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president Trump was threatening personal and political retaliation because they tried to help Harris get elected do you think you'll be penalized yes and Direct on you and direct me you're not planning on leaving the US are you um Reed Hoffman is the co-founder of LinkedIn and one of the world's most successful entrepreneurs playing pivotal roles in the success of influential companies including PayPal Airbnb Facebook and open Ai and now he is a leading voice in AI helping people utilize this new technology to empower themselves in their life and careers you were part of what they call the PayPal Mafia who went on to create Tesla YouTube Reddit SpaceX LinkedIn and become multi-billionaires and so I've got so many questions let's do it what are the key factors of a great entrepreneur's mindset one is you have to understand that you don't get to an optimistic future by trying to avoid failure when we started LinkedIn everyone said this won't work but just because you don't have a 100% chance of succeeding doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it but there's also a set of skills that are rare that you can actually teach to entrepreneurs makes you much more likely to be successful the first is and then how do you know when to quit the job what's your view on work life balance and if you were advising anyone to build wealth in 2025 what would you say here's some simple tips one is Reed what is your take on AI it gives us super powers now there will be costs to it but like electricity it does electrocute people but it's essential for human society and is there anything that the average person should be doing to capitalize on the opportunity that AI presents 100% this is what you do so this has always blown my mind a little bit 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show so could I ask you for a favor before we start if you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the Subscribe button and my commitment to you is if you do that then I'll do everything in my power me and my team to make sure that this show is better for you every single week we'll listen to your feedback we'll find the guest that
you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do thank you so much [Music] read as I read through your life it's remarkable in it's almost impossible that one individual could be involved in so many companies that have had such a big impact on society but at the same time someone would be able to seemingly see the future over and over and over and over again so because as I read through your life I thought this can't be one individual this can't be one lifetime it it begs the question to me what is in your view the causal factors that set you up for such a life well that's interesting I've never been asked that question before um probably it's a combination of the fact that my passion is who are we as human beings and where are we going so like that's from from a very young age like I've been like and I think I got it by reading science fiction right this kind of like what is the scope of humanity like you know Isaac asimov's foundation and you know this kind of stuff and then um I ended up growing up I was born in the Stanford hospital I ended up growing up in Silicon Valley and and so I got the exposure to technology can change the world and so focusing on thinking about you know kind of this intersection of humanity and technology and of course obviously science fiction has some play to that too although most the technology in science fiction is just fiction right just like we have wormholes and we do Intergalactic travel it's like as far as we know there is no such thing as wormholes for Intergalactic travel right I mean all current contemporary Theory of physics would suggest that there isn't I mean there may be wormholes but they're not for you know put your Star Trek spaceship in it and go somewhere and then probably the other part of it is um I played a lot of board games when I was kid and so it gave me a very deep sense of strategy and so approaching life yeah exact wow this one here you probably remember this yes I do remember that right in the names on the cover Borderlands what age were you when you started playing Rune Quest you were very young uh when I started playing Rune Quest
probably 10 and what is the link between the life you lived in the board games you played as a 10-year-old um well mostly as a function again like the role playing games is like strategy right so it's kind of um you know how do you uh kind of think about like uh like an adventure is both a narrative experience but it's also a strategic experience like you know how do you save the town from the from the you know the bandits you know that kind of thing and so um so it gave me a deep sense of kind of like how do strategy and tactics and problem solving um and how do you do it as a group right because you know in fantasy role playing games it tends to be you know especially when I was doing it as a kid a set of blos around the table uh I hear it's now a little bit more gender Balan which is good and especially especially for the blos it's like oh we're not we're not just Geeks by ourselves here right um and um and so and the way that I got to doing this is I was enough because this is kind of the focused you know kind of kid I was is what I um I'd heard that the chaosium had their offices were were down the street from a friend of minees and so I literally walked in the door and started hanging out at their office and they're the maker of this game they're maker of this game the chief editor I think wanted to get me out of the office so he said he handed me the pre the the in development draft of this and said here go look at this and so I took it home as an obsessive kid I I like redlined it I worked my way through it and I brought it back like he gave me a Friday and I brought it back on Monday so he failed on his get this kid out of the office mission right but he's he was then and I I I still remember this look of vague irritation when I handed him this because he's like ah this kid is handing me this thing oh [ __ ] I don't want to be a meany guy and then he started looking at it and went oh this is actually good work and it was like I want to use this work and I was a kid so I didn't understand he needed to pay me to use it I was that wasn't why I was just doing it because I wanted to show that I that I knew how to do this stuff and so he then wrote me a check um so it was my like my very first paycheck to to be able to to use the work in the
publication um because you know this is how copyright that that means he then owns all the work that I did so he could publish it and is your work still in here today yes uhuh so edits that you made to this game are still in here at what age uh that was 12 wow that's incredible and how much did he pay you oh it's like $160 or something it's not bad for 12-year-old no no no my dad my dad was originally opposed to Fantasy role play games it was like uh what what are you doing like you know go like be on a path to a real life and then when I brought home the paycheck I like well maybe that works and what was your what were your dreams at that age what did you think you were going to be when you were older sort of 12 13 14 years old frankly I had no idea other than the following entertaining thing which is since both my mother and father are lawyers when I was asked when I was 12 what I wanted to be when I grew up the answer was not a lawyer really yes well because lawyers um look obviously bunch of are barister the side of the pond um lawyers are essentially modern Gladiators who are paid to be the Gladiator of whatever their paycheck is whether it's a client or whether it's you know being a full-time employee and so forth and it's quality work it's important for society but like I was like no no I want to create things I don't want to be a you know you know belt on my sword and you know go to verbal battle for you know whatever the you know contract or or litigation or any of those things and I was like no no no I I actually want to go build things and so I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up other than and maybe I still don't know right um but what I evolve to is I normally have about a two to three year plan that's iterating right and that's that's tends to be what I do and being born at Stanford hospital is pertinent as well I don't think people in the UK and around the world necessarily know the significance of that yeah but can you explain why that's important Silicon Valley um is a it's a network of a generative platform so like one of the things that that I have learned to think about is networks amplify productivity that's not just as we get to you know why it is i f i conceptualized and
founded LinkedIn but but it's think in terms of networks it's one of the reasons why cities are such uh engines like basically if you really look at economies it's city regions and U it's because the city region creates a network right it's a network of could be suppliers and all the rest but also talent and capital and and and and knowledge and communication and and strategic lenses onto the world and so Silicon Valley has been an like like people go oh I'm a genius it's like no no I'm in Silicon Valley right and that really helps and so being born in Stanford gave me this a set of different you know kind of perspectives one technology is a lens into the uh future another one is as an individual you can go create a technology or technology company that can be a lever that can move the world right and that an individual you know from anywhere can kind of do that um and all of those things were were part of the luck of being born in Stanford the luck yes well I don't choose you don't choose where you're born but a lot of people were born there and they didn't go on to do the things that you did people like to tell stories of manifest destiny it's because I am great it I would have been great anywhere that I was right and it's self- delusional I mean yes I think I'm smart yes I think I'm hardworking yes I think I'm strategic yes I think I have skills that are rare in in in human condition but any great achievement also has luck right and and I can point it in any companies I can point it at any individuals um and for example one of the basic luck is like I had exposure and connection to Silicon Valley if I didn't have that the technology Destiny or the technology achievements I've done wouldn't have been able to do those or wouldn't have been able to do those the amazing way that I did them so what would you say then because there's people that listen to the show all around the world um I we just Spotify rap just came out and globally we have quite an extensive audience it's funny it's funny that it's so globally distributed but I think a factor of being on YouTube and speaking English what would you say to people that are born in we've got an audience in Cape Town in Indonesia in Australia New
Zealand what would you say to people in those parts of the world can you still be quot unquote massively successful yes but but you have to think so um and I see you have a few of my books there um my very first book the startup review um which um came from the commencement speech I gave at my high school the Putney School in Vermont because I was like what do I say to a bunch of 17y olds right and I was like well be the entrepreneur of your own life and what that means there's a chapter in there that says uh uh the bad advice you're usually given is just follow your passion and the problem is the passion your passion might be very passionate but does do you have a strategic Advantage there is that something you can do and so applying the rules of Entrepreneurship yes of course you have to be passionate about what you're doing because if you're not passionate you can never be world class unless you're passionate about what you're doing but that's not the only thing and so you look at okay what are Market realities what's the market what does a competition look like and within those what can your aspirations be and there's a whole chapter on that in that book because that's by the way similar to how you plot out if you're founding a company right if you're founding a company you have to think the same way about this but think about it as an individual so if you're in Cape Town there are many great things you can do now if you say what I'm going to do is create a search company to compete with Google ah don't do that I mean unless you really have some real unique thing because remember you're competing with this intensely powerful not just the company but the network of Silicon Valley which attracts amazing talent from around the world Capital knowledge and they're all sharing it with each other at a very fast clock speed and so wherever you are that doesn't work now you do think about okay what can the thing I do so for example um you know on I love podcasts as you know I you know Master scale possible Etc and so I had the Delight of of um of doing like interviews with Toby lutka right or Daniel a and what you do is you look at part of their success Shopify you know Spotify is is what how do I run my strategy from here like how is it that
I'm competitive and and can win a global field Marketplace that Silicon Valley doesn't do and so for example one of the things that they're different in the cases because like for example in Spotify that was hey I can get the record labels to give me a chance to start doing the business by doing just Scandinavia prove it and then expand it whereas those record labels the capital to do it in the US would never happen and hence you have Spotify and in Shopify it's hey the silkon valley tends to go oh e-commerce is over its own by Amazon we're not going to do any of that as a platform maybe you know this thing or that thing but we're not going to do it as a platform well but they're wrong and I can do a long place and then once I get to this network effect of a whole bunch of you know small and medium businesses doing their own you know kind of websites in e-commerce then I am the plat for that so it's kind of a long under the radar strategy where you're not directly competing with Silicon Valley companies and by the time the sellon value companies go oh there's a Manor opportunity you've got it so those are plays that you can do if you're smart and strategic but you have to know like uh Toby lutka um like is deeply informed what what's going on in Silicon Valley like when he's charting a strategy he's aware of that he's got connections he visits I mean I'm a friend of his right and um and that's part of like if you're doing a global software play you have to be aware that your competition is global there's an element of self-awareness required here yeah and it's funny because when I was younger I certainly didn't have that self-awareness I thought that I could start a social network from my bedroom without ever doing it before and I wasn't necessarily thinking about the geographical situation or Silicon Valley um how important is self-awareness as an entrepreneur and how does one cultivate it to know what they what challenge is actually befitting of their skills so I think um self-awareness is generally a very good thing for all human beings um and um you still have to be irrationally ambitious which is I think very important and so sometimes self-awareness and and just you know uh
immense ambition sometimes don't go together it's better when they do but that's fine what you do have to do is be very aware of what your competitive space looks like right so just about everybody who succeeds in substantive in a substantial way is good at being competitive right and and you if you're blind to your competition H you're kind of hosed if you're successful it's just because you're lucky right because uh and that's part of what I was referring to earlier in luck if you if you start a business where you have the luck where competitors haven't haven't identified it haven't gotten you get a long head start on it that's an instance of luck not all the successful companies are that way but that's very that that can be very good and very useful on that um but you have to be very aware of what the competitive landscape looks like now that's also true of individuals right um because it's like well who am I competing against is a relevant question but it's uh you can be kind of competitively blind as an individual and still be very successful because of the way it works but if you're competitive blind leading a business leading a startup almost always that's hosed right that's one of the reasons why like you know the all investors in Silicon Valley always ask about your competition and if you say I don't have any competition you're like well if they disagree with you they're not going to invest because they go you're competitively blind is there any such thing as an entrepreneur in the sense of you know people always ask me they say can anyone be an entrepreneur and a founder and there's so many different types of companies one can start these days that it's a quite tricky question to answer but do you think any because there's going to be people listening to this now that are in they're managers in companies they're you know they're they're working in a law firm or whatever and maybe they've got an idea I mean everyone's got an idea and they don't know if they're the type of person that should pursue it or not is there a framework one can run through run through to decide that yeah I'll run through a framework to help the folks the um the short answer is no not
everyone should be an entrepreneur just like not everyone should try to be a professional mus musician not everyone should try to be an athlete not everyone should be you have to look at what your competitive advantages are and does your disposition skill sets path give you a Competitive Edge in this case of being an entrepreneur right because any game that's competitive right and Entrepreneurship is a highly competitive game that's that's part of the you know it's as competitive is trying to become you know a uh a globally renowned actor it's as competitive as trying to become the CEO of a major bank or anything else so it's it's a competitive game so for an entrepreneur what you have to do is you have to say okay well um I have to be uh able one of the classic ones to uh to take substantial risks now it's not being risk blind Entre rurs are actually not risk blind or occasionally they are and occasionally they're lucky and it works but almost all the successful ones realize that I'm that when you start a company you're default debt right by default the company is out of business right and so you're trying to get to a point where it's default alive versus default dead then there's a whole bunch of different things that go into that game so one is um well can you go get the capital um are you in in a market that allow you to get the capital um can you move to a market that allows you to get the capital um how do you pitch the capital how does pitching Capital go and then you get this this kind of flywheel going between you know Capital um Talent uh business realization Capital Talent right and you're doing that and the business realization obviously includes customers includes go to market includes building products and services Etc and by the way it's Dynam so you say well I wouldn't worked at a large company and I learned a bunch of things like well yeah but you didn't learn how your default dead you didn't learn how to launch a new product you didn't learn how to how do you start with a small product and grow to a larger product right you didn't learn how do you set up a team from scratch and by the way a team from scratch when the vast majority of human beings like more certainty in what their week looks like right like I'm going to come work at a place because I can
