Reid Hoffman Quotes

Almost anything worth doing involves some measure of risk - from learning to ride a bike, moving to a new city, and certainly, starting your own business. The point is that no one has ever started a business or created a new product with a guarantee of success.

On Day One, a start-up is a faith-based initiative built on guesses.

What interests me is starting businesses on our own, finding ideas that we can support, and simply investing in invention.

I do think a lot of people are trying to do important things still, and I think it is really a great thing that entrepreneurship is getting easier. When I started, it was just much harder to begin a company.

Running a real business is exacting, daunting, repetitive work. Even in Silicon Valley.

The only rollercoasters I get on are startups.

If you're positioned to start your own organization, that's great - but rare.

Entrepreneurs' willingness to innovate or just to invest - and thus create new jobs - is driven by their 'animal spirits,' as they decide whether to leap into the void.

Relatively few people should start companies.

We didn't know how to run a business, but we had dreams and talent.

I think that sometimes people are frightened to take the risk of entrepreneurship.

From the time I was a kid, I was always interested in any and all kinds of new business ideas.

If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.

I'm a big fan of small business ownership. I think it's the backbone of American innovation. But to be successful, you first have to have the courage to go for it.

When you start a company, it's more an art than a science because it's totally unknown. Instead of solving high-profile problems, try to solve something that's deeply personal to you. Ideally, if you're an ordinary person and you've just solved your problem, you might have solved the problem for millions of people.

If you're not a risk taker, you should get the hell out of business.

I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I started my own software company in high school and went to college to study entrepreneurship.

The opportunity for an entrepreneur to start a company from scratch today is abysmal.

When my co-founder and I first had the idea for IronPort, an email security company, we triangulated a list of the 20 most relevant people in email - former CEOs, open source technologists, investors and thought leaders.

There's no such thing as a good time. I started an apparel-manufacturing business in the tech-boom years. I mean, come on. Get out of your garage and go take a chance and start your business.

Entrepreneurs love to view risk as binary. The more you put on the line, the greater the potential for reward.

You can't be successful in business without taking risks. It's really that simple.

Graduating business school, I had $150,000 of debt. An investment firm offered me a steady job, but it didn't feel right. It was 2007 in Silicon Valley, and I dreamed of starting an Internet company.

Starting a successful company is one of the hardest things anyone does.

I believe that every business and company takes two years to establish.