Reid Hoffman Quotes

What got you here won’t get you there.

Years later, Steve Blank and Eric Ries would dub this a “minimum viable product” (MVP). For LinkedIn, the MVP included a user’s professional profile, the ability to connect to other users, a search function to find other users, and a mechanism for sending messages to friends.

Great companies and great businesses often seem to be bad ideas when they first appear because business model innovations — by their very definition — can’t point to a proven business model to demonstrate why they’ll work.

I like to generate fresh, innovative ways to play defense by asking my team, “If we were trying to compete with ourselves, what we would do? What if we were a start-up? Google? Facebook? Microsoft?

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.

Necessity is the mother of invention,

The only time that it makes sense to blitzscale is when (whether for offensive or defensive reasons) you have determined that speed into the market is the critical strategy to achieve massive outcomes.

Viral” distribution occurs when the users of a product bring more users, and those users bring additional users, and so on, much like an infectious virus spreads from host to host. Virality can either be organic — occurring during the course of normal usage of the product — or incentivized by some kind of reward.

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

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

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.

Your teams need the ability — and the manpower — to relentlessly pursue a specific objective; asking a team to split its time between two different business lines is likely to result in the failure of both.

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.

Yet it is possible — indeed, necessary — to extend this personalized approach to all employees using the tour of duty framework. As the world has become less stable, you can’t just rely on a few stars at the top to provide the necessary adaptability. Companies need entrepreneurial talent throughout the organization in order to respond to rapid changes.

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