Reid Hoffman Quotes

If you aren’t embarrassed by the first version of your product, you shipped too late.

Society flourishes when people think entrepreneurally.

The person passionate about what he or she is doing will outwork and outlast the guy motivated solely by making money.

for many people “twenty years of experience” is really one year of experience repeated twenty times.

An entrepreneur is someone who will jump off a cliff and assemble an airplane on the way down.

Everything in life has some risk, and what you have to actually learn to do is how to navigate it.

For life in permanent beta, the trick is to never stop starting.

All humans are entrepreneurs not because they should start companies but because the will to create is encoded in human DNA, and creation is the essence of entrepreneurship.

Start a personal blog and begin developing a public reputation and public portfolio of work that’s not tied to your employer.

you need to think and act like you’re running a start-up: your career.

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late. —Reid Hoffman

All humans are entrepreneurs not because they should start companies but because the will to create is encoded in human DNA. —Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn

Take intelligent and bold risks to accomplish something great. Build a network of alliances to help you with intelligence, resources, and collective action. Pivot to a breakout opportunity.

When the Naysayers Are Loud, Turn Up the Music

Throwing your heart into something is great, but when any one thing becomes all that you stand for, you're vulnerable to an identity crisis when you pivot to a Plan B.

The founders of start-ups as varied as YouTube, Palantir Technologies, and Yelp all worked at PayPal. Another set of people—including Reid Hoffman, Thiel, and Botha—emerged as some of the technology industry’s top investors. PayPal staff pioneered techniques in fighting online fraud that have formed the basis of software used by the CIA and FBI to track terrorists and of software used by the world’s largest banks to combat crime. This collection of super-bright employees has become known as the PayPal Mafia—more or less the current ruling class of Silicon Valley—and Musk is its most famous and successful member.

If you’re in permanent beta in your career, twenty years of experience actually is twenty years of experience because each year will be marked by new, enriching challenges and opportunities. Permanent beta is essentially a lifelong commitment to continuous personal growth. Get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’. If

All human beings are entrepreneurs.

Get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’. If you’re not growing, you’re contracting. If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward.

A team in the business world will tend to perform at the level of the worst individual team member

Until you hear “No,” you haven’t been turned down.

Keeping your options open” is frequently more of a risk than committing to a plan of action.

Remember: If you don’t find risk, risk will find you.

Which plan offers the most learning potential?

If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late. —REID HOFFMAN, FOUNDER OF LINKEDIN

you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” Reid Hoffman

Know the values, current projects, and aspirations of each person in your tribe.   Use Reid Hoffman’s “theory of small gifts” to build your relationship with people in your tribe as preparation for triading.   Form a triad by introducing two people to each other on the basis of current projects and shared values.

Even if you can’t meet the best, you can read about the best.” Brian

A lot of smart people are prone to over-analysis and tend to become paralyzed by indecision

If you are not receiving or making at least one introduction a month, you are probably not fully engaging your extended professional network.

Theodore Roosevelt’s famous dictum, “Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

Ideally, most of the top executives of a company should be on Foundational tours.

Often it’s when you come in contact with challenges other people find hard but you find easy that you know you’re in possession of a valuable soft asset.3

Finished ought to be an F-word for all of us. We are all works in progress. Each day presents an opportunity to learn more, do more, be more, grow more in our lives and careers.

involve yourself in organizations that try to systemically improve society at a massive scale.

blitzscaling is prioritizing speed over efficiency in the face of uncertainty.

In this sense, the world of tomorrow will be more like the Silicon Valley of today: constant change and chaos.

Establish an identity independent of your employer, city, and industry.

Figure out how to get into the networks because they are what amplifies your learnings, give you access to opportunity, information and Intelligence to know what to do.

If you want to find out how resourceful you can be, shrink your budget. Move your deadlines up. See how you cope. This may make you more resilient to actual hardships that inevitably arise.

In a sentence, as you meet your friends and new people, shift from asking yourself the very natural question of “What’s in it for me?” and ask instead, “What’s in it for us?” All follows from that.

the fundamental paradox of the tour of duty: acknowledging that the employee might leave is actually the best way to build trust, and thus develop the kind of relationship that convinces great people to stay.

Mark Pincus smelled the social-game opportunity first. He was the guy who, with Reid Hoffman, had been part of the angel investment that, in his words, was like winning lotto. In late 2006, Matt Cohler tipped him off that Facebook was going to launch a platform and was looking for entrepreneurs to come up with apps. We don’t want any money from you, he told Pincus. Just build cool stuff and we’ll expose you to our traffic.

