Great opportunities almost never fit your schedule. Reid Hoffman More Quotes by Reid Hoffman More Quotes From Reid Hoffman People will be discovering that the Internet helps their career. One of my theses is that every individual is now a small business; how you manage your own personal career is the exact way you manage a small business. Your brand matters. That is how LinkedIn operates. Reid Hoffman careers matter people One thing I learned in '97, when I thought the right time to found a company was during a swing-up, is that it's much better to start during an economic downturn. Partnerships are easier; hiring is easier; and the competition starts later. Reid Hoffman partnership swings competition Everything in life has some risk, and what you have to actually learn to do is how to navigate it. Reid Hoffman navigate risk Having a great idea for a product is important, but having a great idea for product distribution is even more important. Reid Hoffman distribution important ideas First mover Advantage doesn't go to the company that starts up, it goes to the company that scales up Reid Hoffman scales advantage firsts There are opportunities that you get during crises times. Crises times are a great time to start a business. Reid Hoffman great-times crisis opportunity Success...is no longer a simple ascension of steps. You need to climb sideways and sometimes down, and sometimes you need to swing from the jungle gym and establish your own turf somewhere else on the playground. Reid Hoffman swings simple somewhere-else Managing risk is a key variable, frankly, all aspects of life, business is just one of them, and one of the things that most people do in terms of managing risk, that's actually bad thinking, is they think they can manage risk to zero. Everything has some risk to it. You know, you drive your car down the street, a drunk driver may hit you. So what you're doing is you're actually trying to get to an acceptable level of risk. Reid Hoffman zero keys thinking When you’re doing work you care about, you are able to work harder and better. Reid Hoffman able care hard-work Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins. Facebook is ego. Zynga is sloth. LinkedIn is greed. Reid Hoffman greed ego sloth It's better to be the best connected than the most connected. Reid Hoffman being-the-best connected Now, in economic crises times, the kind of things you're looking at is it's generally harder to get capital, revenue growth may be more, revenue lines may be unstable or growth may be less easy to predict that you're going to get to. And so what you do is you take a certain conservative approach of when, as all entrepreneurs should do, you plan for both good luck and bad luck, you put extra time on, "Okay, if I have bad luck, what do I do about that?" Reid Hoffman extra-time entrepreneur good-luck 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. Reid Hoffman founders committed winning If you have to conduct layoffs, which is always a regrettable thing, there's kind of three things that are very important. One is to communicate well with your employees in order to help them understand why it is you're doing, and how. Second is to make sure that the employees who are part of the go forward, understand kind of what happened and are not like the ground doesn't keep moving. It's like, okay, we did that, we're moving forward, here we go. And then for the employees that you unfortunately have to let go, try to provide as much support for them as possible. Reid Hoffman letting-go order moving I find that the interesting challenges, because there's obvious things where, you know, don't be unethical, don't be evil, you know, don't break the law, don't do immoral things, those are all straightforward and don't create ethical dilemmas. The thing that's interesting is when you actually have multiple interests at stake and you have to kind of navigate your way through it. Reid Hoffman obvious-things evil law Well, well-run companies always have a focus on growth and the two lines, which includes profit. The key thing during, I think, tough times, is to make sure that you've covered the basis for when something, you know, essentially things taking longer, bad luck, adversity, other kinds of circumstances may occur. Make sure that you can monitor to win, it's potentially, you know, something is going to go wrong, monitor early enough, and then take appropriate action to essentially counteract that or shift your strategy or plan, even if in fact something is not working out as well as it is. Reid Hoffman adversity winning running I think the right way to do this is just to step up and do it, so I actually think we'll see more of that over the next coming weeks, because I think they'll say, "We'd like to be good for business and quiet on politics, but this is too urgent, it is too much of a key crisis in who we are going to become as Americans. We can risk too much, and so we have to step forward." And I think you will see more and more people stepping forward, like Howard Schultz, Steve Case and other folks, in order to try to make a difference in this [Donald Trump] election. Reid Hoffman differences keys thinking You have to be constantly reinventing yourself and investing in the future. Reid Hoffman investing-in-the-future reinventing-yourself investing When you have an idea, a classic entrepreneurial impulse is to hold the idea close to you and not tell people and that's almost always a mistake. Reid Hoffman mistake people ideas During normal times or boom times, there are some parts of the business that are going to so well, that that can cover for weakness and other parts of the business. What happens during recessions, is you have less windfalls just helping you cover mistakes. You have to be more careful about not making mistakes. Reid Hoffman normal weakness mistake
