Quotes from Reid Hoffman

It's nice to be happy. But the meaning of life is meaning - what's the impact you're having on the world. Suffering to accomplish that is a perfectly fine thing.

Sometimes freedom from normal rules is what gives you competitive advantage.

Blitzscaling is always managerially inefficient - and it burns through a lot of capital quickly. But you have to be willing to take on these inefficiencies in order to scale up. That's the opposite of what large organizations optimize for.

Entrepreneurship is a life idea, not a strictly business one; a global idea, not a strictly American one.

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.

If performance management were a movie, it will become less 'Gladiator' and more 'Moneyball.'

So benevolent, enlightened, wise dictators are the most efficient form of government. The problem is what comes afterwards, right?

In democracies, we aren't always governed by the people or the parties that we voted for. But when officials are elected, we must respect their authority, as long as they're exercising that authority within the bounds of whatever regulatory frameworks are in place to guide them.

Blitzscaling is what you do when you need to grow really, really quickly. It's the science and art of rapidly building out a company to serve a large and usually global market, with the goal of becoming the first mover at scale. This is high-impact entrepreneurship.

In the past, individuals and companies envisioned a lifetime mutual commitment. That's not realistic anymore - nor is it in the interest of either party. So both parties need a more adaptable way to engage each other and co-invest over shorter periods of time for mutual benefit.

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.

As a child, I wondered often, 'Why are we? What is the meaning of life?' These questions made me realize that life is what has meaning - not just individual lives, but all of our lives.

Some people mistake grit for sheer persistence - charging up the same hill again and again. But that's not quite what I mean by the word 'grit.' You want to minimize friction and find the most effective, most efficient way forward. You might actually have more grit if you treat your energy as a precious commodity.

Starting a company is like throwing yourself off the cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.

I actually think every individual is now an entrepreneur, whether they recognize it or not.

The way you deal with bullies is you change their economic equation. Make it more expensive for them to hassle you.

What happens during recessions, is you have less windfalls just helping you cover mistakes. You have to be more careful about not making mistakes.

If Trump's actions as President reflect his campaign rhetoric, the ACLU and other capable organizations like it will be critical for defending the Bill of Rights for all Americans.

Relatively few people should start companies.

One of the things that happens that's challenging within the democratic process is that people say, 'Look at this failure, so we should totally change this whole thing.' And then you add in tons of bureaucratic process and checks and balances, and all of a sudden, it doesn't work that well.

I've long believed that if you're not embarrassed by your first product release, you've released too late.

I usually allocate time each week to work on topics outside of the normal workflow. These topics can be multi-year strategies for work, theories of how the world is changing, or just something refreshingly different or new.

Be persistent, and hang on to your vision. And at the same time, be flexible.

Giving birth to something that could possibly change the lives of millions of people for possibly decades, hundreds of years, whatever the length of time the run is, is a great feeling.