Top 226 Quotes & Sayings by Reid Hoffman - Page 4

I think Hillary [Clinton] hears the anger in a broad swath of the American people, and she says, "OK, how do I help create a future that's good for you?"

I actually think we need to put our energies, as entrepreneurs, as technology inventors, as government, to being much more inclusive. I think the key thing is actually working together.

Democracy is always frustrating.

We understand that most of the middle class doesn't know what to do, doesn't feel like they have economic progress, and [Hillary Clinton] goes, "OK, I realize that's my top agenda item. That's the thing I need to do."

Silicon Valley tends to believe in the individual who creates a small group and does something big. Democracy is always frustrating, but it creates a society that, for example, allows us to invest in each other's kids, to have public education, to have both a greater society and individual freedom for creating businesses.

Part of what being a great founder is, is being both able to hold the belief, to think about where it is you want to be doing and want to be going, but also be smart enough that you are essentially listening to criticism, negative feedback, competitive entries.

We have made a huge amount of progress over the last 50 years by enabling trade, by enabling kind of collaboration and learning. And actually, in fact, when you look at your average 30-year-old today, they're much better off than a 30-year-old 20 years ago, 30 years ago, because of progress in technology and health care and all the rest of this.

I think we realized the depth of frustration through the current political process. So we said, "OK, we know there's a serious problem here, we know we need to work on it," and now it's "Oh, we need to work on it a lot faster."

At Silicon Valley, I'm extremely sympathetic to the revolutionary response. I not only agree with it emotionally. I agree with it practically. And the only thing I disagree with is, I don't think Donald Trump is that. Trump is blow it up for no good reason at all. You want to actually do revolution with a target, with an idea, with building a new system.

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.

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.

So usually you have to have product distribution as more fundamental than what the actual product is.

I think I knew how frightened people were [when Donald Trump was elected], and I think I knew that people were worried about their future. I don't think I realized that they would be willing to risk kind of a 1920s Germany in order to blow it all up, not realizing that we've accomplished a lot as Americans, and we want to keep the good things and revolutionize the new things.

You remake yourself as you grow and as the world changes. Your identity doesn’t get found. It emerges.

[Hillary Clinton] is part of the establishment, and that's good for foreign policy and for understanding the ongoing health care system.

My greatest influences are actually probably a set of different teachers. And these teachers, most prominently at my high school, but also a few others, helped kind of instill in me, thinking thoughts about how life is meaningful in terms of how we all kind of live in a network of people and how you interact with those people is part of what makes life essentially meaningful and then kind of concepts to think about, how do you add value to other people's lives? How do they add value to yours? And how do you kind of form a community together in the network?

Everyone, you know, during crises times, is much more focused on, okay, how do we get the boat completely seaworthy, sailing along well, and everything going well? And so as long as you're communicating how the general strategy of the company and how the work they can do to add to that and to make that more successful and the thing that they can contribute to that, that is generally very motivating for employees in crisis times.

One of the great strengths of American culture is this empowerment of individual, is the individual being able to be entrepreneurial, create new things. But you create a whole group of people to make great companies. It's employees and investors and customers and partners. The fabric of society, of a network of relations, is key to being successful.

We don't celebrate failure in Silicon Valley. We celebrate learning

...Silicon Valley's success comes from the way its companies build alliances with their employees.

All human beings are entrepreneurs.

Silicon Valley tends to believe in the individual who creates a small group and does something big.

In crisis times, it's actually not more difficult to motivate your staff, because everyone gets much more focused on how they control their own economic destiny. So, what you do is you have clear communication, which is always a good leadership technique, and you talk about how you can build something good and strong in the future, and how you can work together in order to do that.

I think most of [people] are not very well educated themselves to understand the Winston Churchill line - democracy is the worst of all governments until you consider all the other ones.

People generally worry about social networking more than they need to. In kind of consumer internet investing and on social and professional networks, I kind of look at time spending and time efficiency. You know, time saving sites. So on time spending sites, things where you play lots of games or that sort of thing, you might worry about a productivity loss if people are spending a lot of time doing that. So if there's a lot of kind of addictive gaming going on during work hours, that won't be as helpful to you.

The CEO's job is always about leadership. It's about leadership in a vision, in terms of where you're going, it's about making sure that you have the right organization and staff, and that you have kind of clearly communicated what some of the plays are and what some of the goals are in terms of the business and how do you organize together in order to make that happen.

The key thing for a CEO to keep their head in the game is recognize that there's turbulent times, plan for, you know, bad luck as well as good luck, keep people focused on what the key, you know, business wins are, and you know, provide the energy that people always need in order to, you know, to go into battle because, you know, work is hard and go into work and do that well. And provide a good leadership beacon for that. In other words, it's the same thing that makes good leadership in any other time.

Because in our boom times, everything is growing, usually, you know, the kind of things that come to mind are Wild, Wild, West, or land grabs, you know, these sorts of things, in order to make something, you know, kind of to grow into the future and to get all the growth that you need to have. So you tend to hire a lot because you're running fast to the future.

World-changing startups need to be premised on accurate contrarian theories.

The question is: how you cross uneven ground, how you assemble networks around you.

Part of the entrepreneurial thing is there are lots of ways to die.

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.

Data only exists within the framework of a vision you're building to, a hypothesis of where you're moving to.

If you don't start out aiming for the big game, you almost never can get there.

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.

You gotta be both flexible and persistent.

It's useful to be able to recognize whether you're on track or not. To have that belief, but also paranoia about am I tracking against my investment thesis.

It's very conventional to say that you're a contrarian these days.

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.

There's an ability to learn & adapt, an ability to constantly have a vision that's driving you, but to be taking input from all sources.

A little-known company with a realistic framework that appeals to entrepreneurial employees is going to be more attractive than a famous company that treats its people like disposable assets.

A product needs to be sufficiently innovative to distinguish itself from the pack, but not so forward thinking as to alienate the user.

The challenge when you think about product distribution is: how are you competing for potential customers or potential members time?

It is impossible to dissociate an individual from the environment of which he is a part. No story of achievement should ever be removed from its broader social context.

When I'm raising money, this fundraising, I'm thinking about the next fundraising. I'm thinking how I'm set up for it.

It’s actually pretty easy to be contrarian. It’s hard to be contrarian and right.