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Steven Bartlett

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The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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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.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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Yeah. Yeah. And I guess the communication is at the very heart of that, right? Yes. Reid, we are all very excited for your next book, which you said is 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 Beato.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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An optimistic take about AI? Yes. Why should someone and who should read that book?

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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I'll link it below for anyone that wants to pre-order it. 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 even if you're not a founder, the startup of you is for everybody, regardless of what you're doing. It helps you navigate both building a business, but also just your career generally.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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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 it.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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I also have the book there and I'll link all of this stuff below. Reid, thank you. It's a pleasure. I look forward to the next one. Thank you so much. It's been such an honor. So wonderful speaking to someone that has such diverse, contrarian at times, opinions, but is willing to stand by them irrespective of whether they are...

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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believed or accepted or politically correct with the dominant narrative at the moment. And that comes from having such a wealth of experience, but being fundamentally well-intentioned, I think. So thank you, Reid, for the time. I really appreciate it. It's an honor to get to meet you. Thank you. And thanks for creating LinkedIn. I fucking love LinkedIn. I think they sponsor this podcast.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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I didn't even know that. Oh, really? They do, yeah. So thank you so much, Reid. 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.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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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 code, 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 Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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The brand new version two updated conversation cards are out right now at theconversationcards.com. They sold out twice instantaneously. So if you are interested in getting hold of some limited edition conversation cards, I really, really recommend acting quickly. Quick one. I want to say a few words from our sponsor, NetSuite.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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One of the most overwhelming parts of running your own business, as many of you entrepreneurs will be able to attest to, is staying on top of your operations and finances. Whether you're just starting out or whether you're managing a fast-growing company, the complexities only increase. So having the right systems in place is crucial. One which has helped me is one called NetSuite.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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They're also a sponsor of this podcast. And NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one fluid platform. With this single source of truth, you'll have the visibility and control to make fast, informed decisions, which is crucial in business.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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I remember the chaos of scaling my first business and trying to keep everything in order. It was an absolute nightmare. And it's tools like NetSuite that make this easier. So if you're feeling the pressure, let NetSuite lighten the load. head to netsuite.com slash Bartlett and you can get a free download of the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning. That's netsuite.com slash Bartlett.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started. And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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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.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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But do you think anyone, because there's going to be people listening to this now that are in their managers and companies that, you know, that 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 to decide that?

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show. Thank you. Thank you so much. Back to the episode. Reid, 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.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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but at the same time, someone being 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 begs the question to me, what is, in your view, the causal factors that set you up for such a life?

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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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 how do they know if it's good?

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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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.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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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 did. 2003.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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I was going to say, so if everybody thinks it's a good idea, it's probably not a big idea.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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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 indicator that it's probably not big or they're bullshitting.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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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-

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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Okay, interesting. So the network effects were slightly less important than the model is today because a lot of people today are using it not to search for a job or a professional, but to...

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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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 in there and make a profile and put my CV up, It doesn't really matter if I don't come back for four days.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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Because I can get an email that will bring me back in saying, oh, there's a job here. But once my profile is up and ready, I'm now giving value to the rest of the network just by being there. Yes.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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Yeah, 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 asking for, like, hell in your life.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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But mafia is cool as well. Yes, yes. People love the term mafia. And through that time, you worked with the likes of Elon. You knew Peter Thiel from your days at university. I mean, everybody asks 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.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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I think seven people that were part of that sort of early PayPal founding team went on to create Tesla, YouTube, Reddit, SpaceX, LinkedIn. Was it talent density? Was that what made the PayPal Matthew?

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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I often hazard a guess at what 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.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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This one here, you probably remember this. Yes, I do remember that. Right, and the name's on the cover. Borderlands. What age were you when you started playing RuneQuest? You were very young.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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And if I was a young entrepreneur telling you, right, I want to be better at pitching my vision so I can get world-class people to join me, world-class investors, partners, is there any advice you could give me on things I should and shouldn't do? Oh, yeah, absolutely.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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And what is the link between the life you lived and the board games you played as a 10-year-old?

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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An insane learning curve. By that, you mean someone that's rapidly learning, self-teaching?

