Reid Hoffman Quotes

Broadcast television succeeded by providing the same thing to all its viewers — a model driven by the technological innovation of broadcasting content via wireless signals and later coaxial cable. Netflix succeeds by providing a carefully personalized experience to each of its many viewers, giving it a huge advantage over its traditional television competitors. Moreover, Netflix produces exactly what it knows its customers want based on their past viewing habits, eliminating the waste of all those pilots, and only loses customers when they make a proactive decision to cancel their subscription

Even if the money doesn’t prove to be necessary, a major financing round can also have positive signaling effects — it helps convince the rest of the world that your company is likely to emerge as the market leader, and can discourage investors from backing additional competitors

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

You remake yourself as you grow and as the world changes. Your identity doesn’t get found. It emerges.

The key is to combine new technologies with effective distribution to potential customers, a scalable and high-margin revenue model, and an approach that allows you to serve those customers given your probable resource constraints

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.

Third, blitzscaling opens up access to capital, because investors generally prefer to back market leaders.

In the context of the alliance, the tour of duty represents an ethical commitment by employer and employee to a specific mission. We see this approach as a way to incorporate some of the advantages from both lifetime employment and free agency.

Throwing your heart into something is great, but when any one thing becomes all that you stand for, you're vulnerable to an identity crisis when you pivot to a Plan B.

A team in the business world will tend to perform at the level of the worst individual team member

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

Until you hear “No,” you haven’t been turned down.

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.

When you’re growing quickly, there will always be fires — inventory shortfalls, servers crashing, customers whose calls aren’t answered. You won’t always know which fire to stamp out first. And if you try to put out every fire at once, you’ll only burn yourself out. That’s why entrepreneurs have to learn to let fires burn — and sometimes even very large fires. When you have a fast-scaling company, the focus must be on moving forward. And you can’t do that if time is spent dealing with spontaneous, scattered eruptions. Fighting every fire can cause you to miss critical opportunities to build your business — you’ll be all reaction and no action.

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.