Everything in life has some risk, and what you have to actually learn to do is how to navigate it.
Reid Hoffman
Observe, orient, decide, act. It's fighter pilot terminology. If you have the faster OODA loop in a dogfight, you live. The other person dies. In Silicon Valley, the OODA loop of your decision-making is effectively what differentiates your ability to succeed.
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.
Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location.
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.
Starting a company is like throwing yourself off the cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.
Your network is the people who want to help you, and you want to help them, and that's really powerful.
I actually think every individual is now an entrepreneur, whether they recognize it or not.
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.
Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins. Facebook is ego. Zynga is sloth. LinkedIn is greed.
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.
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.
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.
I think 'Settlers of Catan' is such a well-designed board game - it's the board game of entrepreneurship - that I made a knockoff called 'Startups of Silicon Valley.' It's literally - it's the same rules but just a different skin set to it.
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.
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.
As an entrepreneur and investor, I prioritize construction and collaboration. Whether it's a five-person start-up or a global giant, the companies that are most productive are the ones whose employees operate with a shared sense of purpose and a clear set of policies for responding to changing conditions and new opportunities.
Relatively few people should start companies.
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.
What makes the meaning of life is people, so you try to be good to people immediately around you and in your broader community. So a lot of my projects are about how I can affect the world in the hundreds of millions.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
You have to be constantly reinventing yourself and investing in the future.
I've long believed that if you're not embarrassed by your first product release, you've released too late.
'Founder' is a state of mind, not a job description, and if done right, even CEOs who join after day 1 can become founders.
If you could train an AI to be a Buddhist, it would probably be pretty good.
In crisis times, it's actually not more difficult to motivate your staff, because everyone gets much more focused on how they control their own economic destiny.
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.
The opportunity to build an enduring product far outweighs the cost of alienating a few users along the way. And the sooner you internalize that trade-off, the faster you'll move along the path to scale.
For Trump, the reasons to release his tax returns have always been compelling. Doing so would show the American people he doesn't just talk about accountability and transparency but also walks the walk.
I'm a little unusual: I'm a six-person-or-less extrovert.
Even by Silicon Valley standards, PayPal's vision was massively ambitious.
Sometimes freedom from normal rules is what gives you competitive advantage.
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.
When thinking about how to deploy kind of professional and social networking into your business, it's really not a question of if - it's a question of when.
My belief and goal is that every professional in the world should be on a service liked LinkedIn.
Your customers are always a bottomless well of surprises.
The business of America is business, but it's about high-integrity business. It's about a business where you keep your word, where you make square deals.
For me, the ethical arguments that resonate strongest are the ones that oppose the death penalty.
So benevolent, enlightened, wise dictators are the most efficient form of government. The problem is what comes afterwards, right?
Each year, I ask, 'Now that I have this knowledge, these resources, what can I do?'
The world's better off the more Silicon Valleys there are and the more scaled companies there are.
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.
The American people deserve to know what's on Trump's tax returns. And Trump must show that he truly embraces accountability and transparency and understands what it means to work on behalf of the public interest.
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.
I would have volunteered to work at Netscape. It was the center node of this new technology and the commercial ecosystem of the Internet.
