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!
Mon, 16 Dec 2024
Reid Hoffman is the Founder of LinkedIn, founding member of Paypal, early investor in Airbnb And Facebook.He is the co-host of the ‘Possible’ Podcast and best-selling author of books such as, ‘Masters of Scale’ and ‘Blitzscaling’. In this conversation, Reid and Steven discuss topics such as, why passion isn’t enough for success, the truth about the PayPal Mafia’s success, why Reid stepped back from LinkedIn, and how to adapt to an AI world. 00:00 Intro 02:16 How Have You Managed to Be So Successful? 07:34 What Did You Want to Be When You Were Growing Up? 08:46 Why Was Being Born in Stanford Hospital So Relevant to Your Story? 15:27 Self-Awareness as an Entrepreneur 17:38 Should Everyone Try to Be an Entrepreneur? 25:45 How Do I Know If My Business Is Good or Not? 37:06 What Was LinkedIn Like When It First Started? 39:09 Why Were So Many Successful People from the PayPal Mafia? 42:23 The Importance of Sales 49:11 How Important Is Hiring in Business? 55:16 What Are the Different Types of Entrepreneurs? 57:43 Elon Musk’s Approach to Business 01:03:17 Work-Life Balance in Startups 01:08:24 Stepping Back as CEO for LinkedIn 01:12:18 How Does Life Change When You Become a Billionaire? 01:13:58 Political Stance as a Billionaire 01:18:11 Trump’s Redeeming Qualities 01:22:32 The Shift Towards Freedom of Speech 01:25:02 Freedom of Speech as X 01:33:03 What Do You Think Social Media Will Become in the Next Decade? 01:37:58 How Should the Average Person Be Approaching AI? 01:40:12 Is the Gloom Around AI Warranted? 01:50:23 What Should the Everyday Person Be Doing with AI? 01:58:40 How Do We Learn About AI? 02:00:22 Your Early Investment in OpenAI 02:01:45 How Important Is Networking? 02:02:30 Underappreciated Qualities for a Good Entrepreneur 02:05:58 The Qualities You Look for in an Entrepreneur 02:15:21 What Is Happiness to You? 02:19:08 Marriage and Entrepreneurship 02:20:55 Should All Entrepreneurs Be Moving Fast to Build a Company? 02:28:51 How Should You Be Viewing Risk? 02:31:56 How Do We Know When to Quit? 02:34:25 LinkedIn’s Deck 02:37:44 Are You Still Interested in Building Companies? 02:40:17 Are There Any Unchecked Boxes? 02:42:28 Last Guest’s Question Follow Reid: Twitter - https://bit.ly/3OVphKO YouTube - https://bit.ly/3OSw33O Website - https://bit.ly/3ZP4GxT Podcast - https://g2ul0.app.link/IqXyrFoeiPb You can pre-order Reid’s book, ‘Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future’, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/6iAtlcEeiPb Get your hands on the brand new Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards here: https://appurl.io/iUUJeYn25v Watch the episodes on Youtube - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACEpisodes My new book! 'The 33 Laws Of Business & Life' is out now - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACBook You can purchase the The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards: Second Edition, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb Follow me: https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Sponsors: Linkedin Ads - https://www.linkedin.com/doac24 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
President Trump was threatening personal and political retaliation because I tried to help Harris get elected.
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?
Um, Reid 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 OpenAI. 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 100% chances 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 that 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, Reid, what is your take on AI? It gives us superpowers. Now, there will be costs to it, but like electricity, it does electrocute people, but it's essential for human society.
100%.
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.
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.
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.
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?
That's interesting. I've never been asked that question before. Probably it's a combination of 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? It was 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 so I got the exposure to technology can change the world. And so focusing on thinking about kind of this intersection of humanity and technology and, of course, obviously science fiction has some –
play to that too although most of the technology in science fiction is just fiction right it's 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
I played a lot of board games when I was a kid, and so it gave me a very deep sense of strategy. And so approaching life, yeah, Zach, wow.
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.
When I started playing RuneQuest, probably 10.
And what is the link between the life you lived and the board games you played as a 10-year-old?
Well, mostly as a function, again, like the role-playing games is like strategy, right? So it's kind of, you know, how do you kind of think about, 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 bandits, you know, that kind of thing. Mm-hmm.
And so it gave me a deep sense of kind of like how does strategy and tactics and problem solving 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 blokes around the table. I hear it's now a little bit more gender balanced, which is good, and especially for the blokes.
It's like, oh, we're not just geeks by ourselves here, right? And... 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 I'd heard that the Chaosium had their offices where we're down the street from a friend of mine's. 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 the maker of this game. The chief editor, I think, wanted to get me out of the office. So he said he handed me the in-development draft of this and said, here, go look at this. And so I took it home as an obsessive kid. 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 was then – and I still remember this look of vague irritation when I handed him this because he's like, oh, this kid is handing me this thing. Oh, fuck. I don't want to be a mean 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. That wasn't why. I was just doing it because I wanted to show that I knew how to do this stuff. And so he then wrote me a check. So it was like my very first paycheck. to be able to use the work in the publication because this is how copyright, 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.
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?
Oh, it's like $160 or something. It's not bad for a 12-year-old. No, no, no. My dad was originally opposed to fantasy role-playing games. It was like, what are you doing? Like, you know, be on a path to a real life. And then when I brought home the paycheck, I was like, well, maybe that works.
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?
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, obviously a bunch of – or a barrister on the side of the pond –
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 being a full-time employee and so forth. And it's quality work. It's important for society. But I was like, no, no, I want to create things. I don't want to be a belt on my sword and go to verbal battle for whatever the contract or whatever.
or litigation or any of those things. And I was like, no, no, no, 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. But what I evolved to is I normally have about a two to three year plan that's iterating. And that 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. But can you explain why that's important?
Silicon Valley is a network of a generative platform. So one of the things that I have learned to think about is networks amplify productivity. That's not just as we get to why it is. I conceptualized and founded LinkedIn. But it's think in terms of networks. It's one of the reasons why cities are such – Like basically, if you really look at economies, it's city regions.
And it's because the city region creates a network, right? It's a network of – it could be suppliers and all the rest, but also talent and capital and knowledge and communication and strategic lenses onto the world. And so Silicon Valley has been – 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 set of different, you know, kind of perspectives. One, technology is a lens into the future. Another one is, as an individual, you can go create a technology or a 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. And all of those things were part of the luck of being born at Stanford. The luck.
Yes. Well, 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 destinates because I am great. 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 human condition. But any great achievement also has luck. Right. And I can point it in any companies. I can point it at any individuals. 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, right? we just Spotify Raptors 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 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.
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, which 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 17-year-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 the bad advice you're usually given is just follow your passion. And the problem is your passion might be very passionate, but 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 the market realities? What's the market? What does the 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. 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 could do.
Now, if you say, what I'm going to do is create a search company to compete with Google, 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 millions.
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, you know, I love podcasts, as you know. I, you know, master scale, possible, et cetera.
And so I had the delight of doing interviews with Toby Lutka or Daniel Ek. And what you do is you look at part of their success, Shopify, Spotify, is how do I run my strategy from here? Like how is it that I'm competitive 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 Silicon 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 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 and e-commerce, then I am the platform for that. So it's kind of a long under the radar approach. strategy where you're not directly competing with Silicon Valley companies.
And by the time the Silicon Valley companies go, oh, there's a managerial 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, Toby Lutka, like, is deeply informed about 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.