continue to work at a place and as long long as I'm capable of what I'm doing I keep my job right in terms of what I'm doing and so I understand the certainty so so entrepreneurs have to do all that sort of thing so in addition to kind of risk taking you have to be good at bringing many resources from different uh vectors into your vision and working with you so there's investors there's employees there's customers there's advisors there's Partners you have to bring the right set of those people along with you in this iterative this this kind of you know iterative Journey um you have to be able to grow yourself and learn because the game changes um like one of the metaphors I use to to to train and and conceptualize young entrepreneurs is kind and there's a bunch of different parallels between military strategy it's part of like the board games thing and and and business strategy but it's like Marines take the beach army takes the country police governs the country three three very crude broad generalizations about how you do it so you go what's your Marine strategy do you have because you must as a C Series a you must have a good strategy how you get on the beach how you get you know initial product Market fit how you're heading towards scale product Market fit okay you're there how do you win the country right the market right what how do you get to scale product Market fit how is that going to work how are you going to play against competition different in these two how do you get up to scale you have to learn this game is different than this game right and you're learning new things as you're doing it so you have to have this kind of um what I refer to as being an infinite learner like you're learning what the new game is because by the way no entrepreneur shows up at door one at day one going well I know how to do marketing I know how to do sales I know how to do uh product development I know how to do engineering I know how to do engineering operations I know how like no no no you have to bring all that in you to be learning what you need to learn in order to do that through that and and and and that's part of how you you grow into that and then by the way once you you've established a business because the thing another thing that brings in a lot of competition is people
say oh that's a valuable business I'd like to possibly that and then you then a new generation of heavy competitors come in so can you can you kind of keep your position and grow your position in a market which is the police part right the police part yes exactly and so so you have to you have to look and each of these three is different games and there's more games than that but it's a a way of kind of Simply understanding that so uh always being learning being an infinite learner and changing your mindset and so frequently like for example when I'm talking to an entrepreneur um especially the first few times is I will push them on their Vision to see if their Learners now one they should have persistence and grit because like no I've thought about this I've got a good plan this is how I'm going to go to market I understand what the competition looks like because if they go oh you're right I should totally change that you're like okay you have to have some grit and precis but on the other hand if they're not like going oh yeah no if we can counter that yeah we'd have to do something about that like if our competitor started doing that and maybe we do this right so they also are learning they have flexibility so you want that combination like one of the things about startups is uh you have to um bring kind of this dual lensed focus of things that seemingly are a little contradictory so like persistence flexibility another one is right now now long term right now you have to do right now but if you don't have a long term of how you're building something that's insanely ambitious no you're never going to get there if if if you shoot for the hillside you're never going to get to the moon you have to shoot for the moon so you're shooting for the moon but it's me and my two friends in a garage right now it's interesting because the middle bit yes does that matter it does but it's it's a remember like the Marines Army police yeah Army when you're doing the Marines is the middle bit right okay right right so so it does but it's not by the way and one of again mistakes and that's part of the reason why there's another chapter in Starview is abz planning the mistakes is like you have a plan and then you
have a plan B it's like no no no you have a plan and then you have a lot of micr plan BS right so you're kind of like well if that doesn't work then let's try this if that doesn't work then let's try this you know and and you're iterating through them and when you know to do a major pivot because by the way many successful businesses also do major pivots um PayPal started as encryption on cell phones right that's that's where it started right so you do major pivots it's when you go oh my current plan which I've iterated for my first plan is worse than my first plan like the market circumstances its chance of succeeding those are now worse mhm that's when you think about okay let's do a major pivot so with your analogy of evading the beach how do you know what beach to invade like how do you know if you've got a good idea and how do you know what a good idea is because most people as I said listen to this they've got a business idea yeah and they how do they know if it's good and part of the issue they often have is they've heard anecdotally or they've seen that someone else is already doing it so they go oh gosh it's already been done yeah there's call it two kinds of ideas is and frankly by the way you think you know there's over 8 billion people in the world the fact that you think you're the one person who thought of this idea you may not be doing math well right um so so thinking you're the one person who's thought of the idea that's a mistake right the question is are you the person who can pull it together in the momentum and and pull it together and it's still by the way that may be well okay that gets down to 100 people okay well am I the one who's in motion right now am I the mo person who's willing to take the risk quit my job and do it um and you never really get down to one right so so startups are risky businesses like one of the things let's get back to entrepreneurs like I think the greatest chance and even when I was starting LinkedIn after having started social land after having you know uh co-founded PayPal as a board member even when I was starting LinkedIn what I would tell the people like look we have about a maximum of 20 25% chance of being successful right just to be clear
right we're GNA try to grow that to 100% right but but we're a couple people in a garage right now right like there's all kinds of things that can go wrong anyone who's telling you it's 100% now they're lying to themselves or they're lying to you and and you know like I'm very realist and ambitious in my strategy and so so you you should never think you're starting something 100% now within the ideas you go there's roughly speaking two kinds of ideas one kind of idea is people generally think that's a good idea they think it's a good idea because you go to customers and customers say yeah I'd like that right they go to they go oh well hey AI is going to create a whole bunch of new SAS businesses right oh yeah that makes sense and new new technology trans transformation that or people in e-commerce they're going to want buy this kind of stuff okay you know makes sense so there's a stack of things where they're pretty measurable as ideas like you can measure them with customers you can you can you can do feedback and polling and other kinds of things now the good news there's good news bad news on this category the good news is you can drisk is there a market for your idea mostly not not entirely but mostly the bad news is so can a lot of other people yeah right and so in this category there always tends to be competition and your competitive strategy generally speaking needs to be why against like in this category you should be expecting competition why am I going to win out sufficiently against this competition in a global Arena I have invested in those businesses Greylock invests in a bunch of those businesses because we do we're you know one of the best VCS in Enterprise on the planet you know blah blah blah then um the other kind of I thing which is the one I tend to start and the one I tend to most invest in is people think that you're uh that you're crazy when you're starting your business and by the way that can be a by the way and frequently you are right yeah but but people think you're crazy which means most people think you're crazy which means your competitive field is a lot less right so for example I'll give LinkedIn um as an example and I'll give Airbnb as an example so l in um I go and I say hey um individuals will join this
network and bring in their and establish a public identity and profile and bring in their Network and and use that even as the vast majority of the billion people register for LinkedIn are you know basically work at companies right they're not starting company like it's a great platform for entrepreneurs entrepreneurs get it right away but like I'm like well I'm working in a company is am I going to seem disloyal to my company if I establish a profile here you know cuz back back when we started it like no one's going to use that why well because like they're worried about uh will their company fire them or not give them a bonus or something else because they have a LinkedIn profile because they're saying they're dis oil so it looks like they're shopping because I mean for most people that use LinkedIn now you don't see it as I'm looking for another role exactly but back then people do 2003 literally everyone said to me this won't work because you're individual focused you need to be selling products to companies okay right right and so I was like no no I think I'm right about the way the world can and should be right and um and so uh I'm gonna take that risk and that's the contrarian risk I'm gonna take that risk and I'm gonna I'm gonna play it forward and if I'm right I will create something that will transform the industry that will be amazing for individuals amazing for companies Etc and we can go obviously whatever length you want to go through the LinkedIn Journey we can do that now Airbnb is as an investor example so Airbnb was my first investment at Greylock and so and I was at Greylock because David Z who was my partner who was the Greylock partner who was my most valuable board member at LinkedIn convinced me that I should do Venture AT Greylock and I'm very close to David and so I bring in Airbnb as an investment and David looks across the table from me and says look every VC has to have a deal they're going to fail on Airbnb can be yours really yes because arbnb at the time had so little volume in its transactions that the founders could have called everyone who used Airbnb that week if what they did is dedicated making phone calls like you know five minutes of phone call you know through the through the week that was how small it was and
David's argument at the Greylock Round Table was look this is very strange staying in other people's houses you know like the danger of something going wrong um cities are going to hate it hotel lobbies are going to try to Outlaw it within cities You Know da like this is just going to be a train wreck all over the place and I was like no but I want to take the v he's like great like we hired you as a partner we think you're smart go ahead right now to David's credit six months later the trend the transaction volume in airbn is like this classic hockey stick it was years a very small and then it grew to being very big um so the hockey stick hadn't started yet and David came to me and said okay because because like they always be learning is also useful in Venture Capital he came and said okay you were totally right about Airbnb and I was I was totally wrong what did you see that I didn't see like how did you know when I was sitting there blowing smoke at you saying this is going to be a total failure you said nope I'm I want to do this I said well look you were right about all of the risks about that could happen with Airbnb you absolutely right any of those things could have made the business worth zero but this is the reason as investors we do a portfolio because yes Airbnb could be zero but if it worked it was going to be huge right it was going to transform an industry this is the kind of investment I like doing as an entrepreneur or as an investor and I said look we had a plan for each of those risks we had a plan a we had plans B we're going to try to navigate it isn't that we could guarantee the risk but the fact that everyone else saw those risks meant that we had years of no competition that we could establish the network we could establish the marketplace and then once we're there we are the marketplace for how that works and that's the kind of investment I like doing that's the same thing with LinkedIn as I as I founded it same thing with you know kind of uh with Airbnb as an investment and so that category of investment you cannot validate with the customers I was going to say so if everybody thinks it's a good idea it's probably not a big idea yes it it's much more challenging to be a big idea
interesting really interesting because it's funny because when people pitch to you they say I've asked everybody and everybody thinks it's great yes so that's probably an indicated that it's probably not big or they bullshitting yes yes and I'm looking for both in my creation of ideas and in my funding of ideas it's not dumb people who think it's a bad idea it's smart people who think it's a bad idea you want smart people to yes because then you have something that's contrarian because that's what contan contrarian isn't I don't understand technology at all and I think it's a terrible idea it's like well who cares you don't understand anything right it's smart people who think it's a bad idea right right and then you have a theory of the game that's a good one not perfect very risk can be very risky about why they're wrong so I'll give you the LinkedIn example literally John Lily partner mind gr I recruited him into Greylock later he was the CEO of Milla that I was on the board of super smart guy friend of mine I sat down with him about LinkedIn because this is how I go when I'm starting a company I go to all my smartest friends and I go here's what I'm doing what's wrong with it I don't want to have the conversation of them going oh it's great useless doesn't help me right what's wrong with it why will this go why will this fail and so I sat down with John we had breakfast at a at a breakfast place in Silicon Valley I said da and he said okay you you know I'll I'm your friend you it's never going to work right and I said okay well why do you think it's never going to work said well look you never grow the network like the first person who comes in no one else in the network not valuable for me why should I invite someone in until you have like you know I don't know 500,000 people a million people there's no value in the network so there's zero value so it's never going to grow you're never going to get anywhere right and it was a very smart perspicacious thought that was probably the key thing for starting LinkedIn was how do you get to millions of people in the network because that's the only place where the value proposition kicks in right I knew that if you had a thousand people come
in 900 of those people would be exactly like John they' go huh I don't see anyone else here in this network Etc but I knew that some of them somewhere between 10 and a hundred of them would go oh I see what this could be and I kind of want to play with it so you know I'll invite Stephen I'll invite you know I'll invite some people in and then as it very slowly starts going then all of a sudden there's enough people in it's interesting it's curious and you could grow to being valuable so I knew that that by persistence through those initial exploratory people people who are curious people who want to experiment with it people who got the vision of it you know Etc ET but all of that I could grow to your initial critical mass and then it would kick in the model of LinkedIn obviously I know LinkedIn more today than I did back then in what 19 no so 2002 2003 200 2003 and then really got 2003 is when we turned it on Wow and back then was it a social network as it is now where there's a news feed and people talking to each other or was it more of a a public CV was a public CV with a search capability and ability to communicate with people okay interesting so the network effects were slightly less important than the modeling is today because a lot of people today using it not to search for a job or a professional but to talk about themselves or to share their life Etc and we knew that we would get to Growing Network fact like for example Again part of the you know Marines Army police is your network effects may very much evolve you may start with no network effects that's fine yeah but you have a plan yes yeah yeah yeah so am I right in thinking because around then there were social networks emerging that were very FOC focused on people conversating with each other whereas LinkedIn by design it didn't really really matter if anybody was chatting to you about what they ate for dinner that day so a new network could penetrate the market that was less dependent on the like social networking component because if I go on there and make a profile and put my CV up it doesn't really matter if I don't come back for four days exactly because I can get an email that will bring me back in saying oh there's a job here but once my profile's up and ready yes I'm now giving value to the rest of
the network just by being there yes and that that's a virtue not a bug because it was part of how we solved the critical mass problem yeah I I could never understand how LinkedIn did that but now it makes sense to me yes because I always think God building a social network is just asking for like hell in your life yeah well I'm kind of a specialist yeah right uh you know uh one of the First Investors in Facebook one of the First Investors in frenster oh right I didn't realize you were invest in frenster as well yes you were part of what they call the PayPal Mafia I know you use a different term Network it's it it's less it has less Pizzazz but we weren't really a criminal group but Mafia is cool as well yes yes people people love the term Mafia and through that time you worked with the likes of Elon you knew Peter the from your days at University um I mean everybody asked this question about PayPal and why it was so successful but also why so many of the alumni of PayPal went on to become multi-billionaires I think seven people that that were part in that sort of part of that St sort of early PayPal founding team went on to create Tesla YouTube Reddit SpaceX LinkedIn was it Talent density was it was that what made the PayPal mafio well it certainly was a component and so it's it's it's it's a couple of things so one um that high density Talent of folks who are willing to take intensive risks want to do contrarian things believe in what their contrarian thing is against Common Sense wisdom that's one part another part is um when PayPal went public it was one of it was a it was a technology winter it was one of two technology companies that went public that year wow right so all of a sudden and then got bought by eBay so all of a sudden you had this talent group of people that had a bunch of money in their pockets and the Network within and that believed in the consumer internet so the network of Silicon Valley at that point had thought the consumer internet was played they were going into clean tech and Enterprise so if you asked if you try to Ping a venture capitalist but I have a new consumer idea they wouldn't even take a meeting with you they would take a meeting if it was clean tech they' take a meeting if it was
Enterprise software right now then you get all the the the PayPal people coming out going hey I can f my own initial idea I've got this great idea YouTube Right LinkedIn and I can fund it and I can get it going and then and this is part of the web 20 movement this is a i i coined the term internet 20 and then Tim uh O'Reilly uh made the much better term web to right and so the uh these folks going no no the consumer internet is like that was just the first wave on the beach the tsunami is still coming right and so we were all out investing and we were talking to each other because frankly we're like well these these VCS don't get it like this is coming and then of course you started seeing you know YouTube and you started seeing LinkedIn and you started seeing and it was like okay like we will like these are important things that we're going to invest in and that that's that's part of the reason why the that's the uh Because by the way remember you know a bad competition right that's one of the reasons why not just Talent not just Capital but also competitive steering as part of the reason why the PayPal Network or PayPal Mafia had such a massive uh Suite of success you know I often Hazard a guess that what the like the the fundamental game of business is for a startup founder and I've hazarded a guess before that it's recruiting the best group of people you possibly can binding them with a culture that gets the best out of them and setting them a vision that's worthwhile but from reading your work there's a couple of things just from hearing you today sales is so like all whatever your go to market is and it can be sales be to be Enterprise Etc but like for example in in social networks it's usually a viral you know a viral marketing or viral growth plan so when I say sales I actually mean like selling to oh yes employees 100% yes you must you said like Partners investors yes cuz you have to come come on board my vision invest in my vision Because by the way a partner when you're startup is also investing in Your Vision yeah an employee is investing your vision yeah right how' you be good at that there's a limited set of skills that you can actually teach to entrepreneurs versus the entrepreneurs just learning by doing one of them is
