YouSaid · the spoken record

Reid Hoffman

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2024-12-16
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2024-12-16
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  1. “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, okay.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “And I convince myself one hundred percent 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. 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 in order to make that work. That's a, you know, a Neil, 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 Russian subsidized rocket programs.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Yes. So Entrepreneur wins at every game. Generally speaking, An entrepreneur, you should try to win to play the games that you have a massive competitive edge on. Same thing is true. So some people, for example, like take a Neil Busri at workday. He is thoughtful, intentionally cultural building, very professional. It's a HR product for work. His contrarian idea was going to the cloud and that people were going to do cloud software for the first I think it was 500 people that worked they hired, he would always do a cultural interview at the end because to make sure that the first 500 people all kind of shared cultural things. So once you get through all the competence and all the rest of the stuff, he would make sure that was a fit and that's part of how you get cultural coherence. That's like one example, right? Another example, Elon is the like I have a big idea.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “You know, Susan or Bob, they're a perfectionist. He's like, oh, so they get their work done slowly because you push them because they're trying to get the one that's actually more. They spend too much time working. You're like, oh, that means they're unintelligent about how they do the work. 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, by the way, because when you get that from reference one, then when you're calling reference two, you say, oh, I heard that the person is disorganized. Like, can you tell me a little bit about that?”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “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 give you something. And you can think about 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. So that's combinations of strengths and weaknesses. And so everyone has them. There is no one who is all strengths. I mean, people tell themselves that, but that's self-delusion. 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,”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “No, no, no. 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 reading, here's my reference 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. Look, I believe every person is a combination of strengths and weaknesses. And if you don't give me a weakness, I will believe it so bad that I should not hire this person.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “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? They're made like an engineer. Like an engineer might be like, you know, like, okay, but oh my God, can they do great things? In which case, 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 take the, I'll hire the person on the references.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Well, but your theory of management is look, if you can hire someone where you only management technique needs to be let them loose. That's best.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “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.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “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. If you could just do it yourself, you wouldn't hire anybody. No, you're hiring people. So you say, well, I've got a really good, let's, you know, use a European football analogy. I've got a really good striker. Great Well, we don't need to worry about the halfbacks or defensive or goalkeeper No, you've to hire all things and you go, well, I'm a really good hatback. That's great. You need the others too.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “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 learning curve.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Yes, self teaching. Yes. and learning on the job and going and figuring it out. And so what I went to PayPal, and when the company was signed, I was on the board of directors, I was like, this is what you're looking for, not this. And so back to your PayPal Mafia question, that's because we hired those kind of people. Right.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “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.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “You know, you either really would love them to join at some point, not too distant future, or they know other people who would be like that, because by the way, part of when you meet great talent, you realize how to, like, 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 that I learned that was, you know, from SocialNet that I brought to PayPal was that social net, 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.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Entrepreneurs kind of go, oh, when I need money is when I write up my PowerPoint and I hit knock on the doors, 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. For example, always be recruiting doesn't mean, oh, I want to hire you right now. It's like, okay, fine, great talent. This is one of the things I learned from social it and brought into PayPal or find great talent and start talking to them. Even if today you don't have the right position to hire them, 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”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Because it's only going to be a couple of winners. Yes. And so, like, 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'll establish trust. So like, for example, in pitching investments, now this I didn't know until I started learning it in terms of mechanical pitching is.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “It is to say this is part of the reason why competition is important is like I understand what game I'm playing 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 blit scaling which I think is another book on your thing most consumer internet plays are what we call Glengarry Glen Ross markets which is first prize the Cadillac second prize the stake knives and third prizes you're fired so you have to be pitching why you're possibly first”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “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. 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. The person goes, okay, great. I get it. You're seeing it, right? Another part of it.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “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 distortions. Like, 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. Like you're literally like, please leave now. So, you have to realize that all pitches are dialogues. And you want to be listening to smart.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “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. One of them is understanding 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.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “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. An employee is investing in your vision.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “That's the, because by the way, remember bad competition, right? That's 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.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “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 Web2. 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, okay, like we will, like these are important things that we're going to invest in. And that's part of the reason why the...”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “So all of a sudden, and then got bought by eBay. So all of a sudden you had this talent group of people that had a bunch of money in their pockets and the network within and that believed in the consumer internet. So the network of Silicon Valley at that point had thought the consumer internet was played. They were going into clean tech and to enterprise. So if you ask, if you try to ping a venture capitalist, I have a new consumer internet idea that wouldn't even make a meeting with you. They would take a meeting if it was cleantech and they'd take a meeting if it was enterprise software. 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.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “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 one of Technology Winter. It was one of two technology companies that went public that year.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “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 Friends Dur.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “Or to share their life, etc. And we knew that we would get to growing network fetch. 