Reid Hoffman Quotes

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Reid Hoffman

Profession : Businessman

Birth : August 5, 1967

If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.

Reid Hoffman

The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be.

Reid Hoffman

Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location.

Reid Hoffman

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.

Reid Hoffman

You have to be constantly reinventing yourself and investing in the future.

Reid Hoffman

To have your parents get divorced at a young age, there's a lot of turbulence. We all grew up together, in some way. It was not idyllic. It was intense, vibrant, sometimes oppressive. I felt I was very much in a world of my own. I didn't meld much in school. I was kind of a loner.

Reid Hoffman

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.

Reid Hoffman

Some people mistake grit for sheer persistence - charging up the same hill again and again. But that's not quite what I mean by the word 'grit.' You want to minimize friction and find the most effective, most efficient way forward. You might actually have more grit if you treat your energy as a precious commodity.

Reid Hoffman

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

Reid Hoffman

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.

Reid Hoffman

For me, the ethical arguments that resonate strongest are the ones that oppose the death penalty.

Reid Hoffman

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

Reid Hoffman

Your network is the people who want to help you, and you want to help them, and that's really powerful.

Reid Hoffman

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.

Reid Hoffman

So benevolent, enlightened, wise dictators are the most efficient form of government. The problem is what comes afterwards, right?

Reid Hoffman

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.

Reid Hoffman

If you contrast the productivity that comes from a networked or capitalist distribution of resources versus a centralized planning system, frequently referred to as communism or socialism, the network approach does much better when it's applied accurately.

Reid Hoffman

People are still very focused on the startup story: Risk-taking founders, with a bold idea, some capital and a network supportive environment, go out and take the shot on goal. But the problem is, this is no longer the truth about what makes Silicon Valley so special.

Reid Hoffman

Entrepreneurs are like visionaries. One of the ways they run forward is by viewing the thing they're doing as something that's going to be the whole world.

Reid Hoffman

I think 'Settlers of Catan' is such a well-designed board game - it's the board game of entrepreneurship - that I made a knockoff called 'Startups of Silicon Valley.' It's literally - it's the same rules but just a different skin set to it.

Reid Hoffman