pitching right one of them is understanding the how do I communicate my vision in a way that other people cannot go that's really exciting I want to join your vision with you and if I was a young entrepreneur telling you right I want to be better at pitching my vision so I can get worldclass people to join me worldclass investors Partners is there any advice you could give me on things I should and shouldn't do uh yeah absolutely and by the way there's we could spend the entire podcast only doing this I mean there's there's a very deep well but here's some simple tips so one is the mistaken lesson that most people learn is to try to do reality Distortion it's like no no no no no uh silicon chips to make ice cream shakes it's the thing no one's thought of it it's really big right and people like okay what you're convincing me is you're crazy right like you're literally like please leave now yeah right so you have to realize that all pitches are dialogues right and you want to be listening to smart people and you like generally speaking everyone you want to be recruiting you want to be recruiting smart people you want the absolute best talent working with you you want the absolute best talent working in your company you want the absolute best so you want people who are who are thoughtful and asking good questions like for example I pitch insanely aspirational businesses but I don't pitch them saying Oh LinkedIn is guaranteed to succeed there's no Universe in which LinkedIn won't be the Transformer of professional work and careers what I do is say it can get here like we have a real chance at this now we have to navigate these risks but if we navigate these risks we're going to be here mhm right and then people say ah you're credible you have a huge Vision you're compelling I think you can do this right and then they come on board with you so one of it is to pitch the huge Vision but show that you're aware of the difficulties of getting there right now you don't have to go through all of them you just have to go through enough of them or a big enough one that the person goes okay great I get it you're seeing it right another part of it is to say this is part of the reason why competition is important is like I understand what game
I'm playing right here's my theory this is what competition plays in this is why I think the market will favor me this is why I think technology Trends will favor me this is why I think I have a very unique Edge and you know in blit scaling which I think is another book on your thing uh most consumer internet plays are uh what we call Glen Gary Glenn Ross markets which is first prize the Cadillac second prize steak knives and third prizes you're fired so you have to be pitching why you're possibly first yeah right right because there's only going to be a couple of winners yes and so like this is why we can win right and so um now there's also mechanics in pitching which is you know how do you tell a story of it part of the thing I tell entrepreneurs is to even if the person doesn't ask you the risk tell them what the risks are and how you're navigating them because it'll establish trust right so like for example in in pitching Investments now this I didn't know until I started learning it in terms of mechanic of pitching is and entrepreneurs tend to go oh when I need money is when I you know write up my PowerPoint and I hit you know knock on the door like hey give me some money that's a foolish time to start the conversation much better to start the conversation when you're not saying give me money so if you like as much as you can in all of these things start the conversation well before you're getting to a potential contract of any sort a partnership or or a investment or even an employment contract like so for example always be recruiting doesn't mean oh I want to hire you right now it's like okay find great talent this is one of the things I learned from social lent and brought into PayPal find great talent and start talking to them right even if today you don't have the right position to hire them right now obviously there's a whole bunch of great talent you could waste a whole bunch of time you want to be talking to people that you know you either really would love them to join at some point not too distant future or they know other people who would be like that because by the way part of when you um when you meet great talent you realize how to like because because you're always you're
always adding new great talent you're like oh my God we need people like this how do we bring them in so for example one of the things that I learned that was you know from social net that I brought to PayPal was at Social at I was trying to hire people who had 10 plus years experience doing the thing that we were hiring them to do before because the classic kind of wisdom that you get from Business Schools is make sure they have experience on their CV look they have to be able to do the job right no question but if you said two years of experience and an insane learning curve that's much better an insane learning curve by that you means someone that's rapidly learning self- teing yes okay and learning on the job and going and figuring it out and so when I went to PayPal and I was I when the company was founded I was on the board of directors I was like this is what you're looking for not this okay right and so back to your like PayPal Mafia question that's because we hired those kind of people right interesting there was a very limited set of people in the company who had had more than a couple years experience working within payments within banking within you know because it was the no know learning curve when you look at your portfolio of Investments and the entrepreneurs you meet do you think young entrepreneurs realize how significant hiring is to their eventual outcome because they tend to focus on like how good the product is or sometimes Capital but I just looking at my own portfolio I I often find myself like feeling like an old man because I'm telling them that like spend more time hiring not just hiring your friends because they're willing to come work here yes aoxy for a Founder if you're not spending a third of your time hiring you're very much underd delivering this is the thing it's like look uh life is a team sport companies are team sports right if you could just do it yourself you wouldn't hire anybody no you're hiring people so like you say well I've got a really good let's you know use a European football analogy I've got a really good Striker great well we don't need to worry about the halfbacks or defensive or you know goalkeeper no no you have to hire all things and you go well I'm a really good
halfback that's great you need the others too I think when I was young when I was 18 19 years old I somewhere in my brain thought my outcomes were going to be determined by how hard I worked and how good my ideas were and it wasn't until I accidentally hired someone fantastic that I realized yes the absolute tremendous impact that an a player can have on everything yes and that was just such a mental shift for me yeah literally I think Zuckerberg puts us in a very good way he wants to hire people he would work for and why why is that because that's a demonstration of high Talent okay yeah yeah when you're a young found you're somewhat insecure though you think oh God why would that person want to come work here or I can't afford them or you want to hire the best people you can and by the way if you can hire people better than you oh my God it makes you much more likely to be successful yeah yeah it's my experience that young Founders don't really think about that because they're also insecure so they think I can't manage that person yeah well but but your theory of management is look if you're if you can hire someone where your only management technique needs to be let them loose that's that that's best like just go right and is there any pra anything practical about hiring you know people say like hire slow Fire fast or uh other sort of like cliche advice around hiring that matters like how important is it that they're culturally aligned or so culture can matter um I would say look in terms of and I hopefully it's not a cliche but hopefully a puristic principle um uh references are more important than interviews right we get a lot of repetitive experience at being compelling in an interview and if you can't and by the way some great people aren't compelling in interviews right they're they're they're not really great at selling themselves but oh my God are they amazing in the field they're am like an engineer like an engineer might be like you like okay but oh my God can they do great things mhm in which case like like do whatever you can to hire that person so if you if you ask me you can only have references or only inter interview 10 out of 10 times I'll take
the I'll hire the person on the references you surely you're not talking about the types of references where they give you the references no no course not no no and this is one of the features of LinkedIn like you want to find references that will give you um uh good perspective now even if you can't go find someone that you know or you have a tie to or as what we refer to frequently as an off-balance reference sheet e not the one they give you to be a reference so even if they say oh here's you know I'm reading here's my reference you know Bob or Susan you call Bob or Susan and you say this is a standard question I will use all the time but especially if I'm calling someone who's a given reference say look I believe every every person is a combination of strengths and weaknesses and you don't give me a weakness I will believe it's so bad that I should not hire this person right so if if you say there's no weakness I'll just go okay I understand I shouldn't hire this person thank you very much right in that they will always almost always give you something right and you can think because we are all combinations of strengths and weaknesses like I'm one of the best people to have on your side for Creative strategic problem solving like one of my employees once told me he's like I would never hire you to run a McDonald's I'm like I wouldn't hire me to run a McDonald's either I'd be terrible at it right so that's combinations of strengths and weaknesses right and so everyone has them there is no one who is all strengths I mean people tell themselves that but that's self- delusion right and so so you have that conversation with a reference and the reference will tell you something because because they're not used to saying it so they might say oh you know he um uh you know Susan or Bob they're a perfectionist he like oh so they get their work done slowly because they you know like you know like you you push them because they're trying to get the one that's actually like more oh they spend too much time working you're like oh that means they're unintelligent about how they do the work yeah right so you can push them into where they're like yeah like they can get a little disorganized when they're stressed okay
great right and then you could that giv you by the way because when you get that from reference one then when you're calling reference two you say oh I heard that the person is disorganized like can you tell me a little bit about that right yeah got some ammo and they can't then say Oh no I've never seen that they'll probably give you a little bit more context yes on all these great people you've worked with specifically you know you during that PayPal period of your life one of the things I was reflecting on is they're all independently successful people but they're all very different people and that in and of itself is evidence that there's not one version of success there's many different types of success presumably there's many different types of entrepreneur leader yes give me a flavor of the different types of entrepreneurs you've worked with and and and what you know because I I sat with Walter isacson and he talked to me about Steve Jobs Elon Musk Etc and he was like Steve's really great at hiring people elon's not as good as at the people team building part but he's better at this part yes so no entrepreneur wins at every game generally speaking as an entrepreneur you should try to win to to play the games that you have a massive Competitive Edge on same thing is true so some people for example um uh like take an Neil busri at workday right he is thoughtful intentionally cultural building very professional so it's a HR uh product for work his contrarian idea was going the cloud and the people were going to do Cloud software um for the first I think it was 500 people the workday hired he would always do a cultural interview at the end because to make sure that the first 500 people all kind of shared cultural things so once you get through all the competence and all the rest of the stuff he would make sure that was a fit and that's part of how you get cultural coherence that's like one example right um another example um Elon is the um like I have a big idea and I convince myself 100% that it's absolutely going to be the case like I am going to settle Mars we're going to terraform Mars in our lifetimes which is no it's impossible no no human being on the
planet including Elon is going to do that within elon's Lifetime right but I'm going to go all in I'm going to work really hard I'm going to be technologically sophisticated I'm going to work work against the odds right in order to make that work that's a you know an Neil very professional understands the workplace Mark Elon like I think I was like the second person he pitched SpaceX to and and his pitch though to my defense was I'm gonna send a turtle to Mars and I'm like that's not a business and you're competing with national governments and like Russian subsidized rocket programs and so forth this is not a good E I was wrong he was right right but there not a good Equity you know kind of play he pitch at you as an investor yes yeah right at what point was SpaceX at when he pitched it it was before he started it so it was an idea yes and I'm GNA send a turtle to Mars and then it became I'm going to send a gelatinous cube with plant seeds in it to Mars because they'll grow I'll be the first person will send life to Mars and you're like okay right what did you think genuinely when he said that to you I thought he'd gone off his rocker really well yeah of course you would yeah like someone's my friends said that to me I think I'd make a couple of calls just to check in you know what I mean like youon doing okay just told me about this Turtle he want yes it's like that's not of business has your opinion of him changed over time in terms of his potential and ability as an entrepreneur no no I've always thought of him as one of the world great entrepreneurs um always yeah all all the way back to PayPal days really yeah yeah yeah no look he has done repetitively amazing things now he pitches everything with the same level of certainty right like you know I have this idea for online banking I have this idea for boring tunnels under cities I have this idea for creating a pneumatic tube for hyperloop tube all of them he has the same level of I am 1,000% right that this is like guaranteed to be part of the future right and I you know and I may be the unique person to make it happen right so you have to have some discernment but he's his you know on Bas batting is pretty
good for such major ideas but it's not it's not 100% yeah people kind of excuse that though if of course if you get if you're if you get one that's big that's fine right yeah on the hiring side has he been is he up there with the best or is he not a direct hirer of people like Steve Jobs was um he hires well um matter of fact you can't be a great entrepreneur and not ultimately hire well mhm um I think some people are better hirers some people also have like are the kind of people that people would work for forever um Elon uh tends to burn people out a lot like there's lots of burnt out people in his wake and when you go and talk to those people what you hear is some people say that was the best work experience ever and I never want to work for him again and other people say that was the worst work work experience ever and I never want to work for him again so they're all I never want to work for him again right so you know as kind of a a dynamic because he basically looks at them as disposable parts and you know go as hard as you can right and then afterwards you're out don't care because he goes so hard yeah he goes hard but he also thinks you're only relevance to me is your relevance your only relevance to me is can you help me with my mission and after you're done after you can no longer help me with my mission you're not relevant to me anymore what do you think of that approach that's not my Approach right L LinkedIn mirrors my Approach like literally I am referenceable by every entrepreneur that I've ever worked with right as a board member and as an investor right who you know even ones that I've like fired as CEO and so forth those people people will say he was really good to work with on these things they may also have some critical things there's no problem with that right but like like literally like when I'm pitching an entrepreneur I like call anyone that I've worked with right because you I try to work with people in a way that even when we're at a at a at a difficult moment because I disagree with them intensely about how well they're doing or what they're doing or something else that I'm doing it in a collaborative constructive
way and so my goal is to work with people like anyone I want to work with Brian chesy you know Mark Pinkus Etc I want to be able to work with them for you know uh the rest of our lives what's interesting is I think these strategies fundamentally come down to what you think matters in life yeah the most because you could optimize even you could optimize more for um building more companies or something at the expense of something else and it's a trade-off of something else like you could go harder yes but there's a trade-off happening here and we often because elon's done these crazy things like the cars and the neural links and there tunnels and the now the AI and the X and the spaceships and stuff we go oh my God that's so amazing and I do that as well as an entreprene one person can do that much but we almost never talk about the trade-off yes yep you're 100% right and we and and it's so this goes back to the point about self-awareness it's like you it's so tempting for the like the brain to go oh my God I want that that's what I want because you're not seeing the tradeoff you're not seeing the darkness that is 100% correct and look I respect it I understand the burn people out like treat them as disposable assets that when they burn out you just jettison them and you can be very elon's not the only entrepreneur who is very successful doing that right but for example on the other side um like if you go to uh Mark Zuckerberg and you talk to the people who worked for him they're like that was great that was the best working experience of my life of course I work with him again interesting because there's a lot of entrepreneurs that are coming Rising through the ranks at the moment that have kind of been raised on the Elon philosophy of do [ __ ] tons of things do them intently do them with uh less of a regard for the I guess the human consequence do them with less of a regard for work life balance yeah well you have have the nature of this thing because it's it's you know you're by Nature dead as a startup work life balance is not the startup game right so like I like what when like when we started LinkedIn we started with people who had families
