Reid Hoffman

“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.”

“It's unprecedented in the post-World War II era to have the leader of Germany say, 'Oh we can't rely on America anymore.'”

“As a candidate, Trump could make outlandish statements with little regard for their Constitutional implications. As President, he is pledged to respect the Constitution's authority, and the specific rights and protections it guarantees to every American citizen.”

“For me, the ethical arguments that resonate strongest are the ones that oppose the death penalty.”

“The key thing for me has always been how we realize the mission - enabling every professional in the world to change their own economic curve by the strength of their alliances and connections with other people.”

“The key thing is to invest in the future, and what that means is - when you're deploying technology or you're a technology business - is to make sure that you're keeping on the innovation cycle, where you're both creating and adopting the new business practices and the new techniques in order to drive your business the right way.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Many employer-employee relationships are built on a lie that starts from the first interaction: neither party automatically conceives of the relationship as something that will last a lifetime, but both interact as if it is. This lie of omission bases the relationship on distrust.”

“LinkedIn allows professionals, including the middle class, to invest in themselves in order to find the right jobs. That essentially can help make them prosperous.”

“Starting a company is like throwing yourself off the cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.”

“Blitzscaling is always managerially inefficient - and it burns through a lot of capital quickly. But you have to be willing to take on these inefficiencies in order to scale up. That's the opposite of what large organizations optimize for.”

“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.”

“I've long believed that if you're not embarrassed by your first product release, you've released too late.”

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

“A startup, to a some degree, is a set of those challenges of, 'If you don't solve this, you're dead.'”

“People are still very focused on the startup story: Risk-taking founders, with a bold idea, some capital and a network supportive environment, go out and take the shot on goal. But the problem is, this is no longer the truth about what makes Silicon Valley so special.”

“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.”

“Your network is the people who want to help you, and you want to help them, and that's really powerful.”

“Our elected officials must understand that we, the American people, expect them to perform the duties of their office, even when that means working with other elected officials from different parties.”