One of the great strengths of American culture is this empowerment of individual, is the individual being able to be entrepreneurial, create new things. But you create a whole group of people to make great companies. It's employees and investors and customers and partners. The fabric of society, of a network of relations, is key to being successful.
Reid HoffmanThe key thing that I find that when you're kind of in boom times and you're hiring bunches, if you can hire, you know, always maintain very high standards and even if you, you know, can't find enough of, you know, what is typically called A players, then don't hire the people. All right? So, you know, use that as a way of standards.
Reid HoffmanOne 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.
Reid HoffmanProbably the biggest mistake that I made personally is I knew early on that I wanted to go into start-ups and creating kind of software that could help change the lives of millions of people. And basically what I did is I kind of went, okay, well, I need a set of titles and I need a checklist of skills, and I ran through all that, and that wasn't a useless thing, but what I didn't realize, and, you know, and no one gave me the right advice for doing this, is that actually your network, in essentially, is your career.
Reid HoffmanEveryone, you know, during crises times, is much more focused on, okay, how do we get the boat completely seaworthy, sailing along well, and everything going well? And so as long as you're communicating how the general strategy of the company and how the work they can do to add to that and to make that more successful and the thing that they can contribute to that, that is generally very motivating for employees in crisis times.
Reid Hoffman