so we said sure go home have dinner with your family then after your dinner with your family open up your laptop and get back into the shared work experience and keep working if you say that today though you're toxic the people who think it's toxic don't understand the the startup game and they're just wrong right that the game is intense and by the way if you don't do that then eventually you're out of a job I mean the people that say it's toxic are often those that have never had to do it yes and and look that's fine it's not that everyone has to work at startups working at startups is a voluntary choice but that's the game for a startup and so that's how we try to balance in the early days of LinkedIn we try to balance how to to be human because we like a third of the company had kids right and so you're like okay like we all have to work this way so we can't say oh you third you sure you guys can go home and you're out of the office and then and then then call in or whatever no like we'll all go for dinner and then we'll all plan on getting back to work after dinner so you get time with your family you get to have dinner with your kids it's the right human thing right but we're working hard and Saturday morning we're working is there a way to build a startup in your opinion where you have work life balance and I Define work life balance maybe as being able to see your friends often spend time with your family often um only in two circumstances one it's a small startup it's both comp it's both an absence of competition that's the general one is it's so small no one's really competing with you that's fine okay right right my screen b a village yeah it's fine right on number two you have some such intense competitive mode that people can't compete with you like say for example you have some like the only thing that matters in this business is contracts with these three companies and you have those three contracts okay fine but absent that that's reason because the the startups that you're if you're in a valuable space the startups that you're competing with right like we had to make the deliberate decision like startups we're competing with aren't going home for
dinner right they're serving dinner at the office that's what we did PayPal we sered dinner at the office at PayPal right right and that was a deliberate thing we were one of the first companies that started not only serving lunch but serving dinner right and then other because this The Learning Network you get with SL Valley other companies start looking oh yeah we're going to serve dinner too so people don't go home yeah don't go home keep working right to some people this does it sounds somewhat toxic right sounds like oh God but that's not what life's about this is like capitalism this is people just wanting to make loads of money well choose what your life's about that's fine there's nothing that says you have to do that and and what gives you the right to tell other people that they can't do that I mean like what are you patronizing like people choose their own lives right so and and people can choose that now you have to understand the game it's like well I'd like to be a worldclass Olympic Athlete but I really only want to swim two hours a day well that's nice right not gonna happen right you have to understand the game you're playing if if you're playing an Olympics game like someone who's trying to compete in the Olympics and swimming they're swimming seven days a week 12 hours a day right so that that choose the game and you say well that's toxic fine not for you I think the important thing which I see some companies doing well is just to be honest about that when you're on boarding people and don't shy away exactly no that's like in early days of LinkedIn when we were talking to people we'd say by the way this is how we work right we work six and a half days a week right we um do get people home for dinner but everyone including Reed is expected you know you know you know online working after dinner and do you pay people more for that than the average rate or so they get paid in equity and this is one of the things again um is you know the the first I don't know some hundreds of people at LinkedIn all don't need to work anymore because their Equity is enough that if they choose not to work anymore that's totally fine which is a a trade-off that was clearly worth making
yes you stepped back as CEO after four years when you're at LinkedIn right yes why did you do that so um I had um awareness of strengths and weaknesses like I know how to do the CEO job right um uh and I think it kind of uh 150 people or less I'm as good as anyone else right like that that that scale of Co job um is a scale that I that operates within my strengths and weaknesses um when you start getting to call it 500 people thousand people part of the CEO job ends up becoming like how do you govern the community of the company now it's not the only thing but like okay like you know what the kinds of things that Jeff weiner that I learned from him on was all right well you start thinking of recruiting not as you going out and individually recruiting people or helping your hiring manager recruiting people but you think about recruiting as a general strategy for the company and how does that General strategy work and how do you have like for example you get to this point in the scale company where you start having onboarding days so like for example new employees start at one of the onboarding days and they start as a group together right so it's kind of like okay we're going through kind of how it works and we're integrating people into the different group like like you know the sales people the engineers they all start and they're going into different groups we like we're approaching it as as the engine of the company and the things that I you only world class but the things you're passionate about the things I'm passionate about like the technology strategy the product strategy um the um the kind of the big idea for what you're doing there and I love working with super high-powered talent and one of the things that I had kind of learned is well that's the reason I like working with Founders that's the reason I like working with CEOs because the some degree it's like okay you're the talent I'm working with on this company right in order to do that and so I was like yeah I like doing more of being a board member working with c more than I like being the CEO once you get past you know 150 people so that's what I should be doing and what I need to do is I need to get linked in to a
point where it's already you know it's it's already kind of hit breakout velocity right and so you can recruit now a worldclass CEO that you can work with right and that's what that's what I should do and you know I like for example the entire time time that Jeff weer was the CEO of Linkin my primary office was immediately next door to his interesting so you stay close but you yeah yeah again this is another point of self-awareness which a lot of Founders don't have but the great Founders that I've met and interviewed whether it's I don't know Brian chesky or whether it was some Founders from the UK like Bennett Jim shark and Julian from hu one of the things that really Define them was they did a low ego move to move out of that CEO role which is typically associated with like the glitz and the Glam because they knew that their skill set was in branding or marketing or something else or just vision for the the future of the company a lot of CEOs don't do that because the COO title comes with a certain yeah I understand esteem um and yes everybody myself included does have a big ego right but my ego is you you have to attach the right way my ego is attached to LinkedIn succeeding right yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it's a big difference yes LinkedIn went public in 2011 with a 4.3 billion valuation and then Microsoft later paid 26 billion to buy LinkedIn at the time it was reported you owned about 11% of the company which made you a multi-billionaire how does life change when one becomes a multi-billionaire so it's funny I try to never like like one of the funny things I never repost things that call me billionaire and so forth because I try to not have that identity I am aware that it's an accurate descriptor yeah right um but it's not like the way I think of myself I don't think of myself as Reed Hoffman billionaire I think of myself as Reed Hoffman technologist Reed Hoffman public intellectual Reed Hoffman uh creative you know strategist Reed Hoffman Etc so I try to um change my life as in those directions not in the the wealth Direction now of course you know I travel around in a private plane you know I own houses in several different
areas of the world you know that kind of stuff yeah right um but uh I try to live a life within those you know high wealth things as much of a as an upper middle class person as I can so for example before I came here to do the interview I I got here a little early so I went to the nearby Starbucks had a cup of coffee pull up my laptop was working on it interesting you know because because that's the way that I want to live right uh and I want Human Relationships that are like that I think human relationships are really important I feel lucky to have um relationships with some people who are these really really amazing people but by the way there's amazing people who are like World celebrities and there's amazing people who the world doesn't know about I just like I just like going through life with amazing people and that's part of what I mean by that you've always been associated with the left side of politics your parents were very uh left leaning to to to say the least I heard that you got pepper sprayed when you were a kid because because I was I was a kid on my uh father's shoulder at a demonstration against against the Vietnam War okay so that's it's in your DNA yes the thing about being on the left is it's typically the left that have a opinion of billionaires that they're evil yes I'm aware of that but not just billionair I've I've been called Evil by a number of people on the left really yes of course look I they are wrong that that is a necessary correlation right um but I you look I I try to understand people I understand their perspective I disagree with it but I understand it it's I mean you you're one of the few people that's still a billionaire and on the left it seems no I'm not I actually in the valley especially in the selection cycle uh well it's the public facing people that we see on the podcast and stuff and look so part of the reason why I think less people were public about about it this cycle was because uh you know president Trump was threatening you know personal and political retaliation and so you had to have a certain degree of courage to stand up right and so en courage in the public
area not just courage in taking risks and so forth but in the public arena for doing that and so I literally had conversations with billionaires who were like oh look I really applaud what you're doing and I think what you're doing exact right thing and that's for you not for me right I mean trying to get people into it and so um so I was aware and because they kind of did the simple Mini Max and they said well if if Harris is elected I won't get penalized for not having supported and if Trump is elected I will get penalized so I'm just gonna stand out of it and do you think you'll be penalized uh I think that uh I think that there's a greater than 50% chance that there will be um uh repercussions uh from a misdirection and Corruption of the institutions of State uh to uh respond to my having tried to help Harris get elected you must spend time at night thinking about what that might be because if I would yeah well look it's a range and look I hope that it's only in the soft end of the range like IRS audits or phone calls like you know Trump made saying you know deny Bezos that that DOD contract because you know he owns the Washington Post and I don't like him you know that kind of stuff I hope it's in that Arena right could get much worse but I don't really want to speculate on it because I don't want to give anybody any ideas right but like I think it's like I think I would safely win a bet that there will be political repercussions that are that are essentially undemocratic American um and Direct on you and direct to me yes um I I think I'd safely win that bet um I'm hoping it's in the what I'm terming the soft Arena you're not planning on leaving the US are you no no no oh my resident's outside of Seattle and you know we have a constitution you know that kind of thing because Mark cubin was the same right Mark cubin was very public and vocal he's a billionaire he was very Pro KL Harris very anti Trump through the cycle he took a lot of flack as well yes I mean I follow everybody on Twitter so I watch it play out and it was kind of like he was stood in no man's land just taking shots from everywhere and you were kind of in the same category yes exactly would have been much easier for you to just shut the [ __ ] up or fall in line or something
exct well but that's the problem you can't allow that form of Neo fascism right is precisely when you feel fear I have huge respect for Mark Cuban when you feel fear stand up because that fear that you're feeling that's you're feeling as a powerful wealthy person right and if you're not not going to stand up who is right can you see any redeeming qualities in Trump I know you're Pro K Harris oh yeah well I think he's going to bring a wrecking ball and some of the places a wrecking ball are useful like so for example if you say hey on regulation you want a new regulation replace to that kind of refactoring is a good thing um hey we going to need a bunch of energy in the future and we're going to need good clean energy I understand everyone doesn't like nuclear I don't care we're going to do nuclear like I can see a number of things that could come out that'd be very positive and I want those things to happen and a matter of fact you know part of being an American you know I'm going to try to make the next four years as great for America as I can right my precise complaint with some of the people I'm in political opposition for is don't ever try to break the country try to always be building the country it doesn't matter if the person you agree with is in power or not be working towards a good Collective future and so I'll be doing all all of that and I I'm hopeful for some of that from this Administration do you think think it's a good time for entrepreneurs to be building companies with Trump coming into Power um fundamentally I think it's always a good time as entrepreneurs to be building companies so one is like you have a good idea the time's now go do it yeah Capital markets harder fine actually if you can get Capital you get competitive differentiation from the people who couldn't I mean it's like so you have to it's always like trying to figure out how to turn the negatives into positives in terms of what you're doing now I think Trump will be broadly um very good for entrepreneurship because I think he's going to reduce a lot of Regulation some of that regulation will have very negative consequences on the society which you know as a society person I'll be
concerned about like climate like you know you get the new EPA person coming in Environmental Protection Agency you ask him what the job is and he says we need to drill more oil wells right you're like that's not the EPA that might be the Commerce Secretary or something else the energy secretary that's not the EPA so there will be a reduction of Regulation because we do have climate change we're living in it and it's going to get worse so those will be places where there'll be real damage from the Wrecking Ball but for entrepreneurs building new businesses like for example I've invested in a number of fusion and fision businesses because nuclear because that's the clean energy that we're going to need to you know just to bring more PE more of the billions of people into the middle class and and to and to try to remove carbon from the environment on so forth so and I've known the regulatory stuff is is ferociously bad for that well actually in fact I have hoped that that they are going to they're going to reset the that thing and so all of a sudden that entrepreneurship turns out to be in retrospect wise U but I think they're going to reduce regulation across the board for all entrepreneurs right so I think ENT like that's helpful on entrepreneurship now they're going to be probably much more closed at the border and immigration is an important part of Entrepreneurship you want to you want to be able to to get the best talent from anywhere in the world it's one of the advantages that's helped buil the US that I think is going to be more uneven anyway so it's like Goods goods and bads one of the things that is very different I think in this Administration with the people he's appointed is there seems to be quite a few entrepreneurs being appointed to fairly important High roles well by entrepreneurs you mean zero experience ever doing the thing they were doing before potentially I was referring particularly to um Elon Musk David saaks doing I think he's doing Ai and Technology I think there's another guy who's looks like he's built a business before yeah so uh David Elon obviously super smart very accomplished you work with both at PayPal right yes yeah right um and now David knows crypto very well so he's the AI and crypto are and the
pcast person he knows crypto very well he hasn't yet done anything in AI like he hasn't been mentioned as an investor or a like when I talk to all the a entrepreneurs you know as a desired person for them to work with and so so you know he's very smart so I presume he knows something but you know AI I think yet TBD what he knows and what he tweets about is anti-woke AI is the most important thing you're like that is not that is not even even the top 100 of the issues around how to you know promote and build and navigate AI um but he's very good at crypto he done a bunch of good stuff there so that'll be and Elon obviously understands AI quite well on this point of speech as well obviously there's quite a big shift in speech that's happened in the last last I'd say two years really from Elon buying twitters where I I saw a drastic shift in globally yes and what we think is okay and not okay what's your thoughts on the the change in spee speech good bad positive negative um so I you know gave a couple days ago here in London the sir Isaiah Berlin speech and one of the lines that I used in the speech was um there there's competing freedoms you could say there's the freedom of speech to say whatever I want to say and then there's a freedom to try to offer something in civil discourse where I'm not going to get harassed by a whole bunch of antagonists right um and obviously they're both good virtues and what you want is the right blend right from them I think that a lot of folks like for example what's happening on you know Twitter and and X right is um just virulent right it's just toxic it's terrible like when I tweet anything including hey you know um I think the following thing is great entrepreneurship I get a oh you evil liberal you know I hope you you know kind of uh fail terribly and you know blah blah blah blah okay I was tweeting about this great entrepreneurship thing right and that's the kind of theme in you know Twitter x.com um I prefer what you kind of thing you see on Linkin is like look you can say critical things but you try to say critical things within the theme of oh well that entrepreneurial thing I actually don't think it's going to be as good as you think and this is why what's
