doesn’t come in the form of direct competitors like Didi Chuxing, though these are formidable threats. The greatest threat to Uber’s business is the technology innovation of autonomous vehicles, which could make obsolete one of Uber’s biggest competitive advantages — its carefully cultivated network of drivers — essentially overnight.

All human beings are entrepreneurs.

Often it’s when you come in contact with challenges other people find hard but you find easy that you know you’re in possession of a valuable soft asset.3

When blitzscaling, speed is more important than having a “well-run” organization. Under normal circumstances, you should strive for organizational coherence and stability. Chaotic, unstable organizations make employees nervous and hurt morale. But when you’re scaling up at lightning speed, you may need to reorganize the company three times in a single year, or repeatedly churn through members of your management team.

Second, you can leverage your lead to build long-term competitive advantages before other players are able to respond.

To change the world, startup entrepreneurs need to capitalize on the relatively small number of transformative opportunities they encounter early on in their journeys. This is equally true when it comes to your career.

Technology innovation is the most common trigger for launching a new market or upending an existing one.

While Jeff leads with compassion, that alone won’t necessarily inspire people. If you’re trying to create a cohesive culture, there are three specific beats a drum major can lay down. “Number one is to have clarity of vision,” Jeff says. “Two is the courage of one’s conviction. And three is the ability to effectively communicate those two things.

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

The problem is that, by definition, business model innovation involves trying something that is new, and thus unproven!

Society flourishes when people think entrepreneurally.

Part of the journey that we entrepreneurs are on is learning how to separate our winning instincts from our losing ideas. I think, as a rule of thumb, if you’re a good entrepreneur you can assume that your instincts are right 95 percent of the time and your ideas might be right 25 percent of the time.

When Brian Chesky was pitching venture capitalists to invest in Airbnb, one of the people he consulted was the entrepreneur and investor Sam Altman, who later became the president of the Y Combinator start-up accelerator. Altman saw Chesky’s pitch deck and told him it was perfect, except that he needed to change the market-size slide from a modest $ 30 million to $ 30 billion. “Investors want B’s, baby,” Altman told Chesky. Of course, Altman wasn’t telling Chesky to lie; rather, he argued that if the Airbnb team truly believed in their own assumptions, $ 30 million was a gross underestimate, and they should use a number that was true to their convictions. As it turns out, Airbnb’s market was indeed closer to $ 30 billion.