YouSaid · the spoken record

Reid Hoffman

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221
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2024-12-16
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2024-12-16
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  1. “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. 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. Okay, you're there. How do you win the country, right? The market, right? 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's? How do you get up to scale? You have to learn this game is different than this game. And you're learning new things as you're doing it. So you have to have this kind of”

    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. “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 in terms of what I'm doing. And so I understand with certainty. So entrepreneurs have to do all that sort of thing. 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, 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.”

    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. “And then you get this kind of flywheel going between capital, talent, business realization, capital talent. 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 your default did. You didn't learn how to launch a new product. You didn't learn how to start with a small product and grow to a larger product. You didn't learn how to set up a team from scratch. And by the way, a team from scratch when”

    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. “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 in it works, but almost all the successful ones realize that when you start a company, you're a default debt, right? By default, the company is out of business, right? And so you're trying to get to a point where it's default alive versus default dead. Then there's a whole bunch of different things that go into that game. So one is, well, can you go get the capital? Are you in a market that allows 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?”

    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. “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 Disposition, skill sets, path give you a competitive edge, in this case it being an entrepreneur. Because any game that's competitive and entrepreneurship is a highly competitive game. That's part of the, you know, it's as competitive as trying to become 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.”

    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. “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”

    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. “Haven't identified it, haven't gotten you get a long head start on it, that's an instance of luck. Not all the successful companies are that way, but that's very that 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 it's 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 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

  8. “So I think self awareness is generally a very good thing for all Hundings, 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, right? So just about everybody who succeeds in substantive in a substantial way is good at being competitive, right? And if you're blind to your competition, you're kind of hosed. If you're successful, it's just because you're lucky, right? 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”

    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. “Strategy where you're not directly competing with Silicon Valley companies, and by the time the Silicon Valley companies go, oh, there's a major 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 is deeply informed of 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.”

    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. “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, you know, this thing or that thing, but we're not going to do it as a platform. Well, but they're wrong, and I can do a long place. And then once I get to this network effect of a whole bunch of small and medium businesses doing their own kind of websites and e-commerce, then I am the platform for that. So it's kind of a long.”

    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. “And what you do is you look at part of their success, Shopify, you know, 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”

    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. “I'd be running 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 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, I love podcasts, as you know, I master scale, possible, et cetera. And so I had the delight of doing like interviews with Toby Lutka, right? Or Daniel Eck.”

    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. “Yes. But you have to think so and I see you have a few of my books there. 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? And I was like, well, be the entrepreneur of your own life. And what that means is a chapter in there that says the bad advice you usually give in is just follow your passion. And the problem is the passion, 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 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.”

    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. “People like to tell stories of manifest destinies'cause 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 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.”

    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. “gave me this a set of different 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. Yes. Well, you don't choose where you're born.”

    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. “Silicon Valley is a it's a network of a generative platform. So like 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 engines, 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, 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, like people go, oh, I'm a genius. It's like, no, no, I'm in Silicon Valley. And that really helps. And so being born in Stanford.”

    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. “Yes. Well, because lawyers are 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, you know, built on my sword and, you know, go to verbal battle for whatever the contract or litigation or any of those things. And I was like, 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 evolve to is I normally have about a two to three year plan that's iterating. Right. And that tends to be what I do.”

    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. “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 twelve what I wanted to be when I grew up, the answer was not a lawyer.”

    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. “No, no, no. My dad was originally opposed to fantasy role-playing games. It was like, what are you doing? Be on a path to a real life. And then when I brought home the paycheck, I was like, oh my God.”

    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. “Gives us superpowers. Now, there will be cost to it, but like electricity, it does electrocute people, but it's essential for human society.”

    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. “One is you have to understand that you don't get to an optimistic future by trying to avoid failure. When we started LinkedIn, everyone said this won't work, but just because you don't have a hundred percent chance of succeeding doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it. But there's also a set of skills that are rare that you can actually teach to entrepreneurs that makes you much more likely to be successful. The first 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