the difference in the in the design of the platform that results in two different types of behavior there uh well uh uh Twitter is anonymous it allows a lot of bots um it encourages um like it says freedom of speech like if if you're tweeting a rape threat that's fine it's freedom of speech you're allowed to do whatever you want right uh uh LinkedIn is you're tied to a named profile that's tied to your identity uh if you're reported for saying something that's frankly uncivil doesn't even have to be as bad as a rape threat right it's just unil like you're you're you're cautioned right it's removed and you're saying hey by the way that's not for for the platform and if you keep doing that we remove your ability to post right so on the Twitter example what Elon said is that if it's legal then it's fine but is there an upside to having an environment where people can anonymously say what they want within the constraint of the law um look I think there are it's important to allow one of the things I think that online platforms give us the difference between freedom of speech and freedom of reach like I think it's okay for people to say such thing as vaccines are evil plots to put chips in people and they give us autism it's 100% wrong right and every credible medical Authority goes vaccines are good and so you go okay a thousand people get vaccinated or call it you know a 100,00 people get vaccinated and 50 of them have adverse conditions to the vaccine right that happens out of 100,000 right but a thousand people or 10,000 people might have died otherwise right that your lottery for everyone being vaccinated is a very good Lottery everyone should do it right uh Because by the way you were more likely to have died in the lottery than have an adverse condition that doesn't mean there aren't people who have adverse conditions so all quality medical professionals medical researchers agree I am allowed legally on x.com to say vaccines are evil plots right to control the American people to sell drugs and make drug companies profitable and blah blah and I can say all that and you see all that ramping on Twitter rampant you know in talk radio and you know and all
the things you can say that that's a problem right I'm okay with people saying it what I'm not okay with is promoting it and having it have broad reach so on this point of the vaccine so just to clarify my position I think vaccines are a wonderful invention that have saved a lot of people's lives so that's my position but I want to I want to interrogate a little bit with the with the vaccine roll out in particular there's a lot of things that we didn't know at the time right the lab leap thing I had Boris Johnson sat here and he said oh yeah we think it's a lab Lab leak if if if I had said that on this podcast a couple of years ago I would have been kicked off YouTube uhuh yes and so having a forum where you can even entertain ideas that are contrarian yes I also think is important and I exist in the the sort of dichotomy of like speech is important but at the same time you know yeah look I am um I was on the support people being able to say lab leak yeah category Because by the way I do think freedom of speech is a good thing and part of the reason I have freedom of speech is sometimes you have a contrarian idea that should have freedom of reach yeah but there should be and look how do we make decisions as a society of what expertise like how what truth is as we convene groups of experts MH like in a science we have a group of scientists review a paper before it's published we have scientists able to reproduce things in a jury we have 12 people who listen to the case and make a decision so we use groups of people as experts and different kinds of expertise for different kinds of things to make a judgment and we should also bring in expertise right right now that doesn't mean that even when all the experts say that's completely wrong you should say you can't post it like I loved what Twitter did pre Elon which is they said hey you can post vaccines or this evil plot by the government to control you but we're going to put a little box around it that says oh and by the way experts disagree here's where you can go get the facts so you can say it right but we'll also put in in selective cases expert opinion and I think that's like for example a balance of how to do freedom of speech and freedom of reach because I do think look I should be a to say the World is Flat I
should be able to go on and say the world is flat and by the way LinkedIn wouldn't take that post off because it's like well it's civil I'm just saying the world flat I'm out of my mind right but I'm being civil so the LinkedIn principles are not you must say something that's scientific truly true it's you must say something that's civil I also think people shouldn't be deplatformed or canceled because of their speech even if you disagree with it providing it's in the constraint like constrains of the law I sat with a well by the way I generally think agree on the constrains of the law but I also agree on I also think importantly civil and civil means well like no threat of violence okay yeah I agree with that you shouldn't be threatening anybody with violence yes um I sat with a I'm GNA say astrologist I don't even know if that's the right word it's not astrology was it who's BR what's cosmetologist and he told me the story of Galileo discovering that the world was round and Galileo basically being threatened by everybody um because it threatened the I think the Catholic institution at the time and then well because the preach the preaching of the church was as was that yeah and so that's a cautionary tale although it's a long time ago in there are always going to be strong forces that are heavily incentivized around some kind of ideology yes and that I mean that does happen today yes 100% And and these forces are powerful forces um so allowing dissent even if it's coming from someone who is not credible yes 100% by way strongly in defense of that yeah right I just think that and like so you know I don't mind um people criticizing me I don't mind them criticizing my arguments I don't mind them criticizing my choices of who I'm going to support politically right what I'm going to do philanthropically I strongly prefer that those cred those those criticisms be backed with uh some knowledge and intelligence and some argu good argument point of view and I really want it to be a civil discourse it's interesting because the human brain when we think about it from an evolutionary standpoint wasn't designed to deal with a thousand people tweeting at you that you're you're an [ __ ] and as a podcaster as someone
who's in the public high yourself who is a podcaster but also a famous entrepreneur you have to deal with that like you you have to deal with that in a way that's just we weren't designed to yeah and I struggle with it I struggle with when I first came into the public spot like when I started doing Dragon's Den Shar tank in the US um opening my phone and being exposed to just a barrage of like noise on the brain yes now whose responsibility is that is it my responsibility to like delete the app or is it the platform's responsibility to moderate people expressing their innate human jealous whatever it is you know so so the classic thing that humans make in reasoning is they go A or B right okay and you answer is both okay right so there's responsibility on both sides like it's like oh no it's a responsibility of the individuals like well like are you kind of saying I have zero responsibility there's zero I can do to be positively contributory here of course you can right so for example like it's totally possible to say I have a freedom of speech Network and if you were engaging in threats like for example your Trump and you're tweeting that Mark Millie should be executed when he is the joint chief of staff's General that's a threat of violence that should be removed right you know so it's totally doable to say violence has no place on this platform or threats of violence now violence is illegal threats of violence is not right one of the theories I had many years ago and I I don't actually think this theory was based on anything other than I read it and it sounded good so I used to say it was that over the next 10 years and I used to say this about six seven years ago on stage social network working would become more and more siloed into these smaller interest based networks I was thinking the other day in the taxi I was like oh my God that's actually happening now you're having like blue sky and threads and you've got your Instagrams and your rumbles and we've got more and more social networks that are more like centered around different pockets of people what is your theory of social networking over the next decade two decades I'm always open as an investor to interesting ideas yeah right here we are in a business podcast so I'm always looking at stuff um look I think
uh they will grow to be an increasingly just as they've grown massively in the last 20 years they will continue to grow to be an important part of life I think there will be different social networks that fit different parts of our Lives um that's part of the reason like for example like back when I started LinkedIn it was also thought to be oh no no no one's ever going to do a business Network it's only going to be social networks right it was only going to be at the time it was like Friendster then it was Myspace then it was Facebook like look there's only going to be that there's never going to be those and then people say well there's only going to ever be one social network and you're like well actually in fact we do have like Twitter we do have snap and we do have right there's there is multiple ones and I think there will be more um so I think they're going to have more social networks and they're going to fit into different people's lives they're going to have different Community cultures um for them and so and I think not only will they get multimodal but they'll use AI in different ways and so and part of that invention like one of the things I tend to think people say well what ideas are you looking at as an investor and I'm like look I'm looking for that great idea that I haven't thought of that someone out there amongst the millions of entrepreneurs has got that great thing and can possibly make it work that's what I'm looking for so when I look to future of social networks now to give a little bit more of a specific answer like I tend to think social networks need to both have individuals as customers and societies as customers so you need to think about like that balance of you need to think about both in how you're designing them right so it's and that doesn't mean no freedom of speech and you know autocratic because I actually think more or less she should allow people to post whatever they want as long as it's civil right and if you want to choose to have an anonymous social network that's fine like there's a definite rule for especially when you get to places where the government is oppressed you know go to in Iran or or or Russia or something else he like well anonymity is important for saving your life right
but on the other hand you should also be thinking about like okay what do this means as society and part of what we want in media networks is we want to be collectively learning so if I'm posting that you know vaccines are an evil plot for corporations to try to kill our children you're like well you're trying to persuade people to do something that's bad for them and bad for society so we should respond in some way we may still allow you to post but we may put a little box around it saying you know here's what experts you know here's what all of the doctors at all the elite hospitals you know survey says 99.999% of them you know there's only one out of all the doctors that lead hospitals who don't think like these vaccines are a good idea and do you think social networks have been a net positive for society I think broadly look it doesn't mean that they're that they don't have some challenges mhm like people criticize Facebook for example um but actually in fact a billion people get on it every day they share their experiences pictures lives with loved ones friends Etc all of that's very very positive um I think Twitter unfortunately is taking a turn for the worst I think if you go you know where's the largest site which has the most untruths on it I think it's Twitter right um but you know that doesn't mean it can't also be improved and fixed over time what's worked well in your business this year where did you need more help we should all be asking ourselves these types of questions as we close out the year Q4 is a time for reflecting but it's also a time to look ahead and start planning could your team increase productivity and set more ambitious goals if you had more resource if so my show sponsor Fiverr could be the resource you need to ramp up in 2025 Fiverr is the Online Marketplace where you can connect with skilled Freelancers specializing in almost every area of business whether you need need coders digital marketeers AI experts or designers they're all there ready to help you can browse portfolios and reviews and if their Creator's work doesn't meet your standards fiverr's refund policy has you covered set your 2025 up for success and explore fiverr's
creative Network visit fiver.com diary and use code diary for 10% off your first order whenever I speak to entrepreneurs like today's guest Reed Hoffman the co-founder of LinkedIn there's one problem that always comes up but today's sponsor LinkedIn has a solution that I think you'll want to hear connecting your business with the right people can be tough you can spend a lot of time in money trying to get it right and still nonetheless fall short especially when it comes to btb marketing where you're not doing business with one person you're dealing with teams making decisions together through Linkedin ads you can get access to the Right audience so you can build relationships with their one billion members 130 million decision makers and 10 million SE Executives you can also Target specific spefically by job industry company and more it's no surprise that LinkedIn is the highest returning paid social platform to help you get started LinkedIn is offering a $100 credit to launch your first campaign just go to linkedin.com doac 24 to claim your credit now that's linkedin.com doac c24 terms and conditions apply there's so many different takes that I've heard on AI I've spoken to Mustafa Solomon I've spoken to lots of different I you know Mustafa because you invested in his company yeah we co-founded inflection ah he co-founded inflection which then sold to Microsoft well it's it did a commercial deal with him it's still going as a company oh okay all right cuz my stuff moved over yeah he moved over because he wanted to do a consumer agent and inflection is doing B2B uh software sales now what is your take on AI and how should we be thinking about it how should Dave and Jenny the average person with you know working in a company or building a small startup think about AI so I think AI is in a look so I last year I published a book called impromptu which is the first book on AI co-written with AI right yeah to show as well as tell that AI is not just artificial intelligence it's amplification intelligence it gives us superpowers right as part of that I'm publishing a book in January called super agency which is our human agency even with this agentic technology can and will be magnified we will get these
superpowers and super agency is the time where um when a lot of people get access to a new general purpose technology um the transformation of society that comes and it's like printing press or electricity or cars or mobile phones it's it's this amazing uh uh transformation of all of our Lives because not only do I get the superpower by having AI the fact that you have a superpower with AI also increase my agency so for example you're a doctor who now has access to AI your ability to help tend to lots of people's heals now just get Amplified and it's the same thing like when a car was created a doctor could now do have a broader range of places they could visit to go help that part of his cars have that super agencies not just I can drive places now because the doctor can drive places that also increases her his agency and also my agency through super agency and that book's coming out in January there's a little around AI as well there's fear all the time with new technologies is any of that Gloom warranted yes but with an asterisk which is every time a new general purpose technology comes out the discourse when the printing press came out the discourse was very similar to the current discourse on AI it's going to destroy Society um it's going to destroy human learning and knowledge you know it's going to disable the current people who are the who are the the custodians of knowledge which mostly priests you know in Society from from from being able to control the flow of information we're going to have all this misinformation etc etc now by the way you don't have a scientific revolution without the printing press right so um now so there's always this fear but and you say is the fear completely unwarranted well look human societies are bad at new general purpose Technologies right so um with the printing press we had nearly a century of religious War because of it so the transitions are very difficult because we as human beings are difficult at new general purpose Technologies and so the transition look the transition is going to have pain there's going to be challenges and reordering and so disruption because of it no question what I'm hoping and part of the reason I
write these books is say look let's manage this transition better than we've managed the previous transitions right let's I have one 100% confidence that the other side this will be enormously amazing super agency what I wanted to do is manage the transition as best we can now people say well shouldn't you manage the transition by being really slow and being really regulated well the challenge is is that these new technologies are developed competitively across the entire Globe different countries different Industries different companies Etc and we don't set the clock like there's no one group that sets the clock and if you don't like go with it like take the industrial Evolution which also had a bunch of things why did Europe basically set the the the the drum beat for the globe for centuries the answer is Europe embraced the Industrial Revolution robustly and early right the um you know it's part of what you know made uh the British Empire right and so that clock is set by different human beings all running at it and by the way they have different theories of the good they have different theories of how technology should be in society they have different theories of what the risks are Technologies like you know when these people published this pause letter that was like that's a mistake like other people aren't going to PA like it's a simple thing you look at the people who care about Humanity if they all pause and the people don't care about Humanity don't pause your letter if you if you achieve your success will cause a bad impact on Humanity so you have to be developing it you have to be going with the CL that's set by the world right when I think about AI in simple terms the the way that I've I've been thinking about it and this is not a Perfect Analogy or whatever but it's just a simple way to think about it is if there was one Steven Bartlet here that has an IQ of 100 and there was another one sat next to me that had the IQ of a thousand what would this Steve do and what would that Steve do that's a good question is that an apt analogy is that somewhat well it depends this is part of the thing is we human beings are very bad at imagining future technology mhm so I can tell you stories about where we have created AIS with IQ of a
thousand I can tell you stories where we've created AIS with IQs of uh 200 of 150 and I can also tell you stories of AIS where we' created that are kind of the equivalent because today we have this is a form of like idiot seant like today's AI are super intelligent I'll give you an example so if I go to a human being I try to look human say explain to me mixture of experts creation of AI with an AI what does that mean uh it's a it's a technique by which modern AIS are created that have um different kind of expertise roles in the combination like chat gbt is created this way that create their output it's a it's a particular technical definition for the way of creating a a worldclass AI model then I say okay compare a mixture of experts uh so it's only thousands of people who understand how to do that I say okay compare that to uh modern economic Game Theory well there's probably some humans that can do that too we're probably now down to like 50 to 100 right then I say okay compare those two to Modern oceanography right okay now we're at zero human beings there's no human beings who can do this but I can go to gbd4 and I can run this gbd4 because it's ingested a mill a trillion words of knowledge can write the comparisons between these three things because it knows all three because it knows all three that's a superpower that no human being has we have ai superpower today right but of course no one's alarmed about that because like oh that's a great amplification intelligence that really helps me I think there's a very good chance that what happens is is that what we're creating with all of every current e AI technique that's under development is these amazing savants that are these great co-pilots right and that's what we're creating not Terminator robots not super intelligences there's a possibility of that and I can address the existential risk questions around the possibility of that because people think about that poorly but um but the I think the likelihood is that we're going to be having these kind of co-pilots that give us these informational GPS's these cognitive superpowers that make us as human beings a lot better B Act is are G to yes that too
