Reid Hoffman Quotes

Like many of my fellow entrepreneurs, I didn't create Hearsay Social with my co-founder Steve Garrity because it would be fun and easy, but because we're at our best when faced with enormous challenges.

People ask, 'Are entrepreneurs born, or are they made?' I think it's a combination of both.

I never went to college. But the structure I grew up with was planted so deep that when it came to doing business, I knew how to be disciplined, create teamwork, and persevere. It set me up to be an entrepreneur and a successful franchiser.

The best entrepreneurs I've ever met are all good communicators. It's perhaps one of the very few unifying factors.

As an entrepreneur, one cannot just work and not say anything.

I learned I'm not a good executive, I'm an entrepreneur and I'm creative. I have to go with my gut and do what I want to do.

The burdens with which the State finds itself encumbered are manifold and heavy … the first proof of our courage will be to confront them as they truly are … the second will be not to despair.

I'd like to see the word 'entrepreneur' knocked off its pedestal. Being 'entrepreneurial' is something I look for not only in founders to invest in, but also employees to hire.

My mum was a quintessential businesswoman. She taught me problem-solving. She can solve any problem.

Being an entrepreneur means being a creative businessperson.

There is, in fact, nothing easy about being an entrepreneur.

Founders need sizable egos to believe that what they are creating is good enough to change the world. What makes for great co-founders is having those egos focused on complementary, not competing, skills.

An important part of leadership is being able to hold two things in your mind at once: Dealing with the reality, whatever it may be, and focus on hope for the future. Any leader helping an organization through challenges needs to be able to do both.

As I've evolved, I'm capable of doing a lot of things at once, but really, as an entrepreneur and business person, it's more about adding the right structure to be able to handle scaling all those things as opposed to being at the forefront of doing a lot of them.

I've had many challenges - every entrepreneur does - it's the nature of the beast.

One of the great and terrible things about starting a start up is that you get no credit for trying.

The idea of an entrepreneur is really thinking out of the box and taking risks and stepping up to major challenges.

Sometimes women entrepreneurs are their own challenge, [in terms of] believing in themselves. There is no need to apologise for being ambitious.

Just balancing all the different projects, I mean I spent almost 10 years just doing Nasty Gal and I say "just" but that was a lot, and it's still a lot.

The word entrepreneur is associated with success and adventure. From my life, the only thing I can tell you that's consistently associated with entrepreneurship is failure, and the only thing consistently associated with invention is frustration. There is a long road between the idea and the reality.

The problem you ultimately want to have, as an entrepreneur, is deciding who to help, not deciding who can help you.

It's important in our role as leaders that we use the platform to address issues, to address barriers, to identify best practices for overcoming these challenges with businesses small and large. Maybe there are some public policy issues that we need to address. Maybe some of them are at the federal level and some are at the state or local level.

Entrepreneurs are all a little crazy. There is a fine line between an entrepreneur and a crazy person. Crazy people see and feel things that others don't. An entrepreneur's dream is often a kind of madness, and it is almost as isolating. What differentiates the entrepreneur from the crazy person is that the former gets other people to believe in his vision.

You're saying no ninety-seven times out of a hundred, and most founders find they have to make a very conscious effort to do this.

The right way to proceed when we face the kind of challenges we face is to pursue the strategy which Ronald Reagan pursued when we faced the challenges of the last century.