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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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.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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But just looking at my own portfolio, 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.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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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 the absolute tremendous impact that an A player can have on everything.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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Okay, yeah. Yeah. When you're a young founder, you're somewhat insecure, though. You think, oh, God, why would that person want to come work here? Or I can't afford them.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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Yeah. 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.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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Like, just go! Right? And is there anything practical about hiring? You know, people say, like, hire slow, fire fast, or other sort of, like, cliche advice around hiring that matters. Like, how important is it that they're culturally aligned?

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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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?

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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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, during that PayPal period of your life, Mm-hmm. One of the things I was reflecting on is they're all independently successful people, but they're all very different people.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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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. Give me a flavor of the different types of entrepreneurs you've worked with. Because I sat with Walter Isaacson, and he talked to me about Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, et cetera, and he was like,

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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Steve's really great at hiring people. Elon's not as good at the people team building part, but he's better at this part.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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He pitched it to you as an investor? Yes. Yeah. At what point was SpaceX at when he pitched it? That was before he started it.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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Really? Well, yeah. Of course you would, yeah. 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, is Elon doing okay? He just told me about this turtle. Yes. It's like, that's not a business. Has your opinion of him changed over time in terms of his potential and ability as an entrepreneur?

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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Of course. If you get one that's big, that's fine. On the hiring side, is he up there with the best? Or is he not a direct hire of people like Steve Jobs was?

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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What's interesting is I think these strategies fundamentally come down to what you think matters in life the most, because you could optimize, even you could optimize more for, 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, but there's a trade-off happening here.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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And we often, because Elon's done these crazy things like the cars and the Neuralinks and there's tunnels and 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 entrepreneur. I go, one person can do that much. But we almost never talk about the trade-off.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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And this goes back to the point about self-awareness. It's so tempting for the brain to go, oh my God, I want that. That's what I want. Because you're not seeing the trade-off. You're not seeing the darkness.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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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 shit tons of things, do them intently, do them with less of a regard for the, I guess, the human consequence. Do them with less of a regard for work-life balance.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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I mean, the people that say it's toxic are often those that have never had to do it.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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Is there a way to build a startup, in your opinion, where you have work-life balance? I define work-life balance maybe as being able to see your friends often, spend time with your family often.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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Keep working. To some people, this does, it sounds somewhat toxic, right? It 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.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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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 onboarding people and don't shy away from the fact. Yes, exactly.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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Which is a trade-off that was clearly worth making. You stepped back as CEO after four years when you were at LinkedIn, right? Yes. Why did you do that?

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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So you stay close, but you... 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 Huel. One of the things that really defined them was they did a...

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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So edits that you made to this game are still in here? Yes. At what age? That was 12. Wow. That's incredible. And how much did he pay you?

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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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 future of the company. A lot of CEOs don't do that because the CEO title comes with a certain esteem.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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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?

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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associated with the left side of politics. Your parents were very left-leaning, to say the least.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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Okay, so that's in your DNA. Yes. The thing about being on the left is it's typically the left that have an opinion of billionaires that they're evil.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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I mean, you're one of the few people that's still a billionaire and on the left, it seems.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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In the valley, especially in this election cycle. It's the public-facing people that we see on the podcasts and stuff.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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And 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?

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

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You must spend time at night thinking about what that might be. Because if I would.

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Because Mark Cuban was the same, right? Mark Cuban was very public and vocal. He's a billionaire. He was very pro-Karmel Harris, very anti-Trump through the cycle. He took a lot of flack as well.

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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. Yes. And you were kind of in the same category.

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Would have been much easier for you to just shut the fuck up or fall in line or something.

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Do you think it's a good time for entrepreneurs to be building companies with Trump coming into power?

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

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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.

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Potentially. I was referring particularly to Elon Musk, David Sachs. I think he's doing AI and technology. I think there's another guy who looks like he's built a business before.

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On this point of speech as well, obviously there's quite a big shift in speech that's happened in the last, I'd say, two years, really from Elon buying Twitter as well. I saw a drastic shift globally in what we think is okay and not okay. What's your thoughts on the change in speech? Good, bad, positive, negative?

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Do you think you'll be penalized? Yes. And direct on you? And direct to me. You're not planning on leaving the U.S., are you?

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What's the difference in the design of the platform that results in two different types of behavior there?

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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?