yes that's the bigger worry so you say one worry is transition and another worry is whenever you're you're creating this new technology you want to say I want to empower all these people who are building Better Lives for themselves in society and I want to not Empower criminals terrorists Rogue States and also you think I also need weapons that are sufficiently uh Advanced attacking my my enemies and everybody globally is thinking that yes China might be thinking about the the west and the West are thinking about China Russia are thinking about this person this person the Middle East are probably thinking about a couple of people yes so with with all developing weapons or defense systems they're going to probably make those robots you talked about the Terminator robot that can go to the battlefield yes and that's super smart they're going to probably make some cyber weapons as well yes so those things end up existing and then they're in the wrong hands the mistake happens so you want to build them in the right hands first that's all I mean look there will be cost to it there's never look electricity essential for Human Society it does electrocute people right it does two things in the wrong hands too right is this technology different though because there's been comparisons to the printing press electricity but is this no no it's new but by the way each technology the printing press was different when it was created electricity was different when it was created cars were different when they were created is this the most profound well in terms of impact it C it might be right that's that's that's possibility um I think there is I always think in probability distributions I think there's a good probability of it but to some degree like it doesn't matter if it is or isn't the most it is a Prof found new technology it's as important at least as these other ones that's the only thing that matters whether it definitely is or not doesn't really matter and look what is different it's the fact it's a gentic technology which means it it's creating agents that can operate on their own right we already have that by the way like the agent you can be running an agent with a connection to the internet
on your computer and it can go buy stuff for you right you can do that today it's doable you have agent just a question of what the shape is right so it's agentic it's cognitive like like it's very strange that we have a technology now that we can talk to in various ways and so you have people mistaken going oh it must be conscious because they asked if who was conscious and it said it was conscious and I was like no but by the way before this technology existed that was a good test does by the way there are conscious things that can't there's there's mute people and the fact that they can't tell you their conscious so conscious not perfectly they tell you they're conscious but you tell me your conscious that was a pretty good test before now it's a little bit more complicated because I don't think any of the current AIS are conscious and we can go in depth of reason of Neuroscience and other kinds of things about why that is it's not a just a human species parist view um and figur out under what circumstance it would be conscious is a very interesting question that we need to we need to figure out because it won't be that it has gray matter it'll be something else or you know maybe we'll figure this out so so that's new the cognitive superpowers are new the fact that the speed of deployment is going to be unusual because now we have the mobile phone internet so I create a new agent and tomorrow a billion people can use it right that's new right so so all of these things are new and by the way new is anxiety producing and new is difficult to navigate and new can make transition's very difficult right but by the way the fact that we're facing a new challenge is not itself a new challenge right for the average person out there that's I know they might be working in a hospital or might be a lawyer or or a doctor whatever just someone with a a job that's heard this term Ai and they're saying chat GPT is there anything that they should be doing on an individual level to make sure that they can capitalize on the opportunity that AI presents the basic answer is absolutely yes and that's part of the reason why like like I do my podcast possible I do super agency I do impromptu because the
strong advice I give everyone and literally I was sitting with the governors of the bank of England yesterday and my advice to them among other things was personally go use AI right don't just use it to make a Sonet for your kids's birthday that's great don't just use it for a recipe for what happens to be refrigerator that's great for something that matters to you that part of your expertise and soth start using it and by the way you'll find that uh some of the things are still not useful for it all like when I sat down to ask gbd4 how would Reed Hoffman make money investing in AI it gave me an answer that was the smart business school Professor answer who didn't understand Venture Capital it was like well study which areas have the largest total addressable Market it then look at what the possibilities for competitive disruption are then you know market research test that it's like it's no way like go find a great entrepreneur with a great idea right you know and and it's best when the idea is something you haven't thought of and few other people have thought of too right is a way of doing so it got it completely wrong from how I how Reed Hoffman how I invest in Ai and what I do very successfully now you say well then it's useless for Venture Capital it's like no no cuz I kept experimenting with it and I said okay I fed in a uh an entrepreneurs plan and I said how would I do due diligence on this plan and it came back with a pretty good list was like yeah yeah one that was I was absolutely planning on doing that two I was absolutely three yeah I could see why you'd think I was doing it that's not important oh four I would have gotten to it would would have gotten to it like four days down the road of doing the work and now I know it now so it's useful there so it is today useful to everybody you can use it for things that you care about today so go start playing with it and I love Ethan mik's line which is the worst AI you're ever going to use in your life is the AI you're using today so one of the reasons to start using it is to start getting familiar with it because like it is a stunning tool and I'll give one since you're talking about Everyday People I'll give one kind of tip that I give everybody at the beginning it's part of the reason I wrote impromptu Etc which
is um what what is ai ai is great at adopting a role that you tell it to adopt right so here's a very simple one you have an argument for something you can paste it into an AI um and you can say uh counter this argument take the role of critic argue against me and you can see it it will immediately give you an you know a a a capable argument against your position that is very helpful it's helpful for cognitive development it's helpful for learning it's for our understanding you know what are the strengths and weaknesses but by the way you can also say take my side give me another argument for the thing I'm arguing for like make that argument but that's just the beginning you can also say like for example if I go okay I'm making this argument for uh um how general purpose technologies always have initial strong fear by people and how they're described as the end of society the end of humanity Etc it's happened a number of different times um how would a historian of Technology analyze my argument how would they criticize my argument and then you get it so you can get to like it's literally it's only your own creativity and your own inspiration of who what role should I be talking to and once you start realizing that you can start using AI very powerfully for whatever you're trying to do should entrepreneurs be thinking about building companies in the field of AI at the moment you know as a entrepreneur who's like roughly 30 years old I look back and go gosh I wish I was of entrepreneurial age when the.com boom came around because everyone became billionaires and and is is that is this that moment in time yes so short answer is yes okay so what so I'm an entrepreneur I'm I'm 30 OD years old um I've got disposable income I'm financially free m i' I'd love to take part in the next Revolution yeah should I be fing out to San Francisco and build building an AI joining an AI start about there yes why so so one of the things is Silicon Valley so Silicon Valley has built itself up of multiple the reason it's called Silicon Valley is because it started with silicon right it's now software Valley Silicon Valley almost never invested in Silicon anymore silicon being the chips yes Bing the
chips yes um so now really it's much more software Valley it's like we invest billions and billions of dollar every year into new software companies right so we went from Silicon through you know networking equipment like Cisco through like just stacks of different things getting to where we are now ai is the new one by the way we did the thing with internet we did it with mobile phones we did it with web 2 now it's AI right and so you know the principal thing is when you get this new like uh new general uh purpose technology uh it opens up massive amounts of entrepreneurial space because one is's all the new things that can be built that were never possible before Airbnb couldn't be done before the internet there's just no way right so it opens up these things that weren't possible before um and so like the internet's a good proxy to the to the wave we have now with AI then it also by the way uh makes a mass massive transformative force on all existing businesses so you say well I had a business of of selling you know kind of um of e-commerce and doing you know mail order cataloges well now there's e-commerce right so it it it transforms all of these businesses and so by the way for example the internet is part of what makes the cloud Revolution so now it's like well actually in fact it's not software on your desktop it's not software on your your phone it's in the cloud and of course it bounces back and forth a little bit then you have well no actually in fact you've got this really great app on your phone and soth but these kinds of things AI is the next one that affects all of them so you have Green Field you have potentially revolutionized any particular place where there's a product or service especially that intelligence could be added to it right there's a possibility of a great startup idea there so so yes now should you go try to build your own Frontier Model which is a 10 billion doll computer it's a hard thing that's a hard amount of capital for startups no no no try to figure out like degrees you use Frontier models from you know open AI or Microsoft or Google or you know others as ways of doing this but you still May build your own model right um that a lots of lots of startup companies
are building their own models I invested in this customer service company called Sierra that Brett Taylor is doing and their thing is we're not building our own models we're just deploying other models so we have best of readed for what models are available to us you could do that as an AI startup there's a whole range and part of what I love about entrepreneurship and invention is like I have a whole set of theories about what kinds of things will be really big and some of my theories will be right and I will also discover some other people who have amazing theories that's one of the things I really I and we at Greylock love to invest in interesting oh what's the best way for someone to go and learn about AI right now because like going to University feels like it would be start using it start building it if you want to if you can if you're technical uh download an open source model uh llama mraw other start playing with it what if you not technical well then well generally speaking like you can't do a technology it's very hard to do a technology startup without a technology co-founder so then go find a technology co-founder so for someone like me who's built my my career in building teams marketing social media content media those kinds of things who is really interested in AI should I go and do you think I should go learn AI now and start trying to be a technical person or too slow okay yeah too slow no no speed matters speed matters and startups but by the way uh like gen because we tend to so much lionize what is usually the man versus the person most of these people are men um the individual startups succeed because their initial team that's part of the hiring point we were talking about earlier and so generally speaking if you ask me would I rather invest in an individual uh founder or two to three co-founders I'd rather invest in two to three co-founders right so going and finding a co-founder is a great thing because by the way your your throw weight your capability weight is so much better when you do that and so you know um uh Mark Zuckerberg had Dustin muskovitz Adam D'Angelo right you know Chris Hughes that's a really important part of how things get created you invested in open
aai almost a decade ago yes before everybody was talking about it what did you see in that company so Sam Alman Greg Brockman Ilia suser um amazing um and uh they had a focused bold vision which is yes Google has invented the Baseline of the attention based Transformer but they don't realize that it's just scale like apply scale to this we are going to bet the entire company everything we're doing on scale on it and we're gonna be very focused on doing it that's that's great but people had said the we AI for a long time and it had never manifested in it and I had passed on a lot of AI Investments but the thing that people need to understand about AI is it's a transformation to scale Computing Learning Systems so as opposed to we program it like we program the AI we program a scale Computing Learning System so it learns right and that only becomes available once you have scale compute so you need the Internet you need the cloud you need massive data centers and you need access to massive amounts of data which you get from the internet and other things and then you need a scale team to build it on that point of people how important if you're trying to be successful as a young entrepreneur is networking uh almost always critical because you need that initial team now you don't need networking of I should spend 12 hours a day seven days a week going to every party that I can possibly go of and shaking people's hand and giving my them my business card that's not particularly useful what you need to be is just like you have a strategy for your business you need to have a strategy for how you're building your network around your business and your network around you like who are the people that I should be talking to who are the people that I should be learning from who are the people I should be trying to bring into my network that the project that I'm creating and how do I meet those people there's so many obvious things that people talk about when they're describing what makes an entrepreneur successful they say hard work they say have a big Vision but is
there anything that's really underappreciated like when I say this I'm talking about being a nice person or being etiquette or politeness or manners are there any things like that that you think make a big difference but people don't appreciate well I don't think politeness and etiquette are s are really particularly good competitive advantages I'm not saying the one should be rude but like an emphasis like if an entrepreneur is like I'm reading my etiquette manual it's like don't spend your time like sure be nice be I think building a network like entrepreneurship is a team sport it is not an individual sport it's a team sport so you need to be building your team right but you've seen entrepreneurs be successful that were bad at that right uh not ultimately at scale oh interesting right because it is a team sport right like you know it requires High Talent people around you doing it now for example you can get enough initial success going and capital that even though you're bad with your team people people will come on board because they'll go oh I believe this is going to go somewhere and I can make a bunch of money doing it I'll come do it and so like for example a classic Trope within Silicon Valley which is broadly correct and that's part of the reason you have the tropes is I want missionary not mercenary cultures right because the missionaries I believe we're going to change the world we're going to do it this way and by the way mostly of the big successful companies most of them are missionary cultures they say oh they're all missionary cultur no no no there's mercenary cultures that have gotten big tooo I'm how do you define mercenary in this all I care about is making money like all like the only thing that matters is I'm selling something I'm gonna make money that's all that matters do you sometimes think the mission's [ __ ] though just like [ __ ] to get people to feel something there are there are [ __ ] missions that that are like the I'm just telling a story I don't really care right I'm telling a story that's incorrect right there are like like like um the Silicon Valley TV show uh on HBO kind of you know um uh you know satiredaily
because that's what people want to do people want to be in things that changing the world so you have to say like I'm LinkedIn this is how I'm going to change the world I'm open AI this is how I'm going to change the world I'm married baby be this is how I'm going to change the world because humans are emotional story animals exactly so yes you need it but of course it's much better if it happens to be that you actually are trying to do that you are actually in fact you have a good plan for how you might succeed in doing that because you know a fiz like a I know fizzy drinks company yeah conglomerate even they try and end they like value proposition with we're going to change the world yes exactly and you know it's [ __ ] it's a public company they got shareholders who want to return Yes but even they I guess have to do it on the mindset front what is the mindset the factors of a great entrepreneur's mindset what are the key things that you look for when you're investing in one insanely great ambition right I'm I'm shooting for the moon and you know sometimes literally but most often like like if I'm successful I will transform the industry okay an awareness of like a good plan for how you might do that right an awareness that that entrepreneurship is a team sport not an individual Sport and I have a plan for how I'm bringing in like all of different elements Capital Talent Etc um like for example one of the ways that I interview Executives is um I say who are the three to five they five I love it but minimum three worldclass people who worked for you before and I'm going to call them and ask them what it's like working for you right because and by the way if I if it really matters I will then reference check those three people on are they actually world class mhm right because only hire people who are going to hire worldclass people who who who play it now similarly like who are the world class people who think you're world class as an entrepreneur and like this is one of the things that actually entrepreneur first that we actually in fact Learned was it isn't necessarily who everybody thinks it's who some worldclass people think that this person world class because they're edgy yeah so
