Reid Hoffman Quotes

You don't run a business hoping you don't have a recession.

Markets are unforgiving, and sometimes they move for reasons we can't possibly foresee.

The bull market, rising prices, earning lots of money, make it seem as if the good days will never end. When prices are falling and there is a recession, that also feels as though it will last for ever. Politics is the same. People simply can't imagine changing circumstances.

Business is all about learning to balance the short-term, medium-term and long-term and I think it's when things are going well it covers up a lot of mistakes and bad decisions because you're growing so quickly.

So it's worth some real up front time to think through the long term value and the defensibility of the business.

When you're public, you're at the mercy of the markets. You can be doing extremely well, but if the markets are in the tank or your industry is in the tank, you don't get rewarded for it.

In troubled times the last thing you want to do is to stick your money into a film. It's such a gamble.

You then get into a period a few years ago, where a lot of external factors that we didn't have anything to do with did hit, and some of them at the same time... devaluations, weak economies, you name it, in various parts of the world.

First of all, every new company today is being built in the face of massive economic headwinds, making the challenge far greater than it was in the relatively benign '90s.

Uncertainty about sales impedes business planning and could harm capital formation just as much as uncertainty about inflation can create uncertainty about relative prices and harm business planning.

The year 1983 was crazy. People wanted to sell not only their investments... but also their companies.

Well first of all it's a business and it's a tough business, and you have to have the strength to survive all the set backs all the failures that make this a mean business, that's getting meaner and meaner every year in my opinion.

Booms are great while they last but they don’t last forever.

Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.

To be sure, booms and busts will come and go. But their severity can vary dramatically based on the policies in place to prevent them. With stronger regulations, neither the housing and derivatives bubbles nor the eventual crash would have been so bad.

Some things never change - there will be another crisis, and its impact will be felt by the financial markets.

Markets don't like instability, investors shy away from uncertainty, and consumer confidence goes down in difficult times.

Listen to market strategists, and a word that comes up a lot these days is 'volatility.'

Once in a blue moon, an entire industry is a good short.

I've just seen it all - I've seen the bird flu, I've seen the Asian economic meltdown, SARS, 9/11, economic cycles.

In nine companies out of ten the factor of fluctuation has been a more dominant and important consideration in the matter of investment than has the factor of long-term growth or decline

Market risk is like taking a plunge into a cool pool ... a lot of people are finding out right now what their risk tolerance is.

Down cycles are not fun. But they form the basis for enormous future profitability

Predicting recessions is indeed a dark art, but I think we are several years away from the next one.

I'm not sure most of the people that get caught up in the middle of a bubble can be described as irrational. It seems pretty rational to buy a house and flip it in the next few weeks at a profit when that's been happening for along time.