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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 interrogate a little bit. With the vaccine rollout in particular, there's a lot of things that we didn't know at the time, right?

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Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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So the lab leak thing, I had Boris Johnson sat here and he said, oh yeah, we think it's a lab leak. If I had said that on this podcast a couple of years ago, I would have been kicked off YouTube. And so having a forum where you can even entertain ideas that are contrarian. Yes.

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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. But can you explain why that's important?

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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 constraints of the law.

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Okay, yeah, I agree with that. You shouldn't be threatening anybody with violence. Yes. I sat with a, I'm going to say astrologist. I don't even know if that's the right word. It's not astrology, was it? Cosmetologist.

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And he told me the story of Galileo discovering that the world was round and Galileo basically being threatened by everybody because it threatened, I think, the Catholic institution at the time.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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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 I mean, that does happen today. Yes, 100%. And these forces are powerful forces. So allowing dissent, even if it's coming from someone who is not credible.

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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 an arsehole. And as a podcaster, as someone who's in the public eye yourself, who is a podcaster but also a famous entrepreneur, you have to deal with that.

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Like you have to deal with that in a way that's just, we weren't designed to. And I struggle with it. I struggle with when I first came into the public spotlight, when I started doing Dragon's Den, the shark tank in the US, opening my phone and being exposed to just a barrage of like noise on the brain. Now, Whose responsibility is that? Is it my responsibility to delete the app?

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Or is it the platform's responsibility to moderate people expressing their innate human jealousy, whatever it is?

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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Right. One of the theories I had many years ago, and 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.

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And 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?

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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Whenever I speak to entrepreneurs like today's guest, Reid 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 and money trying to get it right and still nonetheless fall short.

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Especially when it comes to B2B 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 1 billion members, 130 million decision makers and 10 million C-suite executives. You can also target specifically by job, industry, company and more.

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Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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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 slash DOAC24 to claim your credit now. That's linkedin.com slash DOAC24. Terms and conditions apply. There's so many different takes that I've heard on AI. I've spoken to Mustafa Salaman.

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I've spoken to lots of different... I know you know Mustafa because you invested in his company, right?

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

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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?

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There's a lot of gloom around AI as well. There's fear all the time with new technologies. Is any of that gloom warranted?

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

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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.

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When I think about AI in simple terms, the way that 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 Stephen Bartlett here that has an IQ of 100 and there was another one sat next to me that had the IQ of 1,000, what would this Steve do and what would that Steve do?

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And also you think... I also need weapons that are sufficiently advanced at attacking my enemies. And everybody globally is thinking that. China might be thinking about 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.

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So 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, and that's super smart. They're going to probably make some cyber weapons as well.

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Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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So those things end up existing, and then they're in the wrong hands, a mistake happens.

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Is this technology different, though? Because there's been comparisons to the printing press electricity. But is this any different?

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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Right. For the average person out there, I know they might be working in a hospital or might be a lawyer or a doctor, whatever, just someone with a job that's heard this term AI and they're seeing 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?

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So what would you say then? Because there's people that listen to the show all around the world, right? we just Spotify Raptors came out and globally we have quite an extensive audience. It's funny.

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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 and Indonesia and Australia, New Zealand. What would you say to people in those parts of the world? Can you still be quote unquote massively successful? Yes.

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Should entrepreneurs be – thinking about building companies in the field of AI at the moment. You know, as an entrepreneur who's like roughly 30 years old, I look back and go, gosh, I wish I was of entrepreneurial age when the dot-com boom came around because everyone became billionaires. And is this that moment in time? Yes. The short answer is yes. Okay, so I'm an entrepreneur.

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I'd love to take part in the next revolution. Should I be flying out to San Francisco and building an AI, joining an AI startup out there?

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Interesting. What's the best way for someone to go and learn about AI right now? Because going to university feels like it would be... Start using it.

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So for someone like me who's built 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? Too slow. Okay, yeah.

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You invested in OpenAI almost a decade ago before everybody was talking about it. What did you see in that company?

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

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On that point of people, how important, if you're trying to be successful as a young entrepreneur, is networking?

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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.

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Are there any things like that that you think make a big difference but people don't appreciate?

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Do you need the BS in that context? Do you need to end it with, I'm going to change the world?