you look for that it isn't that you look for people that everybody loves them everybody says oh I'd love to have a drink with that person no no no like having someone say uh that person's hard driving they're difficult that can be a very strong positive I've invested a number of entrepreneurs that way what about resilience well resilience also very important almost every startup goes through what I call a valley the shadow moment which is like why did we think this was a good idea oh my God we're like when when I started social net one of my connections from Apple dropped me who had started doing startups two years before dropped me a um uh a on line email that said welcome to where 15 minutes is the difference between exultation and Terror I'm Gonna Change the World oh [ __ ] I'm gonna die right so resilience is super important because it is a dog fight um and multiple times PayPal LinkedIn Airbnb oh God we're going to die this is going to be worth zero Can you spot resilience in someone um you can have a high probability guess based on well it's kind of like so you push them on things and see what they've done have they taken risk how do they respond to risk are they trying to persuade themselves that the thing that they're doing is zero risk no no no I'm guaranteed to succeed no one is does it m does it help if they've been through some difficult things in their life oh yeah because then if they've gone through the difficult things and they've been resilient in there that's likely not 100% that gives a good probability they'll be resilient in the traumatize people well it depends on how they respond to the trauma right what did you learn from it like how did you respond to it like because generally speaking you need to be able to convert negatives into positives right on the entrepreneurial Journey so it's like look that was that was really bad and I learned from it if you were advising a young person on how to build wealth in 2025 huh and when I say young I mean 18 years old yeah what would you and you had to to plan out the road map of their life can you walk me through how you'd be thinking about those seasons of life like 18 to 30 30 onwards Etc
so part of the reason I wrote startup review was that the advice that universities frequently give is you know Follow Your Passion first do the things that you're really passion about oh you want to go volunteer in Bhutan do it now is tends to be and it's terrible advice right they that that actually is the the wrong end for the advice the right thing and it doesn't mean don't follow your passion but the right thing is to start with how do I get to a place where I have establish myself and have like the ability to like economically the platform and maneuver could be enough wealth to be you know uh to no longer need a salary that was my own personal goal um but it also could be the I'm well known and have a network of contacts of people who would want to hire me and so forth and now I'm going to go spend a year volunteering in Bhutan because I really want to do that right so the answer is go be vigorous about the thing that matters for your entire life early and take the big risks outly yeah take the big risk early right now you might say I want to be a doctor it's not particularly risky it's fine but then go to medical school establish yourself as as as as a medical professional and so before you do that so whatever thing that is the thing that you think gives you the platform for resilience in your later life go esta Lish that now and by the way that's part of the thing of like wealthy but Wealthy by the way could be measured in I have a bank balance right or on stock Equity portfolio but wealthy can also be the I have a great network of people who want to work with me who want to hire me who value my talents right so this whole range uh for things but go establish that first and that can be take big RIS if you if by the way some people say I want to take as few big risks as possible possible in my whole life because that's who I am fine but go establish yourself first now if you're going to be entrepreneur you want to be an entrepreneur then like for example like okay maybe you shouldn't start a business at 18 but maybe you should go join a startup right start learning it start building the network and it's roughly build the network is the broad thing and by the way build the skills and you know get like frequently doing a startup is
very difficult economically usually you start with no salary Etc like having some reserves is a good thing to have I read a book and in the first chapter I was trying to figure out what this platform is for young people and the way that I kind of described it is these five buckets the first one being knowledge and then when knowledge is applied it becomes a skill and the good thing about these first two buckets is they're the only two that no one can ever really um empty of what you put in there yes the next one I posited was me trying to remember my own book was um your I'm gonna say Network y then your resources and your reputation now anyone can take these last three like life can happen you can get five you can lose your friends whatever um Well network is hard to lose if youve really authentically built it right it can be lost there it can be but it's very hard it's kind of like a nuclear bomb kind of thing I mean it's like like you may like one particular person on you may have a real difference of opinion um you know you may move and then fired get fired and a lot of your network is but by the way even if you've gotten fired if you've got a couple people at that company that you had good relationship with they may still be part of your network so am I right in thinking that the Knowledge and Skills part is really the critical thing to uh prioritize when you yeah well sof this is part of what we did in SAR view soft assets are very important people under prioritize them they tend to say oh I should take the job that offers me a 5% higher salary and the answer is almost always that's not the criteria that you should be looking at even 30% higher SI salary is not the criteria you should be looking at you should be looking at where are my soft assets where's my knowledge where's my skills where's my network interesting because the soft assets are what compound generally to the much larger like the fact that you took a job with a 30% higher salary is not necessarily the predictor that you're going to get the job with a 300% higher salary it's the soft assets that are likely to get to the 300% economic outcome so shortterm versus longterm So Soft assets are longevity yes and the and the hard assets I guess are short
term yes immediate is there a different game you play when you hit your 30s do you think well you have to evolve it so for example you can when you're in your 20s you can say well I'm gonna I'm gonna take more risk like the economics take the the the jobs that have zero salary or lower salary because I'm going to live in the house with five of my friends you know we're to have beans and toast for dinner you know d d d da as ways of doing it CU I can take those risks now and then when you're 30 it's like well maybe I'm planning on having a life partner and being in an apartment or a house with them and soth so so it changes as you go through and then you have kids yes did you have kids no um because I'm I'm in that region now where I'm thinking about having kids and I'm just I'm wondering how dis disruptive it's going to be it's another startup like it's fine you can do startups and have it but it's a complete startup which do you think low is your chance of being successful at a startup because doing two startups is more difficult than doing one probably a little yeah but maybe worth it on balance okay yeah what is happiness to you because you've got the money you've got the success you've got the reputation you've got the the CV what is happiness for me is going through life with people I love and building great things but like by the way if I failed at everything I built and I was still going through life with people people I loved great why is that so important because I think part of the meaning of life is how you contribute to the to the people around you it it's like again I sorry I keep referring the startup of you but it was my first book Is advice the young people right it's the I and the Wii like like like do things for yourself do things for the for for me do things for we right and I I learn from people I get Delight from people um I feel meaningful as I contribute to people's lives and obviously you know there's people immediately around me there's people in the whole world I mean like you know LinkedIn billion people have signed up for it like like there's there is there is um like that's part of what I think is essential in the in the meaning of life and for me especially how did you have happiness
wrong when you were younger if in any way um I probably thought like it was important to be top of your class not that it was important to just do well but it's important to be top right and what I've come to realize is you know there 8 billion people right nobody is the best at everything right some people delude themselves that they are but but nobody is you could be the best at something and by the the way being the best at something that's good thing but by the way to really be obsessive about the being the be the absolute best at that thing well maybe you're actually uh being you're you're less investing in other things it's a little bit like your earlier question about managing like you say you'll be I I'm an Oracle and I'll tell you you'll be four times as economically successful if you're a [ __ ] to the people you work with n no uh not okay for me and love how does love come into all of this you're you're in you have a long-term life partner yes yeah uh in Seattle what role has that played in in your happiness and your professional success for me all the people around me are people I learn from and that includes Michelle like I learn all kinds of things from Michelle Michelle are actually both in some ways very similar people deep belief in ethics deep belief in The Importance of Being a good person and in some ways very different she like I'm Mr scale she's anti- scale right she she she thinks she's fine with my doing the scale things but like she wants to go connect with local people in the community right like she's like look I'm volunteering in the senior center will you come volunteer with me no no no I don't do that I'm happy to give money to the senior center but that's not what I do but that that's that's her life and I learn from that because by the way life is both life is both here and here so so it's it's one of the balance of different people she she is intensely going in she's taking this kind of call it Quaker Buddhist approach to creating art right and and that's just amazing like I love being on that Journey with her right um and that's her journey right um but I learned from it and those are the kinds of things that are that
are um you know part of what I think the meaning of life is is how we learn from each other when if two entrepreneurs come to you and they the exact same thing but one of them is in a long-term marriage what is the difference between those two entrepreneurs in terms of how they'll show up in business in your view interesting I've never been asked that question uh it depends um I do think like one of the things that I treat as a very relevant fact is how someone treats the people around them okay so it's somewhat evidenced that there yes yes so like if a person is good to the people around them then that's a person I am more likely to much more much much more likely to want to go through because like a startup is like 10 years like I have passed on investments that I've literally referred to and I won't name them because it's uncivil but I've literally passed on investments that I thought this is going to make a ton of money and I've told my partners at Greylock hey look this entrepreneur and this business this is going to make a lot of money if any of you want to do it great and I will support you but I don't want to invest because I don't want to spend the 10 years with this entrepreneur right because it's just you know Life's Too Short right uh and I was right those businesses made a ton of money right but it was yeah no no thanks not worth a headache yes when I was reading Blitz scaling and I was watching the videos that you did you've done several talks on it I've seen pretty much all of them over the years um one of the questions I had as an investor myself is my early stage companies that aren't in cons the consumer Internet space they're selling I don't know they might be selling a a drink in a supermarket or something should should they all be pursu pursuing this idea of blit Blitz scaling where you go lightning fast to building a mass massively valuable company not necessarily okay uh Blitz scaling is a strategic response to Global competition okay right and so now there are certain industries where Global competition is the norm not the exception You're Building an Internet Property right MH right or mostly like much software not all software but most
like many software companies in which case and by the way if you can get away with not Blitz scaling it's much better because Blitz scaling is spending resources inefficiently to get to Market size ahead of your competition right so like a classic example is like you know uh Uber would interview somebody offer them a job and then say who are the three best people at your company that that that you worked with and send job offers to those three people without even interview them them right because that's Blitz scaling right that's I'm going super super fast and uh and that that was a blitz scaling technique I learned from Uber I was like oh yep put that one in the tool chest for when you need to do that right because outpacing the competition when you're in Glen Gary Glenn Ross markets which is first prize Cadillac second prize steak knives third prize you're fired it's the game right and it's one of the things like when you know you and I were chatting a little bit before we started the podcast like one of the places that things that places like you know London and the UK and Europe need to learn is when the competition is global it's not the people down the street it's the fiercest competitors around the world and Silicon Valley has Fierce competitors China has Fierce compe you have to have a theory of how you're playing that game against those the fiercest competitors in the world and so um Blitz scaling is in part like this is stuff I've learned from Silicon Valley and from the stuff I've done in China to say like when you're in a global competitive business and you're trying to establish it and you have competitors who are doing this this is some of the techniques that you need to do if AI is going to be so transformative when you think about a country like the UK where you know we don't have the blitz scaling advantages as entrepreneurs and Founders that you guys have in Silicon Valley if you were the prime minister of the UK what would you do to give us a shot at getting some of the value that's going to acrw because of this air opportunity so I think there's two things one is you need to enable some of
your company's ability to Blitz scale as much as you can right okay so because if if if a company if company one is not Blitz scaling and is competing against Company 2 that is Blitz scaling company one's going to lose I don't think we've got any AI companies that are blit scaling in company one is going to lose right company two might lose too right but company one is guaranteed to lose and Company two is not guaranteed to lose right so if you're competing against companies that are Blitz scaling you must also be Blitz scaling it's part of the the reason I wrote the book it's part of the reason I give talks it's part of the reason I help uh Sher kou standup the scale the scaling Institute here in London you know etc etc now you say we can't we're not going to be able to well then choose areas where the competitors are not blit scaling I've got a example I want to give you I invest in a matcha company they make matcha like the you know green tea and they've they've grown very very quickly they call perfect T hash ad I'm an investor Etc new investor in the company I think um and I was wondering they've G so quickly so they've gone from I don't know zero to they'll probably do maybe 30 million pounds next year and they've done it in a could be measured in months really and I wondered I was like match is this trend that's coming into Shore everyone's drinking match now every coffee shop you go to has matcha should they be Blitz scaling to capture the opportunity globally so it depends on two things one most centrally comp competition do they need to be outpacing their compet ition could argue yes yeah but if yes then and especially if their competitors are Blitz scaling then absolutely yes if the commits are not Blitz scaling it's all will Blitz scaling enable us to outpace them because by the way it does involve moving so fast you're taking risks and hiring and capital raise and expenditures you're doing marketing that you would like you're uber you're you're launching in 20 cities at the same time it's whoa you know Etc because that does add risks right but you're saying those risks that it adds are less of a risk than not spit scaling that's kind of the tradeoff so competition is a central reason for
doing it and by the way most of the compan most of the times where you can raise Capital bit scaling is because if you if it's a Glen Gary Glenn Ross Market where first prizes Cadillac second priz steak knives well then generally speaking investors are willing to invest at premium prices give a lot of capital etc etc because they'll go we agree that you're going to get a great Market position if you Blitz scale and by the way part of the problem is investors are not always right but if some investors are willing to do it then and they're going to do it in your competitors then you absolutely have to do it if your competitor is going to do it so competition is the first thing the second thing is do you need to get to critical mass scale so like your payments industry and this is one of the things I learned to PayPal which is basically payments businesses are dead unless they have at least a billion you know dollars of you know transactional volume through them per year and that was back in 2002 what I was looking I'm sure it's higher now right maybe it's 10 billion whatever but it's like if you don't get to that scale you're dead you're irrelevant right so getting to that scale and getting through the highly unprofitable getting the scale as fast as possible really matters and so that's one of the places where you say well we're none of our competitors are doing it but we should still do it because getting that critical mass and scale really matters um and so that's another time and and so that would be I don't think that's probably the the matcha company right that that's probably like doesn't need so but those are the the lessons you look at but it's not Blitz scaling for its own sake that's one of the mistakes that people make when they go Blitz scaling oh we're doing it two Blitz scales no no you Blitz scale as a set of strategic techniques in response to a market and response to competition mhm and in the case of matcher there is a role of brand being the mo a little bit yes and so that may be irrelevant that may be the relevant thing of why it's a glen gar in the I haven't looked at the market at all but a glen gar Gad Ross Market a first prize Cadillac second prize steak guys maybe
that's because of brand establishment which case you have to be number one and on that point that I asked earlier about if you're the prime minister of the UK you'd start enabling some of our companies in the UK to like have more Capital give them access to Capital do you think one of my fears is that AI is such a big opportunity it's going to revolutionize everything and it's basically going to be owned by America and China it's one of my fears it's like fears of someone that lives in the UK that we're gonna your economy is gonna in the US is gonna have such a huge upswing in productivity so good news for you is I happen to know that t ding street is paying attention to this issue because I had meetings with him this week on that there's things that they will be announcing which I can't pre-announce okay right but they know this is important and they're working on it okay and they're Consulting you know people good yeah yeah that's what gives me hope yes okay what's the most important thing we haven't talked about for entrepreneurs that we should have talked about I'll give two um the first is and they're related the first is look just because you don't have a 100% chance of succeeding doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it right so like when I said earlier when we were talking about like look when I started LinkedIn I thought we had a most 20 25% chance of being successful that's fine right so and a matter of fact what you should be doing is aligning the fact that there's risks on what you're doing with the reason why you'll have less competition while you have a higher Runway before the com competition intensifies because part of it is if you have a theory like we talked about this in LinkedIn about why other people see that there is like they think there's a 0% chance you succeed and you think there's a 20 25% chance you succeed that's precisely that risk window is your opportunity right so think of risk not as terrifying think of risk as potential opportunity right that's one and we've talked about threads of it but thinking of it as opportunity right because you see something other people don't see you
