Reid Hoffman Quotes - Page 6

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

All human beings are entrepreneurs.

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

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

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.

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

I get energy from one-on-one conversations most often, and I lose energy from group conversations most often.

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.

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.

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

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.

Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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