26 Quotes from Reid Hoffman on How to be a Great Founder
From How to Start a Startup — Lecture 13
Published in
3 min readNov 5, 2014
From Stanford’s CS183B Course How to Start a Startup — Lecture 13
The quotes below are all 140 characters or less, so please feel free to share as you see fit. In case I’ve missed any quotes or you find any errors, please leave me a comment and I will be sure to update the post.
- “The reality is: a founder is someone who deals with a ton of different headaches and no one is universally super powered.”
- “Part of the entrepreneurial thing is there are lots of ways to die.”
- “What great founders do is seek the networks that will be essential to their problem and their task.”
- “The metaphor that I frequently use for entrepreneurship is jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane plane on the way down.”
- “It’s very conventional to say that you’re a contrarian these days.”
- “It’s actually pretty easy to be contrarian. It’s hard to be contrarian and right.”
- 1/ “When you think about being contrarian, you have to think about — how is it that smart people will disagree with me, disagree with me…
- 2/“…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.”
- “This is classic when you begin thinking about what is a great founder is, you navigate what is apparent paradoxes.”
- “You gotta be both flexible and persistent.”
- “You should have an investment thesis that essentially says why you think this is potentially a good idea.”
- 1/“Part of what being a great founder is, is being both able to hold the belief, to think about what it is you want to be doing and where…”
- 2/”you want to be going, but also be smart enough that you’re essentially listening to criticism, negative feedback, competitive entries.”
- “Data only exists within the framework of a vision you’re building to, a hypothesis of where you’re moving to.”
- “So usually you have to have product distribution as more fundamental than what the actual product is.”
- “When I’m raising money, this fundraising, I’m thinking about the next fundraising. I’m thinking how I’m set up for it.”
- 1/“It’s useful to be able to recognize whether you’re on track or not.”
- 2/“To have that belief, but also paranoia about am I tracking against my investment thesis.”
- “The question is: how you cross uneven ground, how you assemble networks around you.”
- “There’s an ability to learn & adapt, an ability to constantly have a vision that’s driving you, but to be taking input from all sources.”
- “The challenge when you think about product distribution is: how are you competing for potential customers or potential members time”
- “One of the tests that I frequently use in an interaction is I push on the idea and what I’m looking for is both flexibility & persistence.”
- “One of the phrases I frequently look for is infinite learning curve.Because each entrepreneurial pattern is to some degree unique and new.”
- “I am most heartened when I’m talking to a team when they’re reasoning to each other.”
- “In software, speed to market, speed to learning is really key. In hardware, if you screw it up, you’re dead. So accuracy really matters.”
- “If I ever hear a founder talk about oh this is how I have a balanced life so on and so forth — they’re not committed to winning.”
You can watch the entire lecture for yourself here: http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec13/
If you liked this post, please click on ‘Recommend’ button below and follow the collection I’ve created for “How to Start a Startup”. Others may stumble upon my post and it will motivate me to continue this exercise for the rest of the course. Thanks.
Also, you can follow me on Twitter @RajenSanghvi
Image Credit: Happy Reid — By Joi Ito
