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One Thing I Learned In '97, When I Thought The Right Time To Found A Company Was During A Swing-up, Is That It's Much Better To Start During An Economic Downturn. Partnerships Are Easier; Hiring Is Easier; And The Competition Starts Later.

-Reid Hoffman

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One Thing I Learned

Reid Hoffman

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One Thing I Learned In '97, When I Thought The Right Time To Found A Company Was During A Swing-up, Is That It's Much Better To Start During An Economic Downturn. Partnerships Are Easier; Hiring Is Easier; And The Competition Starts Later.

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So Usually You Have To Have Product Distribution As More Fundamental Than What The Actual Product Is.

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We Have Made A Huge Amount Of Progress Over The Last 50 Years By Enabling Trade, By Enabling Kind Of Collaboration And Learning. And Actually, In Fact, When You Look At Your Average 30-year-old Today, They're Much Better Off Than A 30-year-old 20 Years Ago, 30 Years Ago, Because Of Progress In Technology And Health Care And All The Rest Of This.

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A Product Needs To Be Sufficiently Innovative To Distinguish Itself From The Pack, But Not So Forward Thinking As To Alienate The User.

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World Suffering

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Silicon Valley Is A Mindset, Not A Location.

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There Are Opportunities That You Get During Crises Times. Crises Times Are A Great Time To Start A Business.

Because In Our Boom Times, Everything Is Growing, Usually, You Know, The Kind Of Things That Come To Mind Are Wild, Wild, West, Or Land Grabs, You Know, These Sorts Of Things, In Order To Make Something, You Know, Kind Of To Grow Into The Future And To Get All The Growth That You Need To Have. So You Tend To Hire A Lot Because You're Running Fast To The Future.

I Think Most Of [people] Are Not Very Well Educated Themselves To Understand The Winston Churchill Line - Democracy Is The Worst Of All Governments Until You Consider All The Other Ones.

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When You Turn A Company Profitable You've Gone From A Company Whose Days Are Numbered To A Company Whose Days Can Be Infinite.

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The Reality Is: A Founder Is Someone Who Deals With A Ton Of Different Headaches And No One Is Universally Super Powered.

I Think The Right Way To Do This Is Just To Step Up And Do It, So I Actually Think We'll See More Of That Over The Next Coming Weeks, Because I Think They'll Say, "we'd Like To Be Good For Business And Quiet On Politics, But This Is Too Urgent, It Is Too Much Of A Key Crisis In Who We Are Going To Become As Americans. We Can Risk Too Much, And So We Have To Step Forward." And I Think You Will See More And More People Stepping Forward, Like Howard Schultz, Steve Case And Other Folks, In Order To Try To Make A Difference In This [donald Trump] Election.

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If You Don't Start Out Aiming For The Big Game, You Almost Never Can Get There.

The 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.

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There Are Two Reasons [ Business People Are Not Publicly Anti-donald Trump ], One Is Well-intentioned, Which Is The Classic Kind Of American Notion. 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."

Times Of Economic Crises Can Change What The Competitive Landscape Looks Like, Because When, For Example, You Have Boom Times, Capital Is Easy To Come By, Growth Is Easy, Sometimes What You Focus On Is, You Know, How To Accelerate In The Boom. During Economic Crises, The Question Is, The Companies That Come Out Of, You Know, That Are Sailing Through That With The Best Liquidity, Both Assets On The Balance Sheet, Making Money, Ability To Grow Their Businesses, Get A Disproportionate Competitive Advantage.

Democracy Tends To Be A Collaborative Process, A Committee, A Consensus.

Giving Birth To Something That Could Possibly Change The Lives Of Millions Of People For Possibly Decades, Hundreds Of Years, Whatever The Length Of Time The Run Is, Is A Great Feeling.

When You Think About Being Contrarian, You Have To Think About - how Is It That Smart People Will Disagree With Me, Disagree With Me ...from A Position Of Intelligence, And There Is Something That I Know That They Don't Know, That Will Actually In Fact Play Out To Be True.

Everything In Life Has Some Risk, And What You Have To Actually Learn To Do Is How To Navigate It.

If You Are Not Embarrassed By The First Version Of Your Product, You've Launched Too Late.

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Opportunities Do Not Float Like Clouds In The Sky. They're Attached To People. If You're Looking For An Opportunity, You're Really Looking For A Person.

The Key Thing For A Ceo To Keep Their Head In The Game Is Recognize That There's Turbulent Times, Plan For, You Know, Bad Luck As Well As Good Luck, Keep People Focused On What The Key, You Know, Business Wins Are, And You Know, Provide The Energy That People Always Need In Order To, You Know, To Go Into Battle Because, You Know, Work Is Hard And Go Into Work And Do That Well. And Provide A Good Leadership Beacon For That. In Other Words, It's The Same Thing That Makes Good Leadership In Any Other Time.

Part Of The Entrepreneurial Thing Is There Are Lots Of Ways To Die.

Entrepreneurial

When You Have An Idea, A Classic Entrepreneurial Impulse Is To Hold The Idea Close To You And Not Tell People And That's Almost Always A Mistake.

When You’re Doing Work You Care About, You Are Able To Work Harder And Better.

This Is Classic When You Begin Thinking About What Is A Great Founder Is, You Navigate What Is Apparent Paradoxes.

World-changing Startups Need To Be Premised On Accurate Contrarian Theories.

The Actual, The Forming Of Ties With A Group Of People Around You Where They Help You Grow As A Professional, Solve Problems, Get Opportunities, And You Help Them, Is Actually The Constitutive Base Of The Foundation Of A Strong, Modern Career.

Pay Attention To Your Culture And Your Hires From The Very Beginning.

One Of The Ways They Run Forward Is By Viewing The Thing They’re Doing As Something That’s Going To Be The Whole World.

Part Of The Reason We Like Democracy Is It's The Portfolio Of Decades, Which Is To Say You Don't Also Get The Disastrous Dictator Who Completely Destroys A Society, Engages You In Wars And So Forth.

During Normal Times Or Boom Times, There Are Some Parts Of The Business That Are Going To So Well, That That Can Cover For Weakness And Other Parts Of The Business. What Happens During Recessions, Is You Have Less Windfalls Just Helping You Cover Mistakes. You Have To Be More Careful About Not Making Mistakes.

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. And The Reason Is, Just Think About The Fact That Those Businesses That Adopt New Technologies To Operate Efficiently And Use Them To Get A Competitive Edge Are The Businesses That In Fact, You Know, It Becomes One More Competitive Advantage. Whether It's A Fax Machine Or A Mobile Phone Or A New Way Of Doing Financing Or Any Of These Things, You Know, These Are Key Things To Do.

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