If you’re looking for the best collection of Reid Hoffman quotes then look no further.
Reid Hoffman is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist and author best known for co-founding LinkedIn. He is currently a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners and has an estimated net worth of $1.9 billion as of 2019.
While in college, according to Hoffman, he formed a conviction that he wanted to try to influence the state of the world on a large scale. With that in mind, Hoffman pursued a career in business and entrepreneurship.
He worked at Apple and Fujitsu before co-founding his first company – SocialNet.com in 1997. According to fellow entrepreneur and venture capitalist, Peter Thiel, SocialNet.com was “literally an idea before its time. It was a social network 7 or 8 years before that became a trend.”
Hoffman left SocialNet.com and joined PayPal where he served as COO (Chief Operating Officer) before it was acquired by Ebay.
Reid Hoffman would go on to co-found LinkedIn in 2002. Today it is the biggest business orientated social network in the world with many seeing it as the most advantageous social networking tool available to job seekers and business professionals today.
But Reid Hoffman has also been a prolific investor in Silicon Valley, making investments in companies such as Airbnb, Digg and Flickr to name a few.
He has also co-authored two New York Times bestsellers with his books The Start-Up of You and The Alliance. He also hosts the Masters of Scale podcast with guests such as Mark Zuckerberg, Brian Chesky and Sheryl Sandberg.
Reid Hoffman is viewed as one of the good guys making it and he certainly has made the impact on the world that he set out to do.
The following Reid Hoffman quotes are packed full of wisdom on success, startups, entrepreneurship, leadership, networking and relationships. Enjoy!
Inspirational Reid Hoffman Quotes On Success
1. “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.” – Reid Hoffman
2. “Ironically, in a changing world, playing it safe is one of the riskiest things you can do.” – Reid Hoffman
3. “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.” – Reid Hoffman
4. “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.” – Reid Hoffman
5. “Seeing what someone’s reading is like seeing the first derivative of their thinking.” – Reid Hoffman
6. “Everything in life has some risk, and what you have to actually learn to do is how to navigate it.” – Reid Hoffman
7. “People who take risk intelligently can usually actually make a lot more progress than people who don’t.” – Reid Hoffman
8. “You have to be constantly reinventing yourself and investing in the future.” – Reid Hoffman
9. “Remember: If you don’t find risk, risk will find you.” – Reid Hoffman
10. “If you’re not growing, you’re contracting.” – Reid Hoffman
11. “You remake yourself as you grow and as the world changes. Your identity doesn’t get found. It emerges.” – Reid Hoffman
12. “Managing risk is a key variable, frankly, all aspects of life, business is just one of them, and one of the things that most people do in terms of managing risk, that’s actually bad thinking, is they think they can manage risk to zero. Everything has some risk to it. You know, you drive your car down the street, a drunk driver may hit you. So what you’re doing is you’re actually trying to get to an acceptable level of risk.” – Reid Hoffman
13. “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.” – Reid Hoffman
14. “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.'” – Reid Hoffman
15. “Change is the only constant.” – Reid Hoffman
16. “Each year, I ask, ‘Now that I have this knowledge, these resources, what can I do?'” – Reid Hoffman
17. “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.” – Reid Hoffman (One of my favorite Reid Hoffman quotes on success. What’s yours?)
Reid Hoffman Quotes For Startups, Entrepreneurs & Leadership
18. “An entrepreneur is someone who jumps off a cliff, and builds a plane on his way down.” – Reid Hoffman
19. “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product you’ve launched too late.” – Reid Hoffman
20. “No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.” – Reid Hoffman
21. “The person passionate about what he or she is doing will outwork and outlast the guy motivated solely focused on making money.” – Reid Hoffman
22. “When you’re doing work you care about, you are able to work harder and better.” – Reid Hoffman
23. “Great opportunities almost never fit your schedule.” – Reid Hoffman
24. “If you don’t start out aiming for the big game, you almost never can get there.” – Reid Hoffman (This is one of the best Reid Hoffman quotes for entrepreneurs. Set high goals!)
