Reid Hoffman Quotes

We use technology to make it cheaper, better, and faster for the client. And then if you have the most flow, you can win. Now, having said that, Silicon Valley wants to take on this business. They think they see an opening.

When I came into the mobile phone business, I was really the upstart who pretty much took the business, not quite by storm, but really made an impact on it quite early on. But it was from a position, really, of feeling that I was a last mover.

We may not have the cheapest labor costs, but where we can compete is innovation. Historically, that's been Connecticut's strength, and it can be again.

Innovation is critical to the heartbeat of any successful corporation in the industrialized world.

I love to think about business. It's what makes me happy.

One of the things that slightly annoys me in business is that we use words like innovation. Young people often think innovation is about doing something new, but actually it's not. It's about doing something better than your competition.

There is the opportunity to do more and better if you're smaller and more nimble.

Every day were saying, 'How can we keep this customer happy?' How can we get ahead in innovation by doing this, because if we don't, somebody else will.

The primary thing that any technology startup must do is build a product that's at least 10 times better at doing something than the current prevailing way of doing that thing. Two or three times better will not be good enough to get people to switch to the new thing fast enough or in large enough volume to matter.

The lifeblood of our business is that R&D spend. There's nothing that flows through a pipe or down a wire or anything else. We have to continuously create new innovation that lets people do something they didn't think they could do the day before.

I have always loved the competitive forces in this business. You know I certainly have meetings where I spur people on by saying, "Hey, we can do better than this. How come we are not out ahead on that?" Thats what keeps my job one of the most interesting in the world.

Think what we would have missed if we had never ... used a mobile phone or surfed the Net -- or, to be honest, listened to other people talking about surfing the Net.

The great lesson in microeconomics is to discriminate between when technology is going to help you and when it's going to kill you. And most people do not get this straight in their heads. But a fellow like Buffett does. For example, when we were in the textile business, which is a terrible commodity business, we were making low-end textiles-which are a real commodity product. And one day, the people came to Warren and said, "They've invented a new loom that we think will do twice as much work as our old ones."

It may well be that creativity is the last unfair advantage we're legally allowed to take over our competitors.

The benefit to building a startup is that customers don't have the same kind of friction when they adopt new technology.

Competition should not be for a share of the market-but to expand the market.

There isn't a plant or a business on earth that couldn't stand a few improvements-and be better for them. Someone is going to think of them. Why not beat the other fellow to it?

If the only common thread you have as an industrial company is the fact that you think you're well managed, you can still be a pretty good company, but you're not going to be a dominant company, a competitive company over time.

To be successful, innovation is not just about value creation, but value capture.

Everybody gets excited about technology, but it doesn't interest me in the least. I'm only interested in it if it makes my job easier or cheaper. They're tools.

Know your stuff. Have an angle. Know how to grow business, how to develop products, have patents and an undeveloped market that could be huge.

Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.

You'd better have the technology knowledge. I really urge you not to think you can start a whole company and business with just ideas on paper, because you'll end up owning so few of those ideas.

Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem.

People aren't the same. Business is, in my opinion, all about the team that fields the best players. It's not about an idea. An idea goes away. Somebody catches up with it. It's not about a widget.