Silicon Valley tends to believe in the individual who creates a small group and does something big. Democracy is always frustrating, but it creates a society that, for example, allows us to invest in each other's kids, to have public education, to have both a greater society and individual freedom for creating businesses.

Reid Hoffman

The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be.

Reid Hoffman

business change motivational

No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you're playing a solo game, you'll always lose out to a team.

Reid Hoffman

crazy business teamwork

What is an entrepreneur? Someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down.

Reid Hoffman

entrepreneur inspiring way

The key issue when you're looking at cost cutting is to always plan for the future.

Reid Hoffman

issues cutting keys

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.

Reid Hoffman

young-entrepreneurs business too-late

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

Reid Hoffman

powerful want people

The future is sooner and stranger than you think.

Reid Hoffman

stranger thinking

Economic tough times are great times to be investing in the future.

Reid Hoffman

investing economic tough-times

Ironically, in a changing world, playing it safe is one of the riskiest things you can do.

Reid Hoffman

playing-it-safe safe world

In software speed to market, speed to learning is really key. In hardware if you screw it up you are dead. So accuracy really matters.

Reid Hoffman

speed keys matter

Great opportunities almost never fit your schedule.

Reid Hoffman

schedules fit opportunity

Every individual is essentially now a small business and entrepreneur.

Reid Hoffman

small-business individual entrepreneur

Innovation comes from long-term thinking and iterative execution.

Reid Hoffman

innovation long thinking

A networker likes to meet people. I don't. I like accomplishing things in the world. You meet people when you want to accomplish something.

Reid Hoffman

want people world

One of the tests that I frequently use in an interaction is I push on the idea and what I'm looking for is both flexibility & persistence.

Reid Hoffman

persistence use ideas

There are two reasons [ business people are not publicly anti-Donald Trump ], one is well-intentioned, which is the classic kind of American notion. We want to be inclusive, we want to have our shareholders, our employees, our customers, whether they are Democrat, Republican, Green or Libertarian, to feel comfortable with how we're doing business. And so that tends to be apolitical. People say, "No, no, I just simply shouldn't get involved in politics."

Reid Hoffman

green two people

Society flourishes when people think entrepreneurally.

Reid Hoffman

people thinking

The entrepreneurial journey starts with jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.

Reid Hoffman

airplane jumping journey

Opportunities do not float like clouds in the sky. They're attached to people. If you're looking for an opportunity, you're really looking for a person.

Reid Hoffman

sky clouds opportunity

The first set of questions to ask yourself when you're doing cost cutting is relatively straightforward, which is, you know, can you use the necessity of cost cutting as an opportunity to do pruning or trimming for projects that aren't being as successful? But, you know, frequently those are the easy ones. I mean, there's always some kind of social costs internal to the company, but that's the easy way of looking at the future.

Reid Hoffman

cutting successful mean