25. “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.” – Reid Hoffman
26. “Every internet entrepreneur should answer these questions: How do we get to 1 million users? Then how do we get to 10 million users? Then how will you get deep engagement by your users.” – Reid Hoffman
27. “A business that isn’t investing in tomorrow’s opportunities and technologies – well, that’s a company already in the process of dying.” – Reid Hoffman
28. “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.” – Reid Hoffman
29. “Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location.” – Reid Hoffman
30. “In the venture capital industry, just picking winners is a losing strategy. The goal is to pick blockbusters, companies that can scale from a team of founders in a garage to a multi-billion dollar IPO in less than a decade.” – Reid Hoffman
31. “Society flourishes when people think entrepreneurially.” – Reid Hoffman
32. “Pay attention to your culture and your hires from the very beginning.” – Reid Hoffman
33. “Ultimately, the alignment of interests, values, and aspirations increases the odds of a long-term strong alliance between a company and its talent.” – Reid Hoffman
34. “How you manage your own personal career is the exact way you manage a small business. Your brand matters.” – Reid Hoffman
35. “There are opportunities that you get during crises times. Crises times are a great time to start a business.” – Reid Hoffman
36. “We don’t celebrate failure in Silicon Valley. We celebrate learning.” – Reid Hoffman
37. “A business without loyalty is a business without long-term thinking. A business without long-term thinking is a business that’s unable to invest in the future.” – Reid Hoffman
38. “A leader’s job is not to put greatness into people, but rather to recognize that it already exists, and to create the environment where that greatness can emerge and grow.” – Reid Hoffman
39. “Start a personal blog and begin developing a public reputation and public portfolio of work that’s not tied to your employer.” – Reid Hoffman
40. “Establish an identity independent of your employer, city, and industry.” – Reid Hoffman
41. “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.” – Reid Hoffman
42. “The most entrepreneurial employees want to establish “personal brands” that stand apart from their employers’. It’s a rational, necessary response to the end of lifetime employment.” – Reid Hoffman
43. “Involve yourself in organizations that try to systemically improve society at a massive scale.” – Reid Hoffman
44. “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.” – Reid Hoffman
45. “Whether you want to learn a new skill or simply be better at the job you were hired to do, it’s now your job to train and invest in yourself.” – Reid Hoffman
46. “Founder’ is a state of mind, not a job description, and if done right, even CEOs who join after day 1 can become founders.” – Reid Hoffman
47. “You need to think and act like you’re running a start-up: your career.” – Reid Hoffman
48. “One of the metaphors that I use for start-ups is, you throw yourself off a cliff and assemble your airplane on the way down. If you don’t solve the right problem at the right time, that’s the end. Mortality puts priorities into sharp focus.” – Reid Hoffman
49. “What happens during recessions, is you have less windfalls just helping you cover mistakes. You have to be more careful about not making mistakes.” – Reid Hoffman
50. “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
51. “The best ideas make you want to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in the same breath.” – Reid Hoffman
52. “The same instincts that make us good students can make us lousy entrepreneurs.” – Reid Hoffman
53. “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
54. “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
55. “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
56. “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
57. “The way you deal with bullies is you change their economic equation. Make it more expensive for them to hassle you.” – Reid Hoffman
58. “The opportunity to build an enduring product far outweighs the cost of alienating a few users along the way. And the sooner you internalize that trade-off, the faster you’ll move along the path to scale.” – Reid Hoffman
59. “Blitzscaling is what you do when you need to grow really, really quickly. It’s the science and art of rapidly building out a company to serve a large and usually global market, with the goal of becoming the first mover at scale. This is high-impact entrepreneurship.” – Reid Hoffman
60. “A startup, to a some degree, is a set of those challenges of, ‘If you don’t solve this, you’re dead.'” – Reid Hoffman