Your competitive advantage is formed by the interplay of three different, ever-changing forces: your assets, your aspirations/values, and the market realities, i.e., the supply and demand for what you offer the marketplace relative to the competition. The

Relationship builders, on the other hand, try to help other people first. They don’t keep score. They’re aware that many good deeds get reciprocated, but they’re not calculated about it. And they think about their relationships all the time, not just when they need something.

Blitzscaling is a strategy and set of techniques for driving and managing extremely rapid growth that prioritize speed over efficiency in an environment of uncertainty. Put another way, it’s an accelerant that allows your company to grow at a furious pace that knocks the competition out of the water.

To achieve massive success, you need to have a big new opportunity—one where the market size and gross margins intersect to create enormous potential value, and there isn’t a dominant market leader or oligopoly. A big new opportunity often arises because a technological innovation creates a new market or scrambles an existing one.

Unfortunately, for far too many, focused learning ends at college graduation. They read about stocks and bonds instead of reading books that improve their mind. They compare their cash salary to their peers' instead of comparing lessons learned. They invest in the stock market and neglect investing in themselves. They focus, in short, on hard assets instead of soft assets. This is a mistake.

Intelligent assistance involves leveraging artificial intelligence to enable the government, individual companies, and the nonprofit social sector to develop more sophisticated online and mobile platforms that can empower every worker to engage in lifelong learning on their own time, and to have their learning recognized and rewarded with advancement. Intelligent assistants arise when we use artificial intelligence to improve the interfaces between humans and their tools with software, so humans can not only learn faster but also act faster and act smarter. Lastly, we need to deploy AI to create more intelligent algorithms, or what Reid Hoffman calls “human networks”—so that we can much more efficiently connect people to all the job opportunities that exist, all the skills needed for each job, and all the educational opportunities to acquire those skills cheaply and easily.

But ignoring those details won’t work—not in the long run, says Y Combinator’s president from 2014 to 2019, Sam Altman. An acolyte of Paul Graham’s, Sam adhered to the core Y Combinator dictum: It’s better to have one hundred users who love you than a million users who just kind of like you. It’s counterintuitive. You may be thinking If a million people “kind of like” my product enough to buy it, isn’t that better for business than a hundred obsessive oddballs? To which Sam would say…definitely not.

People change. You change. Some relationships just aren’t meant to last beyond a certain point. It’s okay to simply let those friendships fade. This is a natural evolution of some relationships. Unlike romantic relationships, with friendships there’s rarely a reason to have a full-on breakup. Even if people go in different directions and the friendship slowly peters out, trust can endure. And unlike most exes, it is possible to rekindle/reactivate friendships later on when your lives are more aligned.

There’s a common misconception that Silicon Valley is the accelerator of the world. The real story is that the world keeps getting faster—Silicon Valley is just the first place to figure out how to keep pace. While Silicon Valley certainly has many key networks and resources that make it easier to apply the techniques we’re going to lay out for you, blitzscaling is made up of basic principles that do not depend on geography. We’re going to show you examples from overlooked parts of the United States, such as Detroit (Rocket Mortgage) and Connecticut (Priceline), as well as from international companies, such as WeChat and Spotify. In the process you’ll see how the lessons of blitzscaling can be adapted to help build great companies in nearly any ecosystem, albeit with differing degrees of difficulty. That’s the mission of this book. We want to share the secret weapon that has allowed Silicon Valley to punch so much (more than a hundred times) above its population index so that those lessons can be applied far beyond the sixty-mile stretch between the Golden Gate Bridge and San Jose. It is sorely needed.

My friend Peter Thiel has written eloquently about the power of being a contrarian in his book Zero to One. Whenever I interview someone for a job, I like to ask this question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” This question sounds easy because it’s straightforward. Actually, it’s very hard to answer. It’s intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon. And it’s psychologically difficult because anyone trying to answer must say something she knows to be unpopular. Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.

What happened? Many things. But the overriding problem was this: The auto industry got too comfortable. As Intel cofounder Andy Grove once famously proclaimed, “Only the paranoid survive.” Success, he meant, is fragile—and perfection, fleeting. The moment you begin to take success for granted is the moment a competitor lunges for your jugular. Auto industry executives, to say the least, were not paranoid. Instead of listening to a customer base that wanted smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, the auto executives built bigger and bigger. Instead of taking seriously new competition from Japan, they staunchly insisted (both to themselves and to their customers) that MADE IN THE USA automatically meant “best in the world.” Instead of trying to learn from their competitors’ new methods of “lean manufacturing,” they clung stubbornly to their decades-old practices. Instead of rewarding the best people in the organization and firing the worst, they promoted on the basis of longevity and nepotism. Instead of moving quickly to keep up with the changing market, executives willingly embraced “death by committee.” Ross Perot once quipped that if a man saw a snake on the factory floor at GM, they’d form a committee to analyze whether they should kill it. Easy success had transformed the American auto

