A biography for Reid Hoffmanhasn’t been written yet.
“Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins. Facebook is ego. Zynga is sloth. LinkedIn is greed.”
“Business is the systematic playing of games.”
“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.”
“Each year, I ask, 'Now that I have this knowledge, these resources, what can I do?'”
“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.”
“You have to be constantly reinventing yourself and investing in the future.”
“The reason the social-networking phenomenon is something that I invested in early and massively - I led the Series A financing for Friendster; I founded a company called Socialnet in 1997; I founded LinkedIn; and I was part of the first round of financing in Facebook - it sounds trivial, but people matter.”
“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.”
“An entrepreneur is someone who will jump off a cliff and assemble an airplane on the way down.”
“Silicon Valley tends to be very myopic - to be focused on one or two things - which has some strengths as well as weaknesses.”