see the risks but you have an idea for why that risk is something that you may be able to win on and they won't right so with LinkedIn that was hey I have an idea about how the network will grow even though it's not valuable until there's a million people in network right that's where that risk becomes an opportunity right so the second one also around risk is um have a plan B have plans B understand that you have an idea in your risk you're playing it and if it's not working out how do you pivot don't think oh the whole thing is going all in and I'm just gonna be roadkill if it doesn't work no no that's the whole point of the reason I have this framework of abz planning which is in the startup view which is by the way startup view is advice they give entrepreneurs shrunk to advice to individuals right every single chapter applies to entrepreneurs in their companies right like the abz planning is don't just have a plan a where like well if it doesn't work I'm dead you're like well that's a bad strategy like sometimes you'll do it sometimes it's the only thing I have I love this plan a it's the only thing I have and the only way to do it is to go all in and doesn't work I'm dead okay it's very scary right um when I do entrepreneurship I have plans B I have a plan Z right I I I have thought through not every because you can't think through everything but maneuverability and how to measure am I on track or not am I am I increasing my probability of success or not am I increasing my ability to get to the moon or not and and be doing risk management smart risks take smart risks that's the thing right how do you know when to quit and I'm saying this in a Prof professional context as well as an entrepreneurship context so when I get around to advising companies I've invested in or friends that now is time to quit or now is time to sell you try to sell of course but sometimes if you can't sell that means quit right is your new plans your new plans a are much worse than your previous plans a your new plan a is much worse because you pivoted yeah right and your new plan a is a much worse plan in your plan a that's when you get to your plan Z it's
like plan Z is I quit right okay so you've you've tried something else that's also messed up like okay and in a professional context when how do you know to quit when to quit the job um well it could be you have a much better plan a right like like okay this plan a that's okay and then by the way this is part of the difference that I tell people between should I found a company or should I join one it's like look one of the problems you have as a Founder you can't really quit you're you're you're with the business right it's very dishonorable to quit before you know the business gets to whatever it's its design is now sometimes you're fired fine but you're you know as a Founder you're like people have come and enjoyed this because of me being here and doing this and I'm here until the business gets to a point where it's it's a massive growing concern now once the company's public you can go do something or once the company's sold you can go do something or once the company is like profitable and really strong you can go do something but you're there until then as a Founder as an employee you're signing up for what I'm the alliance I call a tour of beauty which is I am I've I'm signed up to make a big difference in in the company but I'm not here till the end and so as your employee you can go look have I delivered against my Tour of Duty great and at that point a better opportunity comes along so you know uh Matt Kohler who you know now lives here in London as a you know partner at Benchmark like I recruited him out of Mackenzie in a LinkedIn three years in he comes to me and says hey I've been offered this this opportunity at Facebook I'm like look Matt I love working with you you're a close friend of mine etc etc you should take that job at Facebook that is the right Next Step for you right and because we're close and so forth I think he probably wouldn't have taken the job if I hadn't said but like LinkedIn resembles my brain I want people doing their best work their best opportunities and Facebook gave them a great opportunity what's really interesting about the LinkedIn story I've got the deck in front of me here from August 20 2004 yes that's our Greylock series B deck and what's pretty remarkable and by
the way Matt ker how create that deck oh did he yes I mean it's a it's a pretty good deck for a series series B especially back then it's very simple i' to say simple as good very very simple yes one of the things that really struck out to me is on this page here which is the sort of opening I guess vision mission statement whatever you want to call it is it's find and contact the people you need through the people you already trust and what's quite remarkable although this was written 20 years ago this is still very much what LinkedIn is about yes and usually when I see these decks they started as I don't know hot or not and now it's like Facebook and Instagram whereas this is still so close to what the vision was yeah well it's also my third company I had social net I had PayPal PayPal pivoted a lot right and so I had a good sense of both how to be longterm and short-term when I started LinkedIn and what is the key to being long-term in this regard well you know what is the you're going to transform the industry oh and what do you mean by key as in like if you're trying to build a long-term company from the outset yeah what are you thinking about well you're thinking about like if I'm successful at landing on the beach at expanding into the market how is it that I'm going to be a industry transforming company like what's the thing that changes millions of customers lives you know um uh or if it's an Enterprise company you know whatever like lots of companies within multiple Industries how am I an essential part of how they change the way they live they work they do business and what do you think of LinkedIn today because people use it in such a surprising way I mean people are building their personal brands on it it's like a social network yeah I knew that was all going to be from from before this deck I knew that was possible I have a probability now what what thing surprised me people build dating services on top of it really yes well I'm in a relationship may you haven't seen it but yeah but they're like well some people want to be dating people who have professional like my dating set is I want people who have good CVS okay I don't want LinkedIn to ever build that business fine if you're
gonna go build that business right no problem right I mean and like for example like one of the ear like this was I think uh a few months after we raised money from Greylock um on this deck um one of the surprising uses is like I never had envisioned this use case still looking for a job an engineer wanted to move to Denver from Silicon Valley and so it's like didn't know what companies to look at so this engineer went to LinkedIn and searched for profiles like his then looked at what companies those people worked at then decided which companies to go look for jobs at it was brilliant like it's a very good way of saying hey I'm look I'm interested in going and working here what kinds of companies that are interesting employ people like me are you still interested in building companies in terms of like being a CEO and founder again well so I co-founded inflection so I'm definitely doing the co-founding thing right um and you know I I anticipate that will happen again um but will I be the CEO it's not impossible um but it's kind of like because I have these amazing people like Mustafa suan who the COO that I can be the co-founder with that's great yeah I think that's the season of life I'm in yeah I don't want to be a CEO anymore which is unfortunate because I named the podcast I have a CEO when I was one but I just think there's an element of self-awareness which I think has really it's and for me the older I've gotten the more I'm orientating everything towards being happy yeah and for me it's it's hard to be a CEO and as happy as I and free as I want to be so then then then you need to build the network and skills by which you're working with other people who are the CEOs that's basically what I do now so the companies that I've described the software business the media company we have here there's people that are designed and built and much better CEOs than me what do you do you care about Legacy only because I care about impact um so I don't like I I care that I I've actually made a big difference to the ongoing story of humanity um but I don't that I mean look it's nice I like I certainly don't mind that people go oh Reed Hoffman did these amazing things it
feels good but I care much more about the substance like did I do really good things that was I a very positive impact now I'm I'm not I'm not indicating I have no ego you know the the appreciation for having done that that feels good but I don't do it for the appreciation I do it for the thing so do you make decisions based on Legacy at all only a by impact did you did you decide not to have children uh we did um and it was a joint decision of course and I think it was partially that we realiz we're um you know we're God Parents to a number of children we actually there's three kids here in London that that we're God Parents to right and uh you know there's all kinds of Delights in being a God parent which is you know you show up and spend an evening and get to participate and and the kids lives and then you know when it's like oh time to change the diaper and it are there any unchecked boxes in your life I'm sure there are um any major ones yeah um if you'd ask me um what book um I was going to first write when I was an undergraduate was book on friendship I still want to write that book I I've been taking notes for 30 years on friendship on friendship yep um what would that book be about friendship but specifically what part of why why everything look there's so few books on friendship you go into to a bookstore and you say where is your uh your section on relationships and they every bookstore will go oh over here right relationship with capar romantic relationship say okay where's your section on friendship no section on friendship Do you have a a book on friendship the answer is maybe we have one your assistant we spoke to your assistant ahead of this conversation today and she said that friendship and connection is a major part of your focus at the moment yes always but it it always has been now now you're doing intense things with startups part of the reason I actually think you should work with friends you should hire friends this is kind of a little bit you know counter common wisdom is because you want to be spending your time with friends and that does ADD difficulties
right but you want to spend your time with your friends that's really good are you still friends with Peter the yes you have a lot of disagreements in terms of politics but intense disagreements on politics but you still are able to be friends but we also met um with you know as undergraduates you know in a like like I knew he was extremely right and he knew I was left you know I've become much more uh business oriented than I was as undergraduates and he's become much more libertarian but you know disagreements is a good thing can be a good thing we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for oh and the question that's been left for you is a very interesting one okay what are the two things you want your life partner to know about you that they do not know or do not understand about you yet that's an interesting thing it's an interesting if someone has an answer to that question it suggests that they're not being a particularly good life partner I think I have been and will continue to be a good life partner so I actually don't have an answer to that question what's her name Michelle yes has does she misunderstand you in anyway [Music] um I don't know if it's a misunderstanding because we put a lot of energy into understanding each other I mean like for example we've seen marriage counselors together and not because we're going we're like fighting about something it's because helping having a third party help you understand the other person well is like actually in fact a very good thing find someone who's really good and do that right I do that with my partner yeah it's it's it's great you should do it you shouldn't be because we're arguing it should be because we are putting lots of energy into understanding each other I still think there's things about my partner that she doesn't understand about me or misunderstands about me and I misunderstand about her yeah of course and by the way I can point out things that I have learned about her like for example like the local community is what
really matters to her right I didn't really understand that 10 years ago now I understand that right um I'm sure she has those kind of similar things about me but like the moment it occurs to me that there's something she doesn't understand about me it comes up at a dinner you know not too many weeks in the future because that's part of how we come to our dinners right we come to our dinners is if one of us is on you know I had this thought we want to have those dinners Founders you're investing in that are in a stable solid relationship before they start the startup yeah and then they go on this crazy intense Journey do you ever give them advice on relationships and how to manage that because I have so many Founders come to me and they're like I think she's going to break up with me or he's going to break up with me because I'm just I'm absent in my head in person you try to have a really good relationship you try to be as like like I think you should in friendship and in relationships you should try to identify the things in yourself that the other person may find challenging and you should bring them up in advance M right that is a very good way to build deep quality friendships and relationships so for example in startups Michelle knew that about me so when we had planned our wedding and we we were doing a small you know um thing with you know just basically Justice to the peace and so forth we planned our wedding and it was very early days of LinkedIn and I came back home and I said we really need to delay it right we delayed it a couple weeks right was like we really need to delay I'm doing this thing at LinkedIn right now we really need to have it I I don't have time for that and Michelle didn't go ah she went okay let's make it work because I'd been clear with her about what the startup Journey was like right I had experience with it before and now sometimes like we didn't know it before but like look I'm really committed to this and it's really important to me that I do that well that should be kind of life partner things did you let her down a l uh I hope not in terms of making a plan making a dat we had we had multiple plans that got blown up right and what about the dealing with the
stress when you come home something I've always struggled with is if work is stressful when I come home I can be absent and then you have to transition into this mode of partner but my head is still thinking oh my God cash flow this or whatever well occasionally that's one of the things that Michelle go like you know I think you're not being fully present right like that's one of the one of the kind of as it were key words between us is I think you're not being fully present and that's the stop thinking about whatever else you're doing and focus okay and I'm yes we've had that conversation more times than I can probably remember and count and is it easy just do uh you learn to really yes you learn to because as you as you like you have the okay what is that mean take those other things push them off the table Focus or by the way occasionally you go you're right I'm really sorry I'm just so distracted by this right now would you mind if like like I'm fully present tomorrow because a lot of Founders would Gaslight their partner there and say you don't understand you don't get it I'm doing this for you this is for us look you hate my work well if you're having that conversation if the person doesn't look the two people need to believe in each other and what they're doing if the person doesn't believe in you and what you're doing right you have a long-term problem yeah and I guess the communication is the very heart of that right yes Reed we are all very excited for your next book which you said it's coming out in January January yeah end of January it's a book called Super agency what could possibly go right with our AI future co-written with Greg bet Bato Bato what could possibly go right with our AI future yes an optimistic take about AI uh yes why should someone in who should read that book so anyone who uh believes as I do the only way that you can possibly get to an optimistic future is envisioning what some of the things are and head towards it that you don't get to an optimistic future by trying to avoid failure by trying to avoid pessimism anyone who says okay it's important for me to understand that perspective about
AI they should read super agency we we have a book blurb from yval Harari which says this is a brilliant positive vision of the future I disagree with some of its main arguments and everyone should read it that's refreshing yes I'll link it below for anyone that wants to pre-order it um but I highly recommend everybody goes and checks out your books which are iconic because they've shaped the thinking of Founders across the world and if even if you're not a Founder the startup of view is for everybody regardless of what you're doing it helps you navigate both building a business but also just your cre generally and also masters of scale which is an iconic podcast that many of us listen to here where you sit down with some of the greatest founders of all time and understand how they've scaled and built their companies it's a podcast that I Know Jack is a massive fan of and one of the first podcasts they ever got listening to as well highly recommend that I also have the book there and I'll link all of this stuff below Reed thank you it's a pleasure I look forward to the next one thank you so much it's been such an honor and I so so wonderful speaking to someone that has such diverse um contrarian at times opinions but is willing to stand by them irrespective of whether they are um believed or um accepted or politically correct with the dominant narrative at the moment yeah and that comes from having such a wealth of experience but being fundamentally well intentioned I think so thank you Reed for the time I really appreciate it it's an honor to get to meet you thank you and thanks for creating LinkedIn I [ __ ] LinkedIn I think they sponsored this podcast so oh awesome I I didn't even know that oh really yeah they do yeah so thank you so much appreciate it isn't this cool every single conversation I have here on the Diary of a CEO at the very end of it you'll know I asked the guest to leave a question in the Diary of a CEO and what we've done is we've turned every single question written in the Diary of a CEO into these conversation cards that you can play at home so you've got every guest we've ever had their question and on the back of it if you scan that QR codee you get to watch the person who answered that
question we're finally revealing all of the questions and the people that answered the question the brand new version two updated conversation cards are out right now at Theon conversation cards.com they've sold out twice instantaneously so if you are interested in getting hold of some limited edition conversation cards I really really recommend acting quickly a [Music] [Music]