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. 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?
And how does one cultivate it to know what challenge is actually befitting of their skills?
So I think self-awareness is generally a very good thing for all human beings. And you still have to be irrationally ambitious, which is, I think, very important. And so sometimes self-awareness and just 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.
So just about everybody who succeeds in a substantial way is good at being competitive. And if you're blind to your competition, you're kind of hosed. If you're successful, it's just because you're lucky. And that's part of what I was referring to earlier in luck. If you start a business where you have the luck where –
competitors haven't identified it and you get a long head start on it, that's an instance of luck. Not all the successful companies are that way, but that can be very good and very useful on that. But you have to be very aware of what the competitive landscape looks like. Now, that's also true of individuals, right? Because it's like, well, who am I competing against is a relevant question.
But 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 competitively blind leading a business, leading a startup, almost always that's hosed, right? That's one of the reasons why, like, you know, 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. Right.
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 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?
Yeah, I'll run through a framework to help the folks. The short answer is no, not everyone should be an entrepreneur, just like not everyone should try to be a professional 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 –
Dispositions, 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 part of the, you know, it's as competitive as trying to become, you know, a globally renowned actor. It's as competitive as trying to become the CEO of a major bank or anything else.
So it's a competitive game. So for an entrepreneur, what you have to do is you have to say, okay, well, I have to be able, one of the classic ones, to take substantial risks. Now, it's not being risk blind. Entrepreneurs 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.
that when you start a company, you're default dead, 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, well, can you go get the capital? Are you in a market that allow you to get the capital?
Can you move to a market that allows you to get the capital? How do you pitch the capital? How does pitching capital go? And then you get this kind of flywheel going between capital, talent, 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, et cetera.
And by the way, it's dynamic. So you say, well, I went and worked at a large company and I learned a bunch of things. Like, well, yeah, but you didn't learn how you're default dead. You didn't learn how to launch a new product. You didn't learn how do you start with a small product and grow to a larger product. 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. Like, I'm going to come work at a place because I can continue to work at a place. And as 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 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 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 process. This kind of iterative journey.
You have to be able to grow yourself and learn because the game changes. Like one of the metaphors I use to train and conceptualize young entrepreneurs is – and there's a bunch of different parallels between military strategy. It's part of like the board games thing and business strategy. But it's like Marines take the beach. Army takes the country. Police governs the country. Right.
Three very crude, broad generalizations about how you do it. So you go, what's your marine strategy? Because you must, as a SEED Series A, you must have a good strategy how you get on the beach, how you get initial product market fit, how you're heading towards scale product market fit. OK, 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 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'd be learning what you need to learn in order to do that through that. And that's part of how you grow into that. And then by the way, Once you've established a business, because another thing that brings in a lot of competition is people say, oh, that's a valuable business. I'd like to possibly have that. And then a new generation of heavy competitors come in.
So 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 you have to look. And each of these three is different games. And there's more games than that. But it's a way of kind of simply understanding it. always being learning, being an infant learner and changing your mindset. And so...
Frequently, like, for example, when I'm talking to an entrepreneur, especially the first few times, is I will push them on their vision to see if they're 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 persistence. But on the other hand, if they're not, like, going, oh, yeah, no, if we encounter that, Yeah, we'd have to do something about that. Like if our competitors started doing that, and maybe we'd do this, right? And so they also are learning. They have flexibility.
So you want that combination. Like one of the things about startups is... you have to bring kind of this dual-lensed focus of things that seemingly are a little contradictory. So like persistence, flexibility. Another one is right 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...
You're never going to get there. 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, does that matter? It does, but it's a, remember like the Marines, Army, Police. Army, when you're doing the Marines, is the middle bit.
Right, okay.
Right. Right, yeah.
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 Startup View is AVZ 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 micro 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 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. PayPal started as encryption on cell phones, right? 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.
Mm-hmm.
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 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. Yeah. There's, call it two kinds of ideas. And frankly, by the way, you think there's over 8 billion people in the world. The fact that you think you're the one person who's thought of this idea, you may not be doing math well, right? 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 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 most 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 the entrepreneur is like
I think the greatest chance, and even when I was starting LinkedIn, after having started SocialLand, after having co-founded PayPal as a board member, even when I was starting LinkedIn, what I would tell the people was like, look, we have about a maximum of 20%, 25% chance of being successful. just to be clear.
We're going to try to grow that to 100%, but we're a couple people in a garage right now. 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. I'm very realist and ambitious in my strategy. 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, oh, well, hey, AI is going to create a whole bunch of new SaaS businesses. Right? Oh, yeah, that makes sense. They have new technology transformation.
Or people in e-commerce, they're going to want to buy this kind of stuff. Okay. You know, it makes sense. So there's a stack of things where... They're pretty measurable as ideas. You can measure them with customers. You can do feedback and polling and other kinds of things. Now, there's good news, bad news on this category. The good news is you can de-risk is there a market for your idea mostly.
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? Yeah. I have invested in those businesses.
Greylock invests in a bunch of those businesses because we're one of the best VCs at Enterprise and the planet, blah, blah, blah. Then the other kind of thing, which is the one I tend to start and the one I tend to most invest in is – People think 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 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 – as an example, and I'll give Airbnb as an example.
So LinkedIn, I go and I say, hey, individuals will join this network and bring in their, and establish a public identity and profile and bring in their network and use that even as the vast majority of the billion people registered for LinkedIn are, you know, basically working companies, right? They're not starting companies. Like it's a great platform for entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurs get it right away. But I'm like, well, I'm working in a company. Am I going to seem disloyal to my company if I establish a profile here? Interesting. Because back when we started it, no one's going to use that. Why?
Well, because they're worried about 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 disloyal.
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.
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 so I'm going to take that risk. And that's the contrarian risk. I'm going to take that risk, and I'm going to 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, et cetera. And we can go, obviously, whatever length you want to go through the LinkedIn journey, we can do that. Now, Airbnb is an investor example. So Airbnb was my first investment at Greylock.
And I was at Greylock because David Z, 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 Airbnb 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 five minutes of phone call through the week. That was how small it was. And David's argument at the Greylock Roundtable was – Look, this is very strange.
Staying in other people's houses, you know, like the danger of something going wrong. Cities are going to hate it. Hotel lobbies are going to try to outlaw it within cities. You know, 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 bet. And 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 transaction volume at Airbnb is like this classic hockey stick. It was years of very small. And then it grew to being very big.
Yeah.
So that hockey stick hadn't started yet. And David came to me and said, okay, because like the always be learning is also useful in venture capital. He came and said, okay, you were totally right about Airbnb. And 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 want to do this. I said, well, look, you were right about all of the risks, right? about that could happen with Airbnb. You are 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 founded it.
Same thing 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's much more challenging to be a big idea. Interesting. Really interesting.
Yeah.
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.
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. Yes. Because then you have something that's contrarian. Because that's what contrarian is. Contrarian is that 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. It's smart people who think it's a bad idea. And then you have a theory of the game that's a good one, not perfect, can be very risky, about why they're wrong. So I'll give you the LinkedIn example. Literally, John Lilly, partner of mine at Greylock. I recruited him into Greylock later. He was the CEO of Mozilla 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 breakfast place in Silicon Valley. I said, da-da-da-da. And he said, okay, you know, look, I'm your friend. It's never going to work. Right? And I said, okay, well, why do you think it's never going to work? He said, well, look, you'll 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, 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 1,000 people come in, 900 of those people would be exactly like John. They'd go, eh, I don't see anyone else here in this network, et cetera. But I knew that some of them, somewhere between 10 and 100 of them, would go, oh, I see what this could be, and I kind of want to play with it.