We tried a number of single-threaded efforts to meet the challenge. We rolled out features one after another, such as a recommendation engine for people that our users should meet and a professional Q&A service. None of them worked well enough to solve the problem. We concluded that the problem might require a Swiss Army knife approach with multiple use cases for multiple groups of users. After all, some people might want a news feed, some might want to track their career progress, and some might be keen on continuing education. Fortunately, LinkedIn had grown to the point where the organization could support multiple threads. We reorganized the product team so that each director of product could focus on a different approach to address engagement. Even though none of those efforts alone proved a silver bullet, the overall combination of them significantly improved user engagement.

The best entrepreneurs don’t just follow Moore’s Law; they anticipate it. Consider Reed Hastings, the cofounder and CEO of Netflix. When he started Netflix, his long-term vision was to provide television on demand, delivered via the Internet. But back in 1997, the technology simply wasn’t ready for his vision—remember, this was during the era of dial-up Internet access. One hour of high-definition video requires transmitting 40 GB of compressed data (over 400 GB without compression). A standard 28.8K modem from that era would have taken over four months to transmit a single episode of Stranger Things. However, there was a technological innovation that would allow Netflix to get partway to Hastings’s ultimate vision—the DVD. Hastings realized that movie DVDs, then selling for around $ 20, were both compact and durable. This made them perfect for running a movie-rental-by-mail business. Hastings has said that he got the idea from a computer science class in which one of the assignments was to calculate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes driving across the country! This was truly a case of technological innovation enabling business model innovation. Blockbuster Video had built a successful business around buying VHS tapes for around $ 100 and renting them out from physical stores, but the bulky, expensive, fragile tapes would never have supported a rental-by-mail business.

The concept of product/ market fit originates in Marc Andreessen’s seminal blog post “The Only Thing That Matters.” In his essay, Andreessen argues that the most important factor in successful start-ups is the combination of market and product. His definition couldn’t be simpler: “Product/ market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.” Without product/ market fit, it’s impossible to grow a start-up into a successful business. As Andreessen notes, You see a surprising number of really well-run start-ups that have all aspects of operations completely buttoned down, HR policies in place, great sales model, thoroughly thought-through marketing plan, great interview processes, outstanding catered food, 30" monitors for all the programmers, top tier VCs on the board—heading straight off a cliff due to not ever finding product/ market fit. Unfortunately, it’s far easier to define product/ market fit than it is to establish it! When you start a new company, the key product/ market fit question you need to answer is whether you have discovered a nonobvious market opportunity where you have a unique advantage or approach, and one that competing players won’t see until you’ve had a chance to build a healthy lead. It’s usually difficult to find such an opportunity in a “hot” space; if an opportunity is obvious to everyone, the chance that you’ll be the one who succeeds is exceedingly low. Most nonobvious opportunities arise from a change in the market that the incumbents aren’t willing or able to adapt to.

In fact, the same basic ingredients can easily be found in numerous start-up clusters in the United States and around the world: Austin, Boston, New York, Seattle, Shanghai, Bangalore, Istanbul, Stockholm, Tel Aviv, and Dubai. To discover the secret to Silicon Valley’s success, you need to look beyond the standard origin story. When people think of Silicon Valley, the first things that spring to mind—after the HBO television show, of course—are the names of famous start-ups and their equally glamorized founders: Apple, Google, Facebook; Jobs/ Wozniak, Page/ Brin, Zuckerberg. The success narrative of these hallowed names has become so universally familiar that people from countries around the world can tell it just as well as Sand Hill Road venture capitalists. It goes something like this: A brilliant entrepreneur discovers an incredible opportunity. After dropping out of college, he or she gathers a small team who are happy to work for equity, sets up shop in a humble garage, plays foosball, raises money from sage venture capitalists, and proceeds to change the world—after which, of course, the founders and early employees live happily ever after, using the wealth they’ve amassed to fund both a new generation of entrepreneurs and a set of eponymous buildings for Stanford University’s Computer Science Department. It’s an exciting and inspiring story. We get the appeal. There’s only one problem. It’s incomplete and deceptive in several important ways. First, while “Silicon Valley” and “start-ups” are used almost synonymously these days, only a tiny fraction of the world’s start-ups actually originate in Silicon Valley, and this fraction has been getting smaller as start-up knowledge spreads around the globe. Thanks to the Internet, entrepreneurs everywhere have access to the same information. Moreover, as other markets have matured, smart founders from around the globe are electing to build companies in start-up hubs in their home countries rather than immigrating to Silicon Valley.

