Reid Hoffman's Quotes

Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins. Facebook is ego. Zynga is sloth. LinkedIn is greed.

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

I actually think every individual is now an entrepreneur, whether they recognize it or not.

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.

And people who take risk intelligently can usually actually make a lot more progress than people who don't.

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

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

I'm a little unusual: I'm a six-person-or-less extrovert.

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.

My belief and goal is that every professional in the world should be on a service liked LinkedIn.

Relatively few people should start companies.

Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location.

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

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.

I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture - I'd write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be.

If you can get better at your job, you should be an active member of LinkedIn, because LinkedIn should be connecting you to the information, insights and people to be more effective.

Jeremy Stoppelman started Yelp. Max Levchin started Slide. I started LinkedIn. It was a mininova explosion of folks jumping out to doing other entrepreneurial activities.

MySpace is like a bar, Facebook is like the BBQ you have in your back yard with friends and family, play games, share pictures. Facebook is much better for sharing than MySpace. LinkedIn is the office, how you stay up to date, solve professional problems.

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.

What makes the meaning of life is people, so you try to be good to people immediately around you and in your broader community. So a lot of my projects are about how I can affect the world in the hundreds of millions.

Zynga is about fun. Fun is important. Fun is good. And to have the ability to do something fun for 10 or 15 minutes that's right at your fingertips and involves your friends, well, that's better than television in terms of social connectivity.

It is nearly always the most improbable things that really come to pass.

Boys should not play with weapons more dangerous than they understand.

Is it not in the most absolute simplicity that real genius plies its pinions the most wonderfully?

It is useless to contend with the irresistible power of Time, which goes on continually creating by a process of constant destruction.

Not a single man on earth knows from his own experience the how and where of his birth, only from tradition, which is often very uncertain.