So I'll invite Stephen. 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 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, et cetera, et cetera, that all of that, I could grow to your initial critical mass. And then-
2003.
2000, 2003, and then really- May 5th, 2003 is when we turned it on.
Really?
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-
Public CV. It 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 model is today because a lot of people today are 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 effects 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 so am i right in thinking because around then there were social networks emerging that were very focused on people conversating with each other whereas linkedin but 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 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.
Yes, exactly.
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.
And that's a virtue, not a bug, because it was part of how we solved the critical mass problem.
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.
Yeah. Well, I'm kind of a specialist. Yeah. Right? You know, one of the first investors in Facebook, one of the first investors in Friendster.
Oh, I didn't realize you were going to invest in Friendster as well.
Yes. You...
were part of what they call the PayPal mafia. I know you use a different term.
Network. It has less pizzazz, but we weren't really a criminal group.
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.
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?
Well, it certainly was a component. And so it's a couple of things. So one, 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 when PayPal went public, 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 it 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 in it was played. They were going into clean tech and to enterprise.
So if you ask, if you try to ping a venture capitalist, I have a new consumer in it idea, they wouldn't even take a meeting with you. They would take a meeting if it was clean tech and they'd take a meeting if it was enterprise software, right? Now, then you get all the PayPal people coming out going, hey, I can fund my own initial idea. I've got this great idea. YouTube. LinkedIn.
And I can fund it and I can get it going. And then – and this is part of the Web 2.0 movement. I coined the term Internet 2.0 and then Tim O'Reilly made the much better term Web 2.0. Right? And so – 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 VCs don't get it. Like this is coming. And then, of course, you started seeing YouTube and you started seeing LinkedIn and you started seeing – and it was like, OK – Like we will – like these are important things that we're going to invest in.
And that's part of the reason why the – that's the – because by the way, remember, you know, bad competition, right, is one of the reasons why not just talent, not just capital, but also competitive steering is part of the reason why the PayPal network or the PayPal mafia had such a massive suite of success.
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.
And just from hearing you today, sales is so like... Whatever your go-to market is, and it can be sales, B2B, enterprise, et cetera. But like, for example, in... In social networks, it's usually a viral marketing or viral growth plan.
So when I say sales, I actually mean like selling to employees.
100%.
Yes. You must. You said like partners, investors. Yes. Because you have to come on board my vision. Invest in my vision. Because by the way, a partner, when you're a startup, is also investing in your vision.
Yeah.
An employee is investing in your vision.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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 can 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 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.
And by the way, we could spend the entire podcast only doing this. I mean, 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, no. Silicon chips to make ice cream shakes. It's the thing. No one's thought of it. It's really big. Right.
And people are 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. 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 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. 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 is 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 Blitzscaling, which I think is another book on your thing, Most consumer internet plays are what we call Glen Gary, Glen Ross markets, which is first prize is a Cadillac, second prize is steak knives, and third prize is you're fired. So you have to be pitching why you're possibly first.
Yeah.
Right.
Because there's only going to be a couple of winners.
Yes. And so this is why we can win. And so now there's also mechanics in pitching, which is 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 will establish trust.
So, like, for example, in pitching investments – now, this I didn't know until I started learning it in terms of a mechanic of pitching is entrepreneurs tend to go, oh, when I need money is when I write up my PowerPoint and I hit – knock on the door and say, 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 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 an 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 SocialNet 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 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 meet great talent, you realize how to – because 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 I learned that was, you know, from SocialNet that I brought to PayPal was that SocialNet, 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 mean someone that's rapidly learning, self-teaching?
Yes.
Okay.
And learning on the job and going and figuring it out. And so when I went to PayPal, and 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 PayPal mafia question, that's because we hired those kind of people.
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, I don't 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 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.
Yes. A proxy for a founder, if you're not spending a third of your time hiring, you're very much under delivering. This is the thing. It's like, look, 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 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 goalkeeper. No, no. You have to hire all things. And you go, well, I'm a really good hat back.
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.
And that was just such a mental shift for me.
Literally, I think Zuckerberg puts this 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 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.
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. 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 your theory of management is, look, if you can hire someone where your only management technique needs to be let them loose, that's best. Yeah.
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?
So culture can matter. I would say, look, in terms of, and hopefully it's not a cliche, but hopefully a heuristic principle, references are more important than interviews. 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. They're not really great at selling themselves.
But, oh, my God, are they amazing in the field. Like an engineer. Like an engineer might be like – and you're like, okay. But, oh, my God, can they do great things. In which case, like do whatever you can to hire that person. So if you ask me, you can only have references or only interview. 10 out of 10 times, I'll hire the person on the references.
Surely you're not talking about the types of references where they give you the references themselves. No, no, no, of course not. And this is one of the features of LinkedIn. You want to find references that will give you good perspective. Now, even if you can't go find someone that you know or you have a tie to or is what you refer to frequently as an off-balance reference sheet, e.g.
not the one they give you to be a reference, So even if they say, oh, here's, you know, I'm Reed and 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 person is a combination of strengths and weaknesses.
And if you don't give me a weakness, I will believe that it's so bad that I should not hire this person. Right? So 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 of it 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 has all strengths.
I mean, people tell themselves that, but that's self-delusion, right? And so you have that conversation with a reference and the reference will tell you something because they're not used to saying it. So they might say, oh... You know, Susan or Bob, they're a perfectionist.
He's like, oh, so they get their work done slowly because, you know, like you push them because they're trying to get the one that's actually like more. They spend too much time working. You're like, oh, that means they're unintelligent about how they do their work?
Yeah.
Right. So you can push them into where they're like, yeah, they can get a little disorganized when they're stressed. Okay, great. Right, and then you can, 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? Mm-hmm.
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.
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,
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.
Yes. So no entrepreneur wins at every game. Generally speaking, as an entrepreneur, you should try to play the games that you have a massive competitive edge on. Same thing is true. So some people, for example... Like take Anil Bhusri at Workday, right? He is thoughtful, intentionally cultural building, very professional. So it's a HR product for work.
His contrarian idea was going to the cloud and that people are going to do cloud software for the first time. I think it was 500 people that Workday hired. He would always do a cultural interview at the end 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? Another example, Elon is the – 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 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 against the odds, right, in order to make that work. That's a... You know, Anil, very professional, understands the workplace mark.
Elon, like, I think I was like the second person he pitched SpaceX to. And his pitch, though, to my defense was, I'm going to 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 equity. I was wrong. He was right. There's not a good equity, you know, kind of play there.
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.
So it was an idea. And I'm going to 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 who will send life to Mars. And you're like, well, 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. 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?
No, no. I've always thought of him as one of the world's great entrepreneurs. Always? Yeah. Yeah, 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 to all of them.
He has the same level of I am 1000 percent 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 his on-base batting is pretty good. For such major ideas. But it's not 100%. People kind of excuse that, though.
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?
Um... He hires well. Matter of fact, you can't be a great entrepreneur and not ultimately hire well. I think some people are better hirers. Some people also have – like are the kind of people that people would work for forever. Elon 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 experience ever, and I never want to work for him again. So they're all, I never want to work for him again.