There are only three ways to scale yourself: delegation, amplification, and just plain making yourself better.

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late. —Reid Hoffman, March 2011

Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, said about startups, “You jump off a cliff and you assemble an airplane on the way down”.

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.

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.

Another example of how blitzscaling applies to a completely different type of business is the rapid rise of the shale oil and natural gas industry in the United States during the 2000s. The energy sector scores well on the growth factors we’ve defined. Oil and gas is an enormous, high-margin industry, with a very efficient distribution system. And while the shale industry doesn’t feature many network effects, it has its own source of powerful long-term competitive advantage. In the energy industry, rather than buy land outright, the usual practice is to lease the drilling rights for ninety-nine years for a combination of guaranteed lease payments and royalties. This means that leasing the right land is tantamount to holding an unbreakable monopoly on the oil and gas underneath that land,

Because traditional drilling techniques didn’t work on shale rock formations, the land above those formations had never been leased, which meant that when fracking made those hydrocarbons accessible for the first time, the market to acquire those mineral rights was completely wide open.

Chesapeake moved faster than any other company in its industry, deploying an army of land men to aggressively lease as much land as possible, with instructions to pay whatever was necessary, without knowing whether the gas deposits would justify the price. Hiring an army of land men and paying top dollar for leases sight unseen seemed inefficient…until the wells started producing.

While the hypergrowth of blitzscaling is often synonymous with scrappy start-ups, blitzscaling can take place within larger, established organizations as well.

Most of the orthodoxy in Silicon Valley is about building a good product. I think that’s because most companies in the Valley don’t survive beyond the building-the-product phase. You have to be good at building a product, then you have to be just as good at getting users, then you have to be just as good at building a business model. If you’re missing any of the links in the chain, the whole chain is broken.

First, the Internet has driven the cost of discovery for products and services lower than ever. Unlike in the past, when companies needed to offer goods in retail stores or broadcast advertising in order to be visible to customers, today buyers can find whatever they’re looking for on Amazon or other online marketplaces like Alibaba, in app stores, or, when all else fails, by Googling. Because products and services that are already popular will almost always come up first in search results, companies with a competitive advantage can quickly grow to the point where the increasing returns of network effects produce a winner-take-most or winner-take-all market.

Managers are frontline leaders who worry about day-to-day tactics: they create, implement, and execute detailed plans that allow the organization to either do new things or do existing things more efficiently.

By contrast, 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.

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.

When Selina Tobaccowala joined SurveyMonkey in 2009, she had to build up the company’s data infrastructure quickly.

It’s tempting to assume she achieved this despite the “Nos.” But in truth, each of those 148 “Nos” was a clue that ultimately made her business even stronger. Some sharpened her view on who her user was—and who her user wasn’t. Some helped her grasp how her competition might think. And some gave her an early warning about the ways her company might fail. At the end of the fundraising process alone, Kathryn had a roadmap marked with every potential pitfall she’d need to navigate around—and the unexplored territory she could explore ahead of any competitors.

Kathryn’s tale in many ways echoes the origin story of most great startups, and indeed, most great ideas. We’re taught to get to “Yes” as quickly as we can—but there’s so much more to gain by seeking out and celebrating the “Nos.

When you talk to people who have scaled a business—and we have talked to many, at length and in depth—you begin to uncover some counterintuitive truths about scaling: The best, most scalable ideas are often the ones that seem the most implausible. An encounter with resistance at the start of your journey is a good thing. Early, honest feedback from the right people will have an outsized impact on helping you refine your idea. Doing things that don’t scale—especially at the earliest stages—can set you up for dramatic scale later on. Even if everything you thought you knew turns out to be wrong, you can still achieve your goals—as long as you accept the truth and adjust your plan.

If you spend thirty minutes researching a person in your extended network (LinkedIn is a great place to start), and tailor your request for an introduction to something you’ve learned, your request will stand out.

PROVEN PATTERN #1: BITS RATHER THAN ATOMS Google and Facebook are largely software businesses that focus on electronic bits rather than material atoms. Bits-based businesses have a much easier time serving a global market, which in turn makes it easier to achieve a large market size. Bits are also far easier to move around than atoms, so bits-based businesses can more easily tap into distribution techniques like virality, and their ability to be highly networked provides more opportunities to leverage network effects. Bits-based businesses tend to be high-gross-margin businesses because they have fewer variable costs. Bits also make it easier to design around growth limiters. You can iterate more quickly on software products (many Internet companies release new software daily) than on physical products, making it faster and cheaper to achieve product/market fit. And

Remember, starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.

