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
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.
Jeremy Stoppelman started Yelp. Max Levchin started Slide. I started LinkedIn. It was a mininova explosion of folks jumping out to doing other entrepreneurial activities.
Most often I am only interested in an idea if it's going to get hundreds of millions of users. That's the scale that I am always trying to play to.
The entrepreneurial journey starts with jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.
People will be discovering that the Internet helps their career. One of my theses is that every individual is now a small business; how you manage your own personal career is the exact way you manage a small business. Your brand matters. That is how LinkedIn operates.
First mover Advantage doesn't go to the company that starts up, it goes to the company that scales up
One of the tests that I frequently use in an interaction is I push on the idea and what I'm looking for is both flexibility & persistence.
Not only CAN anyone be an entrepreneur, but they MUST be.
Success...is no longer a simple ascension of steps. You need to climb sideways and sometimes down, and sometimes you need to swing from the jungle gym and establish your own turf somewhere else on the playground.
It's better to be the best connected than the most connected.
Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins. Facebook is ego. Zynga is sloth. LinkedIn is greed.
So usually you have to have product distribution as more fundamental than what the actual product is.
All human beings are entrepreneurs.
It's nice to be happy. But the meaning of life is meaning - what's the impact you're having on the world. Suffering to accomplish that is a perfectly fine thing.