So as kind of a dynamic, because he basically looks at them as disposable parts and go as hard as you can. And then afterwards, you're out. Don't care. Because he goes so hard. Yeah, he goes hard. But he also thinks 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. 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 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. But like literally like when I'm pitching an entrepreneur, I just like call anyone that I've worked with.
Because I try to work with people in a way that even when we're 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 Chesky, you know, Mark Pincus, et cetera.
I want to be able to work with them for, you know, the rest of our lives.
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.
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.
Yes. You're 100% right.
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.
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? Right.
But, for example, on the other side, like if you go to Mark Zuckerberg and you talk to the people who work for him, they're like, that was great. That was the best working experience of my life. Of course I work for them 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 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.
Well, you have to have the nature of this thing because it's, you know, you're by nature dead as a startup. Work-life balance is not the startup game. Right. So 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 you're done with 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 startup game and they're just wrong. Right. 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 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 be human because 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, sure, you guys can go home and you're out of the office and then call in or whatever. 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? I define work-life balance maybe as being able to see your friends often, spend time with your family often.
Only in two circumstances. One, it's a small startup. 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. An ice cream van in a village.
Yeah, that's fine. Right. Number two, you have some such intense competitive moat 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 the reason because 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 at PayPal. We served dinner at the office at PayPal, 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 is the learning network you get with Silicon Valley, other companies are looking at, oh, yeah, we're going to serve dinner too. So people don't go home. Yeah, don't go home.
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.
Well, choose what your life's about. That's fine. There's nothing that says you have to do that. 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? And people can choose that. Now, you have to understand the game.
It's like, well, I'd like to be a world-class Olympic athlete, but I really only want to swim two hours a day. Well, that's nice, right? Not going to happen. Right? You have to understand the game you're playing. 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 choose the game.
And you say, well, it'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 onboarding people and don't shy away from the fact. Yes, 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 do get people home for dinner, but everyone, including Reed, is expected, you know, online working after dinner. And do you pay people more for that than the average rate? So they get paid in equity.
And this is one of the things, again, is 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 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?
So I had awareness of strengths and weaknesses. Like, I know how to do the CEO job, right? And I think it kind of... 150 people or less, I'm as good as anyone else, right? Like that scale of CEO job is a scale that operates within my strengths and weaknesses.
Um, when you start getting to call it 500 people, a 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 Wiener that I learned from him on, um,
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 these scale companies 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. So it's kind of like, okay, we're going through kind of how it works, and we're integrating people into the different groups, like the salespeople, the engineers, and they're going into their different groups. We're approaching it as the engine of the company.
And the things that I – you're only world-class, but things you're passionate about. The things I'm passionate about is like the technology strategy, the product strategy, 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 to 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, eh, I like doing more of being a board member working with CEOs more than I like being the CEO once you get past 150 people. So that's what I should be doing.
What I need to do is I need to get LinkedIn to a point where it's already, you know, it's already kind of hit breakout velocity, right? And so you can recruit now a world-class CEO that you can work with, right? And that's what I should do. And, you know, like, for example, the entire time that Jeff Weiner was the CEO of LinkedIn, my primary office was immediately next door to his. Interesting.
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...
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.
And yes, everybody, myself included, does have a big ego. But my ego is, you have to attach the right way. My ego is attached to LinkedIn succeeding.
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 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, yeah, yeah. But it's not like the way I think of myself. I don't think of myself as Reid Hoffman billionaire. I think of myself as Reid Hoffman technologist, Reid Hoffman –
Public intellectual, Reid Hoffman, creative strategist, Reid Hoffman, et cetera. So I try to... changed my life as in those directions, not in the wealth direction. Now, of course, I travel around in a private plane. I own houses in several different areas of the world, that kind of stuff. But I try to live a life within those high wealth things as much as an upper middle class person as I can.
So, for example, before I came here to do the interview, I got here a little early, so I went to the nearby Starbucks, had a cup of coffee, pulled up my laptop, was working on it. Interesting. Because that's the way that I want to live, right? And I want human relationships that are like that. I think human relationships are really important. I feel lucky to have –
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 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 left-leaning, to say the least.
I heard that you got pepper sprayed when you were a kid because... Because I was a kid on my father's shoulder at a demonstration against the Vietnam War.
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.
Yes, I'm aware of that. But not just billionaires. I've been called evil by a number of people on the left. Really? Yes, of course. Look, they are wrong that that is a necessary correlation, right? But I try to understand people. I understand their perspective. I disagree with it, but I understand it.
I mean, you're one of the few people that's still a billionaire and on the left, it seems.
No, I'm not.
In the valley, especially in this election cycle. It's the public-facing people that we see on the podcasts and stuff.
Look, so part of the reason why I think less people were public about it This cycle was because President Trump was threatening personal and political retaliation. And so you had to have a certain degree of courage to stand up. Right. And so encouraging the public area, not just encouraging 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 is the right thing. And that's for you, not for me. Right. I mean, trying to get people into it. And so I was aware because they kind of did the simple mini max and they said, well, 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 going to stand out of it. Do you think you'll be penalized? I think that there is a greater than 50 percent chance that there will be repercussions from a misdirection and corruption of the institution's estate to 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 he owns the Washington Post and I don't like him, that kind of stuff. I hope it's in that arena.
It could get much worse, but I don't really want to speculate on it because I don't want to give anybody any ideas. But I think I would safely win a bet that there will be political repercussions that are essentially undemocratic, un-American, And direct on you. And direct to me, yes. I think I'd safely win that bet. I'm hoping it's in what I'm terming the soft arena.
You're not planning on leaving the U.S., are you?
No, no. My residence is outside of Seattle, and we have a constitution, that kind of thing.
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.
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. Yes. And you were kind of in the same category.
Yes, exactly.
Would have been much easier for you to just shut the fuck up or fall in line or something.
Yes, exactly. Well, but that's the problem. You can't allow that form of neo-fascism. It's 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 your feeling as a powerful, wealthy person. And if you're not going to stand up, who is?
Can you see any redeeming qualities in Trump? I know you're pro-Kamala Harris.
Oh, yeah. Well, I think... He's going to bring a wrecking ball, and some of the places a wrecking ball are useful. So, for example, if you say, hey, on regulation, you want a new regulation? Replace two. That kind of refactoring is a good thing. Hey, we're 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. I can see a number of things that could come out that would be very positive, and I want those things to happen. As a matter of fact, part of being an American – I'm going to try to make the next four years as great for America as I can. 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 of that. And I'm hopeful for some of that from this administration.
Do you think it's a good time for entrepreneurs to be building companies with Trump coming into power?
Fundamentally, I think it's always a good time as entrepreneurs to be building companies. So one is, like, you have a good idea of the times now, go do it. 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 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 as a society person, I'll be concerned about, like climate. Like you get the new EPA person coming in, Environmental Protection Agency, and 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 will 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 fission businesses because nuclear, because that's the clean energy that we're going to need to to, you know, just to bring more of the billions of people into the middle class and to try to remove carbon from the environment and so forth.
So, and I've known the regulatory stuff is ferociously bad for that. Well, actually, in fact, I have hope that they are going to They're going to reset that thing. And so all of a sudden, that entrepreneurship turns out to be, in retrospect, wise. But I think they're going to reduce regulation across the board for all entrepreneurs. So I think that's helpful in entrepreneurship.
