Reid Hoffman Quotes

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.

Once the executive has earned the team’s trust and credibility, consider promoting him or her.

So don’t treat tweeting on the job like an infraction — encourage it! Ask your employees to expense lunches with interesting people. By helping employees invest in their individual networks, you build an environment of trust and reciprocity. And when you ask employees to tap their own networks on behalf of the company, they’ll be more likely to respond favorably.

What is your organization trying to do? How are you trying to achieve those goals? What acceptable risks are you incurring to achieve those goals more quickly? When you have to trade off certain values, which ones take priority? What kind of behavior do you hire, promote, or fire for?

As with her previous tours, the process of defining the tour was a collaboration between Gultekin and her manager. “Dan always asks, ‘What do you want to do in five years?’ and we work backwards from there,” Gultekin told us. “I want to be a general manager, so we decided that I needed to add sales to my toolkit. I had never done sales in my life but he knew that my fresh perspective could be useful.” Notice how the mission had to serve the needs of both the employee and the business; Gultekin and LinkedIn have a strong alliance because they have the mutual trust to commit to a mutual investment (shifting to sales) that will provide mutual benefit (a more well-rounded skill set for Gultekin, and a fresh perspective for LinkedIn).

They scribbled observations in notebooks.

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

Yet despite these offensive reasons to scale, the most common driver of blitzscaling is the threat of competition. Even without competition, you would still want to achieve first-scaler advantage and climb the learning curve, but you might prefer the less risky fastscaling approach to growth. Ask yourself, “Can somebody else realize this opportunity before me?” If the answer is yes, moving faster probably reduces the risk of competition more than it raises the risk of failure. The more intense the competition, the faster you should try to move.

This is a crossroads many entrepreneurs will recognize. Entrepreneurs always have to solve side problems along the way to realizing their original vision. And every so often, you solve a problem that’s so vexing and so prevalent that your side solution becomes more valuable than your original idea.

Whether you want to learn a new skill or simply be better at the job you were hired to do, it’s now your job to train and invest in yourself.

In some ways, entrepreneurs are built to thrive in challenging times and conditions, says BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti. “I’ve noticed that times of crisis favor founder-led companies, because they’re headed by people who like improvising. They think about things through first principles and are okay adapting and changing their business.” “During times like this,” he adds, “you have to be totally open to changing everything that you’ve been doing and pursuing opportunities you didn’t know existed.” That plays to the strengths of founders. As does the fact that entrepreneurs are just used to struggling — they often relish the struggle.

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

it’s not necessarily any easier to sell a low-margin product than a high-margin product.

Warren Buffett has a mantra: “Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.

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.