Reid Hoffman Quotations

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.

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.

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.

Most often I am only interested in an idea if it's going to get hundreds of millions of users. That's the scale that I am always trying to play to.

And people who take risk intelligently can usually actually make a lot more progress than people who don't.

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.

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.

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.

World-changing startups need to be premised on accurate contrarian theories.

All human beings are entrepreneurs.