Now, they're going to be probably much more close to the border. And immigration is an important part of entrepreneurship. You want to be able to get the best talent from anywhere in the world. It's one of the advantages that's helped build the US. That, I think, is going to be more uneven. Anyway, so it's like 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 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.
So David and Elon, obviously super smart, very accomplished.
You work with both at PayPal, right?
Yes. And now David knows crypto very well. So he's the AI and crypto czar and the PCaaS person. He knows crypto very well. He hasn't yet done anything in AI. He hasn't been mentioned as an investor or a – like when I talk to all the AI entrepreneurs as a desired person for them to work with and so forth. So he's very smart, so I presume he knows something.
But 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 in the top 100 of the issues around how to promote and build and navigate AI. Yeah. But he's very good at crypto. He's done a bunch of good stuff there. 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, 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?
So I gave a couple of days ago here in London the Sir Isaiah Berlin speech, and one of the lines that I used in the speech was, 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.
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 Twitter and X, right, is just virulent, right? It's just toxic. It's terrible. Like, when I tweet anything – Including, hey, you know, I think the following thing is great entrepreneurship.
I get a, oh, you evil liberal, you know, I hope you, you know, kind of 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 there. in, you know, twitterx.com. I prefer what you kind of thing that you see on LinkedIn.
It's 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 design of the platform that results in two different types of behavior there?
Well, Twitter is anonymous. It allows a lot of bots. It encourages, like it says, freedom of speech. Like if you're tweeting a rape threat, that's fine. It's freedom of speech. You're allowed to do whatever you want. Right. LinkedIn is you're tied to a named profile that's tied to your identity.
If you reported for saying something that's frankly uncivil, doesn't even have to be as bad as a rape threat. It's just uncivil. Like you're cautioned. Right. It's removed. And you're saying, hey, by the way, that's not fair for the platform. And if you keep doing that, we'll remove your ability to post. Right. 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?
Look, I think there are... It's important to allow – one of the things I think that online platforms give us is the difference between freedom of speech and freedom of reach. Like I think it's OK 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, OK, 1,000 people get vaccinated. Or call it 100,000 people get vaccinated. And 50 of them have adverse conditions to the vaccine, right? That happens out of 100,000, right? But 1,000 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?
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, blah. And I can sell that. And you see all that rampant on Twitter, rampant, you know, in talk radio and, you know, and all the other 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 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?
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.
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 what truth is, is we convene groups of experts. 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. 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 able 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's 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 scientifically 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 constraints of the law.
I sat with a- Well, by the way, I generally think we agree on the constraints of the law, but I also agree on, I also think importantly civilly. And civilly means? Well, like no threat of violence.
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.
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.
Well, because the preaching of the church was odd.
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.
Yes, 100%. I'm strongly in defense of that. Yeah. Right. I just think that... And like, so, you know, I don't mind... 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, what I'm going to do philanthropically.
I strongly prefer that those criticisms be backed with some knowledge and intelligence and some 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 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.
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?
Or is it the platform's responsibility to moderate people expressing their innate human jealousy, whatever it is?
So the classic thing that humans make in reasoning is they go A or B. And your answer is both. So there's responsibility on both sides. It's like, oh no, it's the responsibility of the individual. It's 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 are engaging in threats, like, for example, you're Trump and you're tweeting that Mark Milley should be executed when he is the Joint Chief of Staff's general. That's a threat of violence. That should be removed, right?
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 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.
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?
I'm always open as an investor to interesting ideas. Here we are in a business podcast, so I'm always looking at stuff. Look, I think 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.
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's only going to be at the time it was like Friendster, then it was MySpace, then it was Facebook. It was 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 and we do have Snap and we do have, right, there is multiple ones. And I think there will be more.
So I think they're going to have more social networks and they're going to fit into different people's lives and they're going to have different community cultures for them. And so, And I think not only will they get multimodal, but they'll use AI in different ways and so forth.
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 a future of social networks now. To give a little bit more of a specific answer, I tend to think social networks need to both have individuals as customers and societies as customers. So you need to think about that balance. You need to think about both in how you're designing them. And that doesn't mean no freedom of speech and autocratic.
Because I actually think more or less you should allow people to post whatever they want as long as it's civil. And if you want to choose to have an anonymous social network, that's fine. There's a definite rule for – especially when you get to places where the government is oppressive. Go to Iran or Russia or something else. It's like, well, anonymity is important for saving your life. Right.
But on the other hand, you should also be thinking about like, OK, what does this mean to society? And part of what we want in media networks is we want to be collectively learning. So if I'm posting that 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 at elite 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 don't have some challenges. Like people criticize Facebook, for example, right? But actually, in fact, a billion people get on it every day. They share their experiences, pictures, lives with loved ones, friends, et cetera. All of that's very, very positive.
I think Twitter, unfortunately, has taken a turn for the worst. I think if you go, you know, where is the largest site which has the most untruths on it? I think it's Twitter, right? But, you know, that doesn't mean it can't also be improved and fixed over time.
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I've spoken to lots of different... I know you know Mustafa because you invested in his company, right?
Yeah, we co-founded Inflection.
Ah, okay. So you co-founded Inflection, which then sold to Microsoft. Yeah.
Well, it did a commercial deal with them. It's still going as a company.
Oh, okay.
All right, because Mustafa moved over. Yeah, he moved over because he wanted to do a consumer agent, and Inflection is doing B2B 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. To show as well as tell that AI is not just artificial intelligence, it's amplification intelligence. It gives us superpowers.
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 when a lot of people get access to to a new general purpose technology. the transformation of society that comes.
And it's like printing press or electricity or cars or mobile phones. It's this amazing 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 increased 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 hells now just get amplified.
And it's the same thing like when a car was created, a doctor could now have a broader range of places they could visit to go help. That part of his car is have that super agency. It's not just I can drive places. Now because the doctor can drive places, that also increases her or his agency and also my agency through super agency. And that book's coming out in January. Yeah.
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?
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. It's going to destroy human learning and knowledge.
It's going to disable the current people who are the custodians of knowledge, which are mostly priests, in society from being able to control the flow of information. We're going to have all this misinformation, et cetera, et cetera. Now, by the way, you don't have a scientific revolution without the printing press, right? So there's always this fear.
And you say, is the fear completely unwarranted? Well, look, human societies are bad at new general purpose technologies, right? So 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 social 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. I have 100% confidence that the other side, this will be enormously amazing super agency. What I want 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, et cetera. 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 Revolution, which also had a bunch of things, why did Europe – basically set the drumbeat for the globe for centuries? The answer is Europe embraced the Industrial Revolution robustly and early. It's part of what made the British Empire. And so that clock is set by Europe. 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 pause. Look, it's a simple thing you look at.
The people who care about humanity, if they all pause, and the people who don't care about humanity don't pause, Your letter, 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 clock that's set by the world, right?
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?
Oh, that's a good question.
Is that an apt analogy? Is that somewhat an interesting one?
Well, it depends. Part of the thing is we human beings are very bad at imagining future technology. So I can tell you stories about where we have created AIs with IQ of 1,000. I can tell you stories where we've created AIs with IQs of 200, of 150. And I can also tell you stories of AIs where we've created that are kind of the equivalent, because today we have this, as a form of like idiot savants.
Like today's AIs are super intelligent. I'll give you an example. So if I go to a human being, I try to look around at a human being and say, explain to me a mixture of experts, creation of AI within AI. What does that mean? It's a technique by which modern AIs are created that have different kind of expertise roles in the combination. Like ChatGPT is created this way that create their output.
