Reid Hoffman Quotes

If you are not receiving or making at least one introduction a month, you are probably not fully engaging your extended professional network.

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

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.

Today, multiple major waves seem to be arriving simultaneously — technologies like the cloud, AI, AR/ VR, not to mention more esoteric projects like supersonic planes and hyperloops. What’s more, rather than being concentrated narrowly in a personal computer industry that was essentially a niche market, today’s new technologies impact nearly every part of the economy, creating many new opportunities. This trend holds tremendous promise. Precision medicine will use computing power to revolutionize health care. Smart grids use software to dramatically improve power efficiency and enable the spread of renewable energy sources like solar roofs. And computational biology might allow us to improve life itself. Blitzscaling can help these advances spread and magnify their sorely needed impact.

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

You’ve got to keep your personal learning curve ahead of the company’s growth curve.

The Rise of Portfolio Careers Around the world, we see increasing fragmentation of a single individual’s career into several different jobs, and their earnings coming from multiple sources. The popular name for this phenomenon is “the gig economy”:

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

old economy” businesses often have low gross margins. Growing wheat is a low-margin business, as is selling goods in a store or serving food in a restaurant.

When the Naysayers Are Loud, Turn Up the Music

you usually need more money to blitzscale than to fastscale, because you have to keep enough capital in reserve to recover from the many mistakes you’re likely to make along the way.

The second growth factor needed for a strong, scalable business is distribution.

The most meaningful way to differentiate your company from your competition, the best way to put distance between you and the crowd, is to do an outstanding job with information. How you gather, manage, and use information will determine whether you win or lose.

My friend Peter Thiel has written eloquently about the power of being a contrarian in his book Zero to One. Whenever I interview someone for a job, I like to ask this question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” This question sounds easy because it’s straightforward. Actually, it’s very hard to answer. It’s intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon. And it’s psychologically difficult because anyone trying to answer must say something she knows to be unpopular. Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.

In this sense, the world of tomorrow will be more like the Silicon Valley of today: constant change and chaos.