Reid Hoffman
Reid Hoffman
Reid Garrett Hoffmanis an American internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist and author. Hoffman is the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network used primarily for professional networking. Hoffman, with a net worth of US$4.7 billion, is ranked as #341 on the list of the world's richest people...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth5 August 1967
CityStanford, CA
CountryUnited States of America
Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location.
What great founders do is seek the networks that will be essential to their task . Usually it's best to have two or three people on a team, rather than a solo founder.
Help the people in your network. And let them help you.
The reality is: a founder is someone who deals with a ton of different headaches and no one is universally super powered.
Part of what being a great founder is, is being both able to hold the belief, to think about what it is you want to be doing and where... you want to be going, but also be smart enough that you're essentially listening to criticism, negative feedback, competitive entries.
The metaphor that I frequently use for entrepreneurship is jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane plane on the way down.
Part of the entrepreneurial thing is there are lots of ways to die.
When you have an idea, a classic entrepreneurial impulse is to hold the idea close to you and not tell people and that's almost always a mistake.
It's very conventional to say that you're a contrarian these days.
When you think about being contrarian, you have to think about - how is it that smart people will disagree with me, disagree with me ...from a position of intelligence, and there is something that I know that they don't know, that will actually in fact play out to be true.
My belief and goal is that every professional in the world should be on a service liked LinkedIn.
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.
I'm a little unusual: I'm a six-person-or-less extrovert.
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.