Reid Hoffman Quotes

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

All humans are entrepreneurs not because they should start companies but because the will to create is encoded in human DNA, and creation is the essence of entrepreneurship.

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

you need to think and act like you’re running a start-up: your career.

Peter doesn’t believe in beating the competition, he believes in escaping it altogether — either by entering an emerging field with no natural competitors or by moving so quickly and decisively that competitors have no hope of catching up.

When you’re letting a fire burn, it’s important that your team realizes that, yes, you see the problem, and yes, your neglect is deliberate. If your team accepts this, it’s a good sign that you’ve hired the right people: people who can recognize and then calmly deal with problems as they arise — and who have a good sense of which fires are critical enough to require immediate attention, and which ones can be allowed to just burn for a while.

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

Don’t try a second channel until you have your main flywheel working. Most successful companies dominate one channel.

Ice melts into water; water boils into steam. As a start-up scales up from one phase to the next, it undergoes fundamental changes as well.

We tried a number of single-threaded efforts to meet the challenge. We rolled out features one after another, such as a recommendation engine for people that our users should meet and a professional Q&A service. None of them worked well enough to solve the problem. We concluded that the problem might require a Swiss Army knife approach with multiple use cases for multiple groups of users. After all, some people might want a news feed, some might want to track their career progress, and some might be keen on continuing education. Fortunately, LinkedIn had grown to the point where the organization could support multiple threads. We reorganized the product team so that each director of product could focus on a different approach to address engagement. Even though none of those efforts alone proved a silver bullet, the overall combination of them significantly improved user engagement.

In the Family stage, you should hire only generalists.

if the fires at your start-up are burning money but not touching the customer, and if you’re able to afford the waste, you might be able to literally buy time and ignore them.

Entrepreneurial employees possess what eBay CEO John Donahoe calls the founder mind-set. As he put it to us, “People with the founder mind-set drive change, motivate people, and just get stuff done.

Making a decision reduces opportunities in the short run, but increases opportunities in the long run. To move forward in your career, you have to commit to specific opportunities as part of an iterative plan, despite doubt and despite inconvenience.

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.