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Because, you know, like a fizzy drinks company conglomerate, even they try and end their value proposition with we're going to change the world.

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And you know it's bullshit. It's a public company. They've 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?

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No one is. Does it help if they've been through some difficult things in their life?

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

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If you were advising a young person on how to build wealth in 2025, And when I say young, I mean 18 years old. Yeah. And you had to plan out the roadmap of their life. Can you walk me through how you'd be thinking about those seasons of life, like 18 to 30, 30 onwards, et cetera?

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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 empty. Yes. What you put in there. Yes.

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The next one I posited was. me trying to remember my own book, was your, I'm going to say network, then your resources, then your reputation. Now anyone can take these last three. Like life can happen. You can get fired. You can lose your friends, whatever.

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So am I right in thinking that the knowledge and skills part is really the critical thing to prioritize when you're... Yeah, well, this is part of what we did in Starview.

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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?

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And then you have kids. Yes. Did you have kids? No. Because I'm in that region now where I'm thinking about having kids and I'm just, I'm wondering how disruptive it's going to be. It's another startup.

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Which, do you think lowers your chance of being successful at a startup? Because doing two startups is more difficult than doing one.

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Not okay for me. And love. How does love come into all of this? You have a long-term life partner. Yes. In Seattle. What role has that played in your happiness and your professional success?

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If two entrepreneurs come to you and they pitch 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?

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Not worth the headache. Yes. When I was reading Blitzscaling 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. One of the questions I had as an investor myself is my early stage companies that aren't in the consumer internet space, they're selling, I don't know, they might be selling a drink in a supermarket or something.

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Should they all be pursuing this idea of blitzscaling where you go lightning fast to building a massively valuable company?

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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 we don't have the blitzscaling advantages as entrepreneurs and founders that you guys have in Silicon Valley, if you were the prime minister of the UK...

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What would you do to give us a shot at getting some of the value that's going to accrue because of this AI opportunity?

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I've got an example I want to give you. I invest in a matcha company. They make matcha, like the green tea. And they've grown very, very quickly. They're called Perfect Ted, hashtag ad. I'm an investor, et cetera. I'm a new investor in a company, I think. And I was wondering, they've grown so quickly. So they've gone from, I don't know, zero to they'll probably do maybe 30 million pounds next year.

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And they've done it in a couple, could be measured in months, really. And I wondered, I was like, matcha is this trend that's coming into shore. Everyone's drinking matcha now. Every coffee shop you go to has matcha. Should they be blitzscaling to capture the opportunity globally?

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This is what you're doing. Quick one before we get back to this episode. Just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us. And this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place.

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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.

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One of my fears is like, fears as someone that lives in the UK, that we're going to, your economy in the US is going to have such a huge upswing in productivity.

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Okay. What's the most important thing we haven't talked about for entrepreneurs that we should have talked about? I'll give two.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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How do you know when to quit? And I'm saying this in a professional context as well as an entrepreneurship context.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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There's an element of self-awareness required here. 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. How important is self-awareness as an entrepreneur?

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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What's really interesting about the LinkedIn story, I've got the deck in front of me here from August 20, 2004.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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And what's pretty remarkable... By the way, Matt Kohler helped me create that deck.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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I mean, it's a pretty good deck for a Series B, especially back then. It's very simple, I'd have to say. Simple is good. Very, very simple.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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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.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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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.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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As in like... If you're trying to build a long-term company from the outset, what are you thinking about?

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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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.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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And how does one cultivate it to know what challenge is actually befitting of their skills?

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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Are you still interested in building companies in terms of like being a CEO and founder again?

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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Hmm. Hmm. Yeah, I think that's the season of life I'm in. I don't want to be a CEO anymore, which is unfortunate because I named the podcast I am a CEO when I was one. But I just think there's an element of self-awareness, which I think has really – and for me, the older I've gotten, the more I'm orientating everything towards being happy.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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Yeah. 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. Do you care about legacy?

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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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 always has been now

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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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?

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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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.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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So founders you're investing in that are in a stable, solid relationship before they start the startup.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder: It’s Time To Quit Your Job When You Feel This! Selling LinkedIn For $26 Billion Taught Me This About Life! Trump Is Going To Punish Me!

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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.