50 Quotes from Reid Hoffman

1. “The person passionate about what he or she is doing will outwork and outlast the guy motivated solely focused on making money.”

2. “When you’re doing work you care about, you are able to work harder and better.”

3. “Great opportunities almost never fit your schedule.”

4. “The same instincts that make us good students can make us lousy entrepreneurs.”

5. “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.”

6. “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.”

7. “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.”

8. “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.”

9. “It’s better to be the best connected than the most connected.”

10. “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.”

11. “Ironically, in a changing world, playing it safe is one of the riskiest things you can do.”

12. “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.”

13. “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.”

14. “Seeing what someone’s reading is like seeing the first derivative of their thinking.”

15. “Everything in life has some risk, and what you have to actually learn to do is how to navigate it.”

16. “People who take risk intelligently can usually actually make a lot more progress than people who don’t.”

17. “You have to be constantly reinventing yourself and investing in the future.”

18. “Remember: If you don’t find risk, risk will find you.”

19. “If you’re not growing, you’re contracting.”

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

21. “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.”

22. “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.”

23. “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.'”

24. “Change is the only constant.”

25. “Each year, I ask, ‘Now that I have this knowledge, these resources, what can I do?'”

26. “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.

27. “An entrepreneur is someone who jumps off a cliff, and builds a plane on his way down.”

28. “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product you’ve launched too late.”

29. “No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.”

30. “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. S

31. “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.”

32. “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.”

33. “A business that isn’t investing in tomorrow’s opportunities and technologies – well, that’s a company already in the process of dying.”

34. “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.”

35. “Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location.”

36. “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.”

37. “Society flourishes when people think entrepreneurially.”

38. “Pay attention to your culture and your hires from the very beginning.”

39. “Ultimately, the alignment of interests, values, and aspirations increases the odds of a long-term strong alliance between a company and its talent.”

40. “How you manage your own personal career is the exact way you manage a small business. Your brand matters.”

41. “There are opportunities that you get during crises times. Crises times are a great time to start a business.”

42. “We don’t celebrate failure in Silicon Valley. We celebrate learning.”

43. “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.”

44. “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.”

45. “Start a personal blog and begin developing a public reputation and public portfolio of work that’s not tied to your employer.”

46. “Establish an identity independent of your employer, city, and industry.”

47. “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.”

48. “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.”

49. “Involve yourself in organizations that try to systemically improve society at a massive scale.”

50. “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.”