LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman: Persistence and flexibility are equally important to entrepreneurs

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Ride Hoffman Hoffman, the co-founder and chairman of the board, recently interviewed Tencent Tech Zhu Xudong. The following excerpt from the interview, Reid Hoffman as a successful entrepreneur, talk about how entrepreneurs should grasp the balance between perseverance and flexibility. Whether you're insisting on your opinion or actively absorbing other people's opinions, Reid Hoffman's advice is that the most important thing is to "judge if you've been learning." The following is the dictation of Reid Hoffman:

Early startups are tough, you don't know what you're doing. For entrepreneurs, have a good vision in the early stages and know what's most important now. In addition, entrepreneurs need to have a strong ability to learn, and the business of timely adjustment-in the words of Silicon Valley is a transformation.

One of the difficulties LinkedIn faced early on was that other social networking sites--initially Friendster, and then Facebook--grew very quickly, and people have been telling me that our site should also provide picture sharing, games, and more. We also put a lot of effort into thinking about this problem.

In fact, our goal is to change people's "economic life" and change the efficiency of people's job search. For any business event, it's all about connecting people, possibly for capital, for talent, and possibly for resources, and when you can connect people, you create value. So while our users are growing more slowly, we offer people more value than other social networking sites, and these values are more sustainable. From the present situation, we have done the right thing.

One suggestion I often give to other entrepreneurs is to be able to stick to it but also to be flexible. Insist is to adhere to their own vision, flexibility is to listen to other people's opinions, understand the market changes. A lot of internet companies are big, but then they fail, for example, Excite was once the second biggest search engine but then failed. Sometimes it is wrong to insist, sometimes it is wrong to give in to the reality too easily, so the entrepreneur needs to combine the two.

I didn't have any doubts about the LinkedIn model at first, but I've been deciding whether I've been learning.

When we released our website in May 2003, we wanted to be able to get users as quickly as Friendster, but by July we found it impossible. Then we think that our company is on the right path. Our research later found that we were not working hard enough and needed to think of a better way to increase the user's growth.

So we started to provide a function of the address Book. When people came to LinkedIn in June 2003, they didn't know who was here, but when we start providing the Address book feature-you can upload your own address book, and then we'll tell you what these people are already here-when people find that they can see their acquaintances. , it will naturally connect with acquaintances. This makes our user growth has a great improvement, although and Friendster still have a big gap.

This is a key feature, and if you didn't come up with this feature, LinkedIn might be over.

The other thing we do is how to deal with profit. A lot of people told us that we were trying to make LinkedIn profitable as soon as possible, but in the 1.5 to two years that LinkedIn was founded, we didn't think about the profit model at all. We think the most important thing in the beginning is user growth.

This is also an important lesson: the best ideas are controversial ideas. I now invest in Greylock, our favorite investment case is those who have different views of the case, some people support the opposition. The ideas of the early days of LinkedIn were in fact helpful to its growth.