Reid Hoffman
Reid Hoffman
Reid Garrett Hoffmanis an American internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist and author. Hoffman is the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network used primarily for professional networking. Hoffman, with a net worth of US$4.7 billion, is ranked as #341 on the list of the world's richest people...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth5 August 1967
CityStanford, CA
CountryUnited States of America
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.
Part of what being a great founder is, is being both able to hold the belief, to think about what it is you want to be doing and where... you want to be going, but also be smart enough that you're essentially listening to criticism, negative feedback, competitive entries.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And people who take risk intelligently can usually actually make a lot more progress than people who don't.
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.
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.
I'm a little unusual: I'm a six-person-or-less extrovert.
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.
My belief and goal is that every professional in the world should be on a service liked LinkedIn.
If I ever hear a founder talk about oh this is how I have a balanced life so on and so forth - they're not committed to winning.