Only spend money to fix things that are on the critical path to reach the next phase of scale;

Winning careers, like winning start-ups, are in permanent beta: always a work in progress.

Blitzscaling requires more than just courage and skill on the part of the entrepreneur. It also requires an environment that is willing to finance intelligent risks with both financial capital and human capital, which are the essential ingredients for blitzscaling. Think of them as fuel and oxygen; you need both to propel the rocket skyward. Meanwhile, the infrastructure of your organization is the actual structure of your rocket, which you’re rebuilding on the fly as you rise. Your job as a leader and an entrepreneur is to make sure that you have sufficient fuel to propel your growth while making the necessary mechanical adjustments to the actual rocket ship to keep it from flying apart as it accelerates. Fortunately, this is more possible today than it has ever been in the past.

Before dreaming about the future or making plans, you have to articulate what you already have going for you ‒ as entrepreneurs do.’ These are the words of Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, in his book The Start-Up of You. He and his co-author Ben Casnocha were trying to illustrate how exactly a person could transform.

Whatever form it takes, it’s something that’s different, real, and unique. It’s making travel excessively personal when it had become impersonal. “It’s anticommodity,” says Greylock’s Reid Hoffman. “It’s uniqueness. It’s humanization.

As we’ve discussed, key growth factors like distribution and network effects tend to provide disproportionate rewards to a company that is the first in its space to achieve critical scale.

we suspect that the market for food delivery from existing restaurants—a pure commodity business—is unlikely to offer any lasting competitive advantages that would justify an expensive blitzscaling campaign.

Susan Fowler described in her personal blog as “a game-of-thrones political war” with managers fighting for advancement: The ramifications of these political games were significant: projects were abandoned left and right, OKRs were changed multiple times each quarter, nobody knew what our organizational priorities would be one day to the next, and very little ever got done. We all lived under fear that our teams would be dissolved, there would be another re-org, and we’d have to start on yet another new project with an impossible deadline. It was an organization in complete, unrelenting chaos.

What can we do to surprise you?” or “What would it take for me to design something that you would literally tell every single person you’ve ever encountered?

People should be part of building the future rather than feeling like the future is being

El empresario y cofundador de LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, manifestó: «No importa cuán brillante sea su mente o su estrategia; si está jugando solo, siempre perderá ante un equipo».

Who I am in this context is a form of advanced computational math that can produce natural language outputs that resemble human communication.

Practical Magic, Alice Hoffman Maybe in Another Life, Taylor Jenkins Reid The Bride Test, Helen Hoang What Alice Forgot, Liane Moriarty Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng Josh and Hazel’s Guide to Not Dating, Christina Lauren The Proposal, Jasmine Guillory

Many people think you get career stability by minimizing all risk. But ironically, in a changing world, that’s one of the riskiest things you can do.

Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, observed that an entrepreneur is someone who will jump off a cliff and assemble an airplane on the way down.

For many new Internet entrepreneurs, Jeff Bezos of Amazon is a great choice. Read all the shareholder letters from Amazon’s annual reports. Reid Hoffman wrote a cool book, The Startup of You.

While you don’t want to make career moves on 0 percent information, you also don’t want to wait till you have 100 percent information—or else you’ll wait forever. Jetting off to vacation in Hawaii with no set itinerary introduces many uncertainties about what will transpire, but it’s not particularly risky. After all, how likely are you to have a bad time in Hawaii? But the biggest and best opportunities frequently are the ones with the most question marks. Don’t let uncertainty lull you into overestimating the risk.

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

This formal philosophy of learning treats knowledge like a fixed asset: learn, then you have it forever! But as a modern professional, you can’t acquire knowledge this way, because the knowledge you need isn’t static—it’s always changing. Stockpiling facts won’t get you anywhere. What will get you somewhere is being able to access the information you need, when you need it.

This phenomenon is partly due to the nature of how we learn about ourselves and need to shuffle between jobs to gain experience. It is also largely a reality of the new nature of work, which has everyone looking more like a freelancer than a lifer. As Reid Hoffman writes in The Start-Up of You, we are increasingly thinking of our careers more entrepreneurially and see ourselves as start-ups, selling our time, talent, and networks.2 This approach creates a tremendous amount of freedom. We are not tied to one job or employer; we are the masters of our own destiny. But as Harvard’s Barry Schwartz observed, “On the other side of liberation sits chaos and paralysis.

Even when people are well intentioned,” writes LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, “they tend to overvalue their own contributions and undervalue those of others.