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
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.
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.
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.
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 reason the social-networking phenomenon is something that I invested in early and massively - I led the Series A financing for Friendster; I founded a company called Socialnet in 1997; I founded LinkedIn; and I was part of the first round of financing in Facebook - it sounds trivial, but people matter.
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.
My belief and goal is that every professional in the world should be on a service liked LinkedIn.
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.