61. “Innovation comes from long-term thinking and iterative execution.” – Reid Hoffman
62. “The key issue when you’re looking at cost cutting is to always plan for the future.” – Reid Hoffman
63. “If I ever hear a founder talk about oh this is how I have a balanced life so on and so forth - they’re not committed to winning.” – Reid Hoffman
64. “First mover Advantage doesn’t go to the company that starts up, it goes to the company that scales up.” – Reid Hoffman
65. “Having a great idea for a product is important, but having a great idea for product distribution is even more important.” – Reid Hoffman
66. “The key thing for all businesses, and especially of course technology businesses or businesses that employ technology as a key kind of strategic advantage, is you always have to be investing in the future.” – Reid Hoffman
67. “Make sure a certain percentage of the people that you’re hiring are generalists so that you can be, kind of reconfigured in the workforce pretty easily.” – Reid Hoffman
68. “I don’t normally think of like most successful moments, because like most entrepreneurs, I tend to think that however how high of a mountain I’ve climbed, I’m always looking at the next mountain to climb.” – Reid Hoffman
69. “Good ideas need good strategy to realize their potential.” – Reid Hoffman
70. “Before dreaming about the future or marking plans, you need to articulate what you already have going for you – as entrepreneurs do.” – Reid Hoffman
71. “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.” – Reid Hoffman
72. “‘Keeping your options open’ is frequently more of a risk than committing to a plan of action.” – Reid Hoffman
73. “A product needs to be sufficiently innovative to distinguish itself from the pack, but not so forward thinking as to alienate the user.” – Reid Hoffman
74. “Be persistent, and hang on to your vision. And at the same time, be flexible.” – Reid Hoffman
75. “Whatever the situation, actions, not plans, generate lessons that help you test your hypotheses against reality.” – Reid Hoffman
76. “Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.” – Reid Hoffman
77. “Until you hear “No,” you haven’t been turned down.” – Reid Hoffman
78. “When the naysayers are loud, turn up the music.” – Reid Hoffman
Reid Hoffman Quotes On Networking & Relationships
79 “The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be.” – Reid Hoffman (This is one of my favorite Reid Hoffman quotes and advice. What’s yours?)
80. “A networker likes to meet people. I don’t. I like accomplishing things in the world. You meet people when you want to accomplish something.” – Reid Hoffman
81. “What makes the meaning of life is people, so you try to be good to people immediately around you and in your broader community. So a lot of my projects are about how I can affect the world in the hundreds of millions.” – Reid Hoffman
82. “Your network is the people who want to help you, and you want to help them, and that’s really powerful.” – Reid Hoffman
83. “Help the people in your network and let them help you.” – Reid Hoffman
84. “My belief and goal is that every professional in the world should be on a service liked LinkedIn.” – Reid Hoffman
85. “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
86. “Opportunities do not float like clouds in the sky. They’re attached to people. If you’re looking for an opportunity, you’re really looking for a person.” – Reid Hoffman
87. “It’s better to be the best connected than the most connected.” – Reid Hoffman
88. “Not only can anyone be an entrepreneur, but they must be.” – Reid Hoffman
89. “The thing that changes your professional life, your capabilities, your learning, your understanding, your opportunity flow, your ability to make things happen, is the center relationships you have with powerful and effective people around you in the industry, in the activity that you want to be doing.” – Reid Hoffman
90. “The value of being connected and transparent is so high that the roadbumps of privacy issues are much lower in actual experience than people’s fears.” – Reid Hoffman
91. “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.” – Reid Hoffman
92. “If you want to build a strong network that will help you move ahead in your career, it’s vital to first take stock of the connections you already have.” – Reid Hoffman
93. “If you are not receiving or making at least one introduction a month, you are probably not fully engaging your extended professional network.” – Reid Hoffman
94. “One lunch is worth dozens of emails.” – Reid Hoffman
95. “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.” – Reid Hoffman
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