The king of networks speaks.
Few people have their fingers on the pulse of current Internet culture as much as Reid Hoffman. In fact, he’s as involved the Internet we know today as any other person. He was a member of the board of directors of PayPal upon its founding and is a co-founder of LinkedIn.
What’s interesting—and often overlooked—about Hoffman, is that he was involved in an early social networking site, SocialNet, that was essentially too far ahead of its time and flamed out without recognition. To grow the business, Reid used to take advantage of every networking opportunity and asked open ended questions to get to know someone who could help support the project.
Because Hoffman is also an author with many interesting ideas about society and life, his quotations are particularly useful and inspirational.
“Everything in life has some risk, and what you have to actually learn to do is navigate it.”
“You have to be constantly reinventing yourself and investing in the future.”
“Once how you treat people, how you work and how you live becomes part of your network image, then all of a sudden you have an incentive to be good in each of these circumstances because you live with it for years and the decades to come.”
“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”
“I actually think every individual is now an entrepreneur, whether they recognize it or not.”
“The network is not just the people you know—it’s who your network knows.”
“A product needs to be sufficiently innovative to distinguish itself from the pack, but not so forward thinking as to alienate the user.”
“Every person is his or her own brand.”