Quotes from Reid Hoffman

The challenge when you think about product distribution is: how are you competing for potential customers or potential members time?

I think I have a good track record, both in commercial investing and in philanthropic investing. I don't have any interest in creating a named foundation; I have an interest in really good impact for capital. I think I'm pretty good at doing it, so I'm going to apply myself to doing it in my lifetime.

I actually think we need to put our energies, as entrepreneurs, as technology inventors, as government, to being much more inclusive. I think the key thing is actually working together.

The same instincts that make us good students can make us lousy entrepreneurs.

Broadly, the meaning of life comes from how we interact with each other. The Internet can reconfigure space so that the right people are always next to each other.

MySpace is like a bar, Facebook is like the BBQ you have in your back yard with friends and family, play games, share pictures. Facebook is much better for sharing than MySpace. LinkedIn is the office, how you stay up to date, solve professional problems.

You have to be constantly reinventing yourself and investing in the future.

'Founder' is a state of mind, not a job description, and if done right, even CEOs who join after day 1 can become founders.

To have your parents get divorced at a young age, there's a lot of turbulence. We all grew up together, in some way. It was not idyllic. It was intense, vibrant, sometimes oppressive. I felt I was very much in a world of my own. I didn't meld much in school. I was kind of a loner.

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

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.

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

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.

There's a lot of people in the world that would love to trade places with American citizens, and we are very fortunate to be here.

The reason the social-networking phenomenon is something that I invested in early and massively - I led the Series A financing for Friendster; I founded a company called Socialnet in 1997; I founded LinkedIn; and I was part of the first round of financing in Facebook - it sounds trivial, but people matter.

One of the challenges in networking is everybody thinks it's making cold calls to strangers. Actually, it's the people who already have strong trust relationships with you, who know you're dedicated, smart, a team player, who can help you.

One of the metaphors that I use for start-ups is, you throw yourself off a cliff and assemble your airplane on the way down. If you don't solve the right problem at the right time, that's the end. Mortality puts priorities into sharp focus.

Everything in life has some risk, and what you have to actually learn to do is how to navigate it.

If you can get better at your job, you should be an active member of LinkedIn, because LinkedIn should be connecting you to the information, insights and people to be more effective.

Trump often says he needs to keep his tax returns private until the IRS finishes auditing him. But the IRS itself has said this isn't necessary. And recently, Trump changed his tune, saying he'll release his returns as soon as Hillary Clinton releases the 33,000 emails she deleted from her email server.

Death Row inmates are almost twice as expensive to house each year as other inmates. Death penalty trials are much costlier than trials where execution is not a potential punishment and consume more time from judges, public defenders, and other legal personnel.

Hard work isn't enough. And more work is never the real answer. The sort of grit you need to scale a business is less reliant on brute force. It's actually one part determination, one part ingenuity, and one part laziness.

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.

The key thing for me has always been how we realize the mission - enabling every professional in the world to change their own economic curve by the strength of their alliances and connections with other people.