Reid Hoffman Quotes

I really like the ‘Silicon Valley’ show. It’s good to do a little rib-poking and not take yourself too seriously, so I think it’s awesome the show does that.

Hard work isn’t enough. And more work is never the real answer. The sort of grit you need to scale a business is less reliant on brute force. It’s actually one part determination, one part ingenuity, and one part laziness.

Broadly, the meaning of life comes from how we interact with each other. The Internet can reconfigure space so that the right people are always next to each other.

I’ve long believed that if you’re not embarrassed by your first product release, you’ve released too late.

Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins. Facebook is ego. Zynga is sloth. LinkedIn is greed.

One of the things that happens that’s challenging within the democratic process is that people say, ‘Look at this failure, so we should totally change this whole thing.’ And then you add in tons of bureaucratic process and checks and balances, and all of a sudden, it doesn’t work that well.

Starting a company is like throwing yourself off the cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.

In the past, individuals and companies envisioned a lifetime mutual commitment. That’s not realistic anymore – nor is it in the interest of either party. So both parties need a more adaptable way to engage each other and co-invest over shorter periods of time for mutual benefit.

I do think there are some irreducible inefficiencies in government. But we still need to have government; we still need to make government effective if we can.

As a candidate, Trump could make outlandish statements with little regard for their Constitutional implications. As President, he is pledged to respect the Constitution’s authority, and the specific rights and protections it guarantees to every American citizen.

Our elected officials must understand that we, the American people, expect them to perform the duties of their office, even when that means working with other elected officials from different parties.

I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture – I’d write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be.

Any effort to make the death penalty speedier and less costly – more ‘efficient‘ – will inevitably make it less just.

In democracies, we aren’t always governed by the people or the parties that we voted for. But when officials are elected, we must respect their authority, as long as they’re exercising that authority within the bounds of whatever regulatory frameworks are in place to guide them.

Death Row inmates are almost twice as expensive to house each year as other inmates. Death penalty trials are much costlier than trials where execution is not a potential punishment and consume more time from judges, public defenders, and other legal personnel.

Blitzscaling is always managerially inefficient – and it burns through a lot of capital quickly. But you have to be willing to take on these inefficiencies in order to scale up. That’s the opposite of what large organizations optimize for.

If performance management were a movie, it will become less ‘Gladiator‘ and more ‘Moneyball.’

Business is the systematic playing of games.

The best ideas make you want to say ‘yes‘ and ‘no’ in the same breath.

One of the challenges in networking is everybody thinks it’s making cold calls to strangers. Actually, it’s the people who already have strong trust relationships with you, who know you’re dedicated, smart, a team player, who can help you.

As a child, I wondered often, ‘Why are we? What is the meaning of life?’ These questions made me realize that life is what has meaning – not just individual lives, but all of our lives.

The way you deal with bullies is you change their economic equation. Make it more expensive for them to hassle you.

Over the last 20 years, I’ve worked on or invested in many companies that scaled to 100 million users or more. But here’s the thing: You don’t start with 100 million users. You start with a few. So, stop thinking big, and start thinking small.

The world‘s better off the more Silicon Valleys there are and the more scaled companies there are.

What makes the meaning of life is people, so you try to be good to people immediately around you and in your broader community. So a lot of my projects are about how I can affect the world in the hundreds of millions.

If you can get better at your job, you should be an active member of LinkedIn, because LinkedIn should be connecting you to the information, insights and people to be more effective.

Sometimes freedom from normal rules is what gives you competitive advantage.

Many employer-employee relationships are built on a lie that starts from the first interaction: neither party automatically conceives of the relationship as something that will last a lifetime, but both interact as if it is. This lie of omission bases the relationship on distrust.

I’m a little unusual: I’m a six-person-or-less extrovert.

Zynga is about fun. Fun is important. Fun is good. And to have the ability to do something fun for 10 or 15 minutes that’s right at your fingertips and involves your friends, well, that’s better than television in terms of social connectivity.

The American people deserve to know what’s on Trump’s tax returns. And Trump must show that he truly embraces accountability and transparency and understands what it means to work on behalf of the public interest.

I would have volunteered to work at Netscape. It was the center node of this new technology and the commercial ecosystem of the Internet.

The death penalty and the arguments it inspires don’t only involve ethics, morals, and justice. There are bureaucratic and economic aspects to it as well. All these different aspects commingle in ways that convince me we should take whatever steps we can to abolish the death penalty.

Trump often says he needs to keep his tax returns private until the IRS finishes auditing him. But the IRS itself has said this isn’t necessary. And recently, Trump changed his tune, saying he’ll release his returns as soon as Hillary Clinton releases the 33,000 emails she deleted from her email server.

MySpace is like a bar, Facebook is like the BBQ you have in your back yard with friends and family, play games, share pictures. Facebook is much better for sharing than MySpace. LinkedIn is the office, how you stay up to date, solve professional problems.

Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location.

Blitzscaling is what you do when you need to grow really, really quickly. It’s the science and art of rapidly building out a company to serve a large and usually global market, with the goal of becoming the first mover at scale. This is high-impact entrepreneurship.

One of the metaphors that I use for start-ups is, you throw yourself off a cliff and assemble your airplane on the way down. If you don’t solve the right problem at the right time, that’s the end. Mortality puts priorities into sharp focus.

A startup, to a some degree, is a set of those challenges of, ‘If you don’t solve this, you’re dead.’

Observe, orient, decide, act. It’s fighter pilot terminology. If you have the faster OODA loop in a dogfight, you live. The other person dies. In Silicon Valley, the OODA loop of your decision-making is effectively what differentiates your ability to succeed.