Reid Hoffman Quotes

You should want your employees to be discoverable by the outside world in a professional context. They’re discoverable anyway, thanks to Google and social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, so you should incentivize them to craft their presence in a way that’s maximally helpful to the company.

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.

the role of the executive is to lead managers. For the most part, executives don’t manage individual contributors. Instead, they focus on vision and strategy. Yet they are still connected to the frontline employees because they are also responsible for the “fighting spirit” of their organizations; they need to be role models who help people persist through inevitable adversity.

Zara takes only two weeks to develop a new product and get it into stores — the industry average is six months — and launches over ten thousand new designs per year, a rate several times that of competitors like H&M and Gap. Zara holds just six days of inventory, while rival H&M holds nearly ten times as much.

If a market leader like Adobe gets complacent one year, it will still count billions of dollars in the bank, but if a startup gets complacent, it’s game over.

One of the challenges you face as you build up your data capabilities is that your strategy can disappear behind the numbers. The numbers might not measure the real health of the business or reveal the real major threats you face.

Teams win when their individual members trust each other enough to prioritize team success over individual glory; paradoxically, winning as a team is the best way for the team members to achieve individual success.

The purpose of hiring a management team is to solve the organization’s problems in a more scalable way. The CEO should be the hub, and the executive team the spokes that connect the CEO to the frontline managers and employees operating where the rubber hits the road.

When we first started raising money in 1997, we thought we’d be mostly streaming in 5 years,” Hastings told us when he visited our Blitzscaling class at Stanford. “In 2002, we had no streaming. So we thought that by 2007, it would be half our business. In 2007, we were still nowhere. So we made the same prediction. And this time we were wrong the other way — by 2012, streaming was 60% of our business.” It may have taken longer than Hastings expected, but Moore’s Law eventually came through for him.

WORK TOGETHER TO ALIGN EMPLOYEE, MANAGER, AND COMPANY. Once everyone’s values and aspirations have been articulated, all parties should work together to strengthen the alignment between them. This is a collaborative rather than top-down effort. It’s not just a job for you, but for the employee as well. The good news is, working together on this can actually help build the long-term relationship.

As we’ve already seen, most great ideas look dumb at first. Being contrarian doesn’t mean that dumb people disagree with you; it means that smart people disagree with you!

When a start-up matures to the point where it has a killer product, a clear and sizable market, and a robust distribution channel, it has the opportunity to become a “scale-up,” which is a world-changing company that touches millions or even billions of lives. Often, the fastest and most direct path from start-up to scale-up is the hypergrowth produced by blitzscaling.

So play with your assets, aspirations, and the market realities until you see compounding potential in one of the combinations. Sure, being faster, better, or cheaper for a given job will make you more competitive. But if you find a growth loop for the intersection of what you do well, what you value, and what the market wants, then you’ve got something even better.

Despite all the chaos, and the inefficiency of manufacturing and shipping in small batches, Zara’s gross margins continue to exceed those of its competitors H&M (55 percent) and Gap (29 percent). That’s because all that inefficiency incurred in the pursuit of speed allows Zara to avoid one of the biggest drags on gross margin for almost any apparel company — overstock of designs that failed to sell. Ortega devised this model when he was sixteen years old — don’t order inventory and hope it sells; instead, figure out what people want, and then make it.

Bring the new executive in at a lower level initially and let the executive prove himself or herself. John gave himself the title “Director of Business Development and Operations” and only took on bigger titles after he had demonstrated his ability and value to existing teams. He employed the same technique when he hired Schrep, bringing him in as “Director of Engineering