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. But you have a plan”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “I knew that if you had a thousand people come in. 900 of those people would be exactly like John. They go, eh, I don't see anyone else here in this network, etc. But I knew that some of them somewhere between ten and a hundred of them would go, Oh, I see what this could be, and I kind of want to play with it. So, you know, I'll invite Stephen, I'll invite 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 were curious, people who want to experiment with it, people who got the vision of it.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “What's wrong with it? Why will this go? And so I sat down with John. We had breakfast at a breakfast place in Silicon Valley. I said. And he said, okay, you know, I'll come your friend. It's never going to work, right? And I said, okay, well, why do you think it's never going to work? It's like, 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, you know, I don't know, 500,000 people, a million people, there's no value in the network. So there's zero value. So it's never going to grow. You're never going to get anywhere, right? And it was a very smart, perspicacious thought that was probably the key thing for starting LinkedIn was how do you get to millions of people in the network? Because that's the only place where the value proposition kicks in.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “So I'll give you the LinkedIn example. Literally, John Lilly, partner of Minecraft, I recruited him in a Greylock later. He was the CEO of Mozilla that 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. I'm going, oh, it's great. Useless. Doesn't help me.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “Yes, because then you have something that's contrarian. Because that's what contrarian. Contrarion isn't, I don't understand technology at all. I think it's a terrible idea. It's like, well, who cares? You don't understand anything, right? It's smart people who think it's a bad idea, right? And then you have a theory of the game That's a good one, not perfect, very risk can be very risky about why they're wrong”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “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.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “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 can...”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “This classic hockey stick. It was years of very small, and then it grew to being very big. So that hockey stick hadn't started yet. And David came to me and said, okay, because they always be learning is also useful in venture capital. He and me 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.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “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, like the danger of something going wrong, City's 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, nope, but I want to take the bet. And I was 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 in Airbnb is like...”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “So, Airbnb was my first investment at Greylock. And so, and I was at Greylock because David Z, who was my partner, who was the Greylock partner, who was my most valuable board member at LinkedIn, convinced me that I should do venture at Greylock. And I'm very close to David. And so I bring in Airbnb as an investment. And David looks across the table from me and says, look, every VC has to have a deal they're going to fail on. Airbnb can be yours”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “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 through obviously whatever length you want to go through the LinkedIn journey, we can do that. Now, Airbnb is an investor example.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “2003 literally everyone said to me this won't work Because your individual focus, you need to be selling products to companies.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “Basically, work at 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? Back when we started it, no one's going to use that Well, because like 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 disoy.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “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,”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “And so in this category, there always tends to be competition and your competitive strategy, generally speaking, needs to be why against, like in this category, you should be expecting competition. Why am I going to win out sufficiently against this competition in a global arena? I have invested in those businesses. Greylock invests in a bunch of those businesses. We're one of the best VCs in enterprise on 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. But people think you're crazy, which means most people think you're crazy, which means your competitive field is a lot less.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “Two kinds of ideas. One kind of idea is people generally think that's a good idea. They think it's a good idea because you go to customers and customers say, yeah, I'd like that, right? They go to they go, oh, well, hey, AI is going to create a whole bunch of new SaaS businesses, right? Oh, yeah, that makes sense. New technology transformation. Or people in e-commerce. They're going to want to buy this kind of stuff. Okay, it makes sense. So there's a stack of things where they're pretty measurable as ideas. Like you can measure them with customers. You can do feedback and polling and other kinds of things. Now, the good news, there's good news bad news on this category. The good news is you can 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”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “We're going to try to grow that to 100%. But were 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. And I'm very realist and ambitious in my strategy. And so you should never think you're starting something 100%. Now, within the ideas, you go, there's roughly speaking,”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “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 a momentum and pull together? And 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 person who's willing to take the risk? Quit my job and do it. And you never really get down to one, right? So startups are risky businesses. Like one of the things this gets back to you entrepreneur is like, I think the greatest chance, and even when I was starting LinkedIn, after having started social land, after having co-founded PayPal as a board member, even when I was starting LinkedIn, what I would tell the people is like, look, we have about a maximum of 20, 25% chance of being successful. Just to be clear”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “There's call it two kinds of ideas, and frankly, by the way, you think, you know, there's over eight 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.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “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 Starviews, ABZ planning. The mistakes is like you have a plan and then you have a plan B. It's like, no, no, you have a plan, and then you have a lot of micro plan B's, 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. 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. That's where it started, right? See, you do make your pivot It's when you go oh My current plan, which I've iterated from my first plan, is worse than my first plan. Like the market circumstances, its chance of succeeding. Those are now worse”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “Startups, 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.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “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 going, oh yeah, no, if we encounter that, yeah, we'd have to do something about that. I'll give our competitors started doing that. And maybe we'd do this, right? So they also are learning. They have flexibility. So you want that combination. Like one of the things about...”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “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 that. So always being learning, being an infant learner, and changing your mindset. And so frequently, like, for example, when I'm talking to an entrepreneur.”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “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 Dor 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 to like, no, no, no. You have to bring all that in. You have to 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 the thing another thing that brings in a lot of competition is people say, oh, that's a valuable business. I'd like to possibly 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?”

    2024-12-16 · The Diary of a CEO · 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! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT