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
Innovation comes from long-term thinking and iterative execution.
The future is sooner and stranger than you think.
A product needs to be sufficiently innovative to distinguish itself from the pack, but not so forward thinking as to alienate the user.
The challenge when you think about product distribution is: how are you competing for potential customers or potential members time.
When I'm raising money, this fundraising, I'm thinking about the next fundraising. I'm thinking how I'm set up for it.
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.
You should have an investment thesis that essentially says why you think this is potentially a good idea.
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.
This is classic when you begin thinking about what is a great founder is, you navigate what is apparent paradoxes.
I actually think every individual is now an entrepreneur, whether they recognize it or not.
Society flourishes when people think entrepreneurally.
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.