It's a particular technical definition for the way of creating a world-class AI model. Then I say, okay, compare a mixture of experts. So use only thousands of people who understand how to do that. And I say, okay, compare that to 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.
Then I say, okay, compare those two to modern oceanography, right? Okay, now we're at zero human beings. There's no human beings going to do this, but I can go to GBD-4 and I can run this. GBD-4, because it's ingested 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. But of course, no one's alarmed about that because they're like, oh, that's a great amplification intelligence. That really helps me.
I think there's a very good chance that what happens is that what we're creating with all of every current AI technique that's under development is these amazing savants that are these great co-pilots. 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 I think the likelihood is that we're going to be having these kind of co-pilots that give us these informational GPSs, these cognitive superpowers that make us as human beings a lot better. Bad actors are going to... Yes, that too. Yes. That's the bigger worry.
So you say one worry is transition. And another worry is whenever 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'd want to not empower criminals, terrorists, rogue states.
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.
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.
Yes.
So those things end up existing, and then they're in the wrong hands, a 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 do 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 any different?
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 in terms of impact? It might be, right? Do you think it is? Yeah.
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 profound 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 that it's agentic technology. Which means? It's creating agents that can operate on their own. We already have that, by the way. You can be running an agent with a connection to the internet on your computer and then can go buy stuff for you. You can do that today. It's doable. You have agent – it's just a question of what the shape is. So it's agentic. It's cognitive.
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, ooh, it must be conscious because they asked if it 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.
By the way, there are conscious things that can't – there's mute people and the fact that they can't tell you they're conscious. So conscious is not perfectly they tell you they're conscious, but you tell me you're 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 know no depth of reason of neuroscience and other kinds of things about why that is. It's not just a human species parochialist view. And figuring out under what circumstance it would be conscious is a very interesting question that we need to figure out. Because it won't be that it has gray matter. It'll be something else. Or maybe we'll figure this out. 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 transitions 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, 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?
The basic answer is absolutely yes. And it'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 sonnet for your kid's birthday. That's great. Don't just use it for a recipe for what happens to be in your refrigerator. That's great. For something that matters to you, that part of your expertise and so forth, start using it. And by the way, you'll find that Some of the things are still not useful for it all.
Like when I sat down to ask GBD4, how would Reid Hoffman make money investing in AI? It gave me an answer that was the smart business school professor's answer who didn't understand venture capital. It was like, well, study which areas have the largest total addressable market. Then look at what the possibilities for competitive disruption are. Then market research tests that. And it's like, eh.
Let's go find a great entrepreneur with a great idea, right? And it's best when the idea is something you haven't thought of and few other people have thought of too, right, is the way to do it. So it got it completely wrong from how I – how Reid Hoffman, how I invest in AI and what I do very successfully. Now, he said, well, then it's useless for venture capital.
I was like, no, no, because I kept experimenting with it. And I said, okay. I fit in an entrepreneur's plan and I said, how would I do due diligence on this plan? And it came back with a pretty good list. It was like, yeah, yeah. One, I was absolutely planning on doing that. Two, I was absolutely. Three, yeah, I could see why you'd think that I was doing it. That's not important.
Oh, four, I would have gotten to it, but it 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 Mollick'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, et cetera, which is 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 and you can say, counter this argument. Take the role of critic. Argue against me.
And you can see it will immediately give you a capable argument against your position. That is very helpful. It's helpful for cognitive development. It's helpful for learning. It's helpful for our understanding. 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. 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 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, et cetera. It's happened a number of different times. how would a historian of technology analyze my argument?
How would they criticize my argument? And then you get – 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 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.
I'm 30-odd years old. I've got disposable income. I'm financially free.
Mm-hmm.
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?
Yes. Why? 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. It's now software valley. Silicon Valley almost never invests in silicon anymore. Silicon being the chips. Yes, being the chips, yes. So now really it's much more software valley.
It's like we invest billions and billions of dollars every year into new software companies. So we went from silicon through networking equipment like Cisco, 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.
And so the principal thing is when you get this new general purpose technology – It opens up massive amounts of entrepreneurial space because, one, there'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. So it opens up these things that weren't possible before.
And so, like, the internet's a good proxy to the wave we have now with AI. Then it also, by the way, makes a massive transformative force on all existing businesses. So you say, well, I had a business of selling, you know, kind of e-commerce and doing, you know, mail order catalogs. Well, now there's e-commerce, right? So 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 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 so forth.
But these kinds of things. AI is the next one that affects all of them. So you have Greenfield, 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, yes. Now- Should you go try to build your own frontier model, which is a $10 billion computer?
That's a hard amount of capital for startups. No, no, no. Try to figure out the degrees you use frontier models from OpenAI or Microsoft or Google or others as ways of doing this. But you still may build your own model. 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 breed 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 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've also discovered some other people who have amazing theories. And that's one of the things I really think I and we at Greylock love to invest in.
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.
Start building it. If you want to, if you can, If you're technical, download an open source model, Lama, Mistral, other, start playing with it. What if you're not technical? Well, generally speaking, 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 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.
Too slow. No, no, speed matters. Speed matters in startups. But by the way, because we tend to so much lionize what is usually the man versus the person, most of these people are men, the individual, startups succeed because of 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 founder or two to three co-founders, I'd rather invest in two to three co-founders. So going and finding a co-founder is a great thing. Because by the way, your throw weight, your capability weight is so much better when you do that. And so Mark Zuckerberg had Dustin Muscovitz, Adam D'Angelo, Chris Hughes.
That's a really important part of how things get created.
You invested in OpenAI almost a decade ago before everybody was talking about it. What did you see in that company?
So Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Suskefer, amazing. And 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, right? like apply scale to this. We are going to bet the entire company, everything we're doing on scale on it. And we're going to be very focused on doing it. That's great.
People had said the word 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 and We program a scale computing learning system so it learns. 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?
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 them my business card. That's not particularly useful.
But 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 that I should be trying to bring into my network that I have a project that I'm creating? And how do I meet those people? Yeah.
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 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. 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. But you've seen entrepreneurs be successful that were bad at that, right? 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 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. 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 cultures. No, no, there's mercenary cultures that have gotten big too.
How do you define mercenary in this context? All I care about is making money. Like the only thing that matters is I'm selling something. I'm going to make money. That's all that matters. Do you sometimes think the mission's bullshit though?
Just like bullshit to get people to feel something.
There are bullshit missions 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 the Silicon Valley TV show on HBO kind of satired this in a particular way. It was like, I am creating a reverse double encryption system to change the world. And yeah, there is BS there. Just like any other –
large-scale human activity, there's a lot of BS in different places.
Do you need the BS in that context? Do you need to end it with, I'm going to change the world?
Well, it's helpful. The reason why people use the BS is because that's what people want to do. People want to be in things that are changing the world. So you have to say, I'm LinkedIn. This is how I'm going to change the world. I'm OpenAI. This is how I'm going to change the world. I'm Airbnb. 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, like a fizzy drinks company conglomerate, even they try and end their value proposition with we're going to change the world.
Yes, exactly.
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?
insanely great ambition, right? I'm shooting for the moon. And, you know, sometimes literally, but most often, like, if I'm successful, I will transform the industry. Right here. An awareness of, like, a good plan for how you might do that, right? An awareness that entrepreneurship's 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, et cetera. Like, for example, one of the ways that I interview executives is I say, who are the three to five, the five, I love it, but minimum three world-class people who've worked for you before? And I'm going to call them and ask them what it's like working for you.
And by the way, if it really matters, I will then reference check those three people on are they actually world class. Because only hire people who are going to hire world class people who play it. Now, similarly, 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 world-class people think that this person is world-class because they're edgy. 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 and say, oh, that person's hard driving and they're difficult. That could be a very strong positive. I've invested in a number of entrepreneurs that way. What about resilience? Well, resilience is also very important. Almost every startup goes through what I call a valley of the shadow moment, which is like, why did we think this was a good idea? Oh, my God.
Like when I started SocialNet, one of my connections from Apple – dropped me, who had started doing startups two years before, dropped me a one-line email that said, welcome to where 15 minutes is the difference between exaltation and terror. I'm going to change the world. Oh, shit, I'm going to die. Right? So resilience is super important because it is a dogfight. 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? 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, I'm guaranteed to succeed.
No one is. Does it help if they've been through some difficult things in their life?
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. Like traumatize people. Well, it depends on how they respond to the trauma. What did you learn from it? How did you respond to it?
Because generally speaking, you need to be able to convert negatives into positives on the entrepreneurial journey. So it's like, look, that was really bad. And I learned from it.
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?
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 very passionate about. Oh, you want to go volunteer in Bhutan? Do it now, it tends to be. And it's terrible advice, right? That actually is 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 established myself and have like the ability to – like economically, the platform to move. It could be enough wealth to be – to no longer need a salary. That was my own personal goal. But it also could be the I'm well-known.
I 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. So the answer is go be vigorous about the thing that matters for your entire life early. And take the big risks. Yeah, take the big risk early. Now, you might say, I want to be a doctor. It's not a particular risk. It's fine.
But then go to medical school. Establish yourself as a medical professional 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 establish that now. And by the way, that's part of the thing of like wealthy. But wealthy, by the way, can 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 for things. But go establish that. first. And that can be take big risk. By the way, some people say, I want to take as few big risks as possible in my whole life because that's who I am. Fine. But go establish yourself first.
Now, if you're going to be an entrepreneur, you want to be an entrepreneur, then like, for example, it's like, okay, maybe you shouldn't start a business at 18, but maybe you should go join a startup. 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 get – like frequently doing a startup is very difficult economically. Usually you start with no salary, et cetera. 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 empty. Yes. What you put in there. Yes.
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.
Well, network is hard to lose if you really authentically built it. Right? It can be lost, though. It can be. But it's very hard. It's kind of like a nuclear bomb kind of thing. I mean, it's like, look, you may, like, one particular person on you may have a real difference of opinion. You know, you may move and then get fired. And a lot of your network is that.
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.
Mm-hmm.
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.
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 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 it's short term versus long term. Yes. So soft assets are longevity.
Yes.
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 going to I'm going to take more risk. Like I can always take 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 going to have beans and toast for dinner, you know, as ways of doing it because 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 so it changes as you go through.
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.
Like, it's fine. You can do startups and have it, but it's a complete startup.
Which, do you think lowers 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 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 i loved great why is that so important
Because I think part of the meaning of life is how you contribute to the people around you. It's like, again, sorry, I keep referring to Startup Review, but it was my first book as advice to young people, right? It's the I and the we. Like, do things for yourself, do things for me, do things for we, right? And I learn from people. I get delight from people.
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, a billion people have signed up for it. Like, there is, like, that's part of what I think is essential in the meaning of life. And for me, especially. Yeah.
how did you have happiness wrong when you were younger?
Oh, 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's 8 billion people, right? Nobody is the best at everything. Some people delude themselves that they are, but nobody is. You could be the best at something.
And by the way, being the best at something, that's a good thing. But by the way, to really be obsessive about being the absolute best at that thing, well, maybe you're actually... You're less investing in other things. It's a little bit like your earlier question about managing.
You say, I'm an oracle, and I'll tell you you'll be four times as economically successful if you're a shit to the people you work with. Meh. No.
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?
For me, all the people around me are people I learned from. And that includes Michelle. Like I learned all kinds of things from Michelle. Michelle and I 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. Like I'm Mr. Scale, she's anti-scale, right?
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? Right? She's like, look, I'm volunteering at the senior center. Will you come volunteer with me? 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's her life. And I learned from that. Because by the way, life is both.
Life is both here and here. So it's one of the balance of different people. She is intensely going and she's taking this kind of, call it Quaker Buddhist approach to creating art, right? And that's just amazing. Like I love being on that journey with her, right? And that's her journey, right? But I learned from it.
And those are the kinds of things that are, you know, part of what I think the meaning of life is, is how we learn from each other.
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?
Interesting. I've never been asked that question. It depends. 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 evidence that there.
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, 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. I don't want to spend the 10 years of this entrepreneur. Right. Because it's just, you know, life's too short. Right. And I was right. Those businesses made a ton of money, right?
But it was, yeah, no, no thanks.
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.
Should they all be pursuing this idea of blitzscaling where you go lightning fast to building a massively valuable company?
Not necessarily. Okay. Blitzscaling 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? 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 blitzscaling, it's much better because blitzscaling is spending resources inefficiently to get to market size ahead of your competition, right? So like a classic example is like Uber would – Interview somebody, offer them a job, and then say, who are the three best people at your company that you worked with?
And send job offers to those three people without even interviewing them, right? Because that's blitzscaling, right? That's I'm going super, super fast. And that was a blitzkilling 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 Glengarry Glen Ross markets, which is first prize Cadillac, second prize steak knives, third prize you're fired, it's the game.
And it's one of the things like when you and I were chatting a little bit before we started the podcast, like one of the places that things that places like 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 competitors.
You have to have a theory of how you're playing that game against those, the fiercest competitors in the world. And so blitzscaling 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 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...
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?
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 the company, if company one is not blitz scaling and is competing against company two that is blitz scaling, company one's going to lose. I don't think we've got any AI companies that are blitz scaling. Company one is going to lose.
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 blitzscaling, you must also be blitzscaling. It's part of the reason I wrote the book. It's part of the reason I give talks.
It's part of the reason I help Sherry Kutu stand up the Scaling Institute here in London, et cetera, et cetera. Now, you say, we can't. We're not going to be able to. Well, then choose areas. where the competitors are not blitzscaling.
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.
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?
So it depends on two things. One, most centrally, competition. Do they need to be outpacing their competition?
You could argue yes.
Yeah. But if yes, then, and especially if their competitors are blitzscaling, then absolutely yes. if the committers are not blitzscaling, it's called blitzscaling, 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 your Uber, you're launching in 20 cities at the same time. It's whoa, you know, et cetera. Because that does add risks, right? But you're saying those risks that it adds are less likely of a risk than not blitzscaling. That's kind of the trade-off. So competition is a central reason for doing it.
And by the way, most of the times where you can raise capital blitzscaling is because if it's a Glen Gary, Glen Ross market where first prize is Cadillac, second prize is steak knives, well then, generally speaking, investors are willing to invest at premium prices, give a lot of capital, et cetera, et cetera, 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, and if 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 at PayPal, which is basically payments businesses are dead unless they have at least a billion dollars of – you know, transactional volume through them per year. And that was back in 2002 when I was looking at it. 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. 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, none of our competitors are doing it, but we should still do it because getting that critical mass and scale really matters. And so that's another time. And so that would be – I don't think that's probably the matcha company. That probably doesn't need – but those are the lessons you look at. But it's not blitzscaling for its own sake.
That's one of the mistakes that people make when they go blitzscaling. Oh, we're doing it to blitzscales. No, no, you blitzscale as a set of strategic techniques in response to a market, in response to competition.
In the case of matcha – There is a role of brand being the moat a little bit.
Yes, yes. And so that may be irrelevant. That may be the relevant thing of why it's a Glengarry... I haven't looked at the market at all, but a Glengarry, Guerlain, Ross market, a first-price Cadillac, second-price Staken Eyes, maybe that's because of brand establishment, in 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.
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.
So good news for you is I happen to know that 10 Downing Street is paying attention to this issue because I had meetings with them 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. Yeah. And they're consulting, you know, people.
Good. Yeah, 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.
The first is – and they're related. The first is – look, just because you don't have 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, right? That's fine, right?
So, as a matter of fact, what you should be doing is aligning the fact that there is risks in what you're doing with the reason why you'll have less competition, while you have a higher runway before the competition intensifies.
Because part of it is if you have a theory, like we talked about this on 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. So think of risk not as terrifying. Think of risk as potential opportunity. That's one.
And we've talked about threads of it, but thinking of it as opportunity. 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. 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 the network.
That's where that risk becomes an opportunity. So the second one also around risk is – Have a plan B. Have plans B. Understand that you have an idea and you 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 going to 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. By the way, Startup View is Advice I Give Entrepreneurs. shrunk to advice to individuals, right? Every single chapter applies to entrepreneurs and their companies, right? And like the ABC planning is don't just have a plan A where like, oh, 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 it doesn't work, I'm dead. Okay. It's very scary, right? When I do entrepreneurship, I have plans B, I have a plan Z, right?
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 increasing my probability of success or not? Am I increasing my ability to get to the moon or not? And be doing risk management, smart risks, take smart risks, right? That's the thing, right?
How do you know when to quit? And I'm saying this in a 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've pivoted, right?
And your new plan A is a much worse plan than 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 tried something else that's also messed up.
Yes.
Okay. And in a professional context, how do you know when to quit the job?
Well, it could be you have a much better plan A, right? Like, okay, this plan A, that's okay. And then by the way, this is the part of the difference that I tell people between should I found a company or should I join one? It's like, well, one of the problems you have as a founder is you can't really quit. You're with the business, right?
It's very dishonorable to quit before, you know, the business gets to whatever its designee is. Now, sometimes you're fired, fine. But you're, you know, as a founder, you're like, people have come in and joined us because of me being here and doing this. And I'm here until the business gets to a point where it's a massive growing concern. Now, once the company's public, you can go do something.
Or once the company is 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'm signed up to make a big difference 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, Matt Kohler, who, you know, now lives here in London as a partner at Benchmark. Like I recruited him out of McKinsey into LinkedIn. Three years in, he comes to me and says, hey, I've been offered this opportunity at Facebook.
I'm like, look, Matt, I love working with you. You're a close friend of mine, et cetera, et cetera. 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 it. But like LinkedIn resembles my brain. I want people doing their best work, their best opportunities.
And Facebook gave him 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... By the way, Matt Kohler helped me create that deck.
Oh, did he? Yes.
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.
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 SocialNet. I had PayPal. PayPal pivoted a lot. Right. And so I had a good sense of both how to be long-term and short-term when I started LinkedIn. And what is the key to being long-term in this regard? Well, you know, 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, 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 an industry-transforming company? Like, what's the thing that changes millions of customers' lives? You know, 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 before this deck, I knew that was possible. I have a probability for it. Now, what things surprised me... People build dating services on top of it.
Really?
Yes. Well, I'm in a relationship, so maybe you haven't seen it. 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 going to go build that business. No problem. I mean, and like, for example, like one of the – like this was, I think –
A few months after we raised money from Greylock on the stack, one of the surprising uses is, like, I never had envisioned this use case to looking for a job. An engineer wanted to move to Denver from Silicon Valley. And so he 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. It's a very good way of saying, hey, 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. Yeah. So I'm definitely doing the co-founding thing. Right. Um, And, you know, I anticipate that will happen again. But will I be the CEO? It's not impossible. But it's kind of like because I have these amazing people like Mustafa Suleiman, who is the CEO that I can be the co-founder with, that's great.
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.
And for me, it's hard to be a CEO and as happy and free as I want to be.
Then you need to build the network and skills by which you're working with other people who are the CEOs.
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?
Only because I care about impact. So I don't – like I care that I've actually made a big difference to the ongoing story of humanity. But I don't care that – I mean, look, it's nice. Like I certainly don't mind that people go, oh, Reid Hoffman did these amazing things. It feels good. But I care much more about the substance. Like did I do really good things? Was I a very positive name? Now, I'm –
I'm not indicating I have no ego. You know, 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 by impact.
Hmm.
Did you decide not to have children? We did. And it was a joint decision, of course. And I think it was partially that we realized we're godparents to a number of children. Actually, there's three kids here in London that we're godparents to. And there's all kinds of delights in being a godparent, which is you show up and spend an evening and get to participate in the kids' lives.
And then when it's like, oh, Time to change the diaper.
Are there any unchecked boxes in your life?
I'm sure there are.
Any major ones?
Yeah, if you'd asked me what book I was going to first write when I was an undergraduate, it was a book on friendship. I still want to write that book. I have been taking notes for 30 years. On friendship? On friendship, yep. What would that book be about? Friendship. But specifically, what part of friendship? Everything. Look, there's so few books on friendship.
You go into a bookstore and you say, where is your section on relationships? And every bookstore will go, oh, over here, right? Relationship with capital R, romantic relationship. Say, okay, where's your section on friendship? No section on friendship. Do you have 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 always has been 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 Thiel? Yes.
Yes.
You have a lot of disagreements in terms of politics.
Intense disagreements on politics.
But you still are able to be friends.
But we also met with, you know, as undergraduates, you know, in a... Like, I knew he was extremely right and he knew I was left. You know, I've become much more 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?
It'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.
Does she misunderstand you in any way? No. 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. I do that with my partner. Yeah. It's great. You should do it. It 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.
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. 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 party. 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 as if one of us is like, you know, I had this thought. We want to have those dinners.
So 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, 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. 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, you know, we were doing a small, you know, 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. And we delayed it a couple of weeks. Right.
It was like, we really need to delay. I'm doing this thing at LinkedIn right now. We really need to have it. I don't have time for that. And Michelle didn't go, ah. She went, OK. 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. Now, sometimes it's 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 little?
I hope not.
In terms of making a plan, making a day? Oh, we had multiple plans that got...
blown up right and what about this 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 to 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 or keywords between us i think you're not being fully present and that's the stop thinking about whatever else you're doing and focus
Okay. And yes, we've had that conversation more times than I can probably remember and count. And is it easy just to? You learn to. Really? Yes, you learn to. Because as you have the okay, what does 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 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. 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.
Beato.
Beato. What could possibly go right with our AI future?
Yes.
An optimistic take about AI? Yes. Why should someone and who should read that book?
So... Anyone who 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. But you don't get to an optimistic future by trying to avoid failure, by trying to avoid pessimism. Anyone who says, OK, it's important for me to understand that perspective about AI, they should read Super Agency.
We have a book blurb from Yuval 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. 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.
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.
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...
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.
Oh, awesome.
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.
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 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.
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