President Trump was threatening personal and political retaliation because they tried to help Harris go away.

Do you

think you'll be penalized? Yes. And direct on you?

And direct to me.

You're not planning on leaving the US, are you? Reid Hoffman is the cofounder of LinkedIn and 1 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 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. You've become multibillionaires. And so I've got so many questions.

Let's do it.

What are the key factors of a great entrepreneur's mindset?

1 is you have to understand that you don't get to an optimistic future by trying to avoid failure. When we started LinkedIn, everyone said this won't work. But just because you don't have a 100% chance of succeeding, doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it. But there's also a set of skills that are rare that you can actually teach to entrepreneurs 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. So 1 is Reid, what is your take on AI? It gives us superpowers. Now there will be cost to it. But, like, electricity, it does electrocute people, but it's essential for human society.

And is there anything that the average person should be doing to capitalize on the opportunity that

AI presents? A 100%. This is what you need. So

Quick 1 before we get back to this episode. Just give me 30 seconds of your time. 2 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 gonna make to you. I'm gonna do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future. We're gonna deliver the guest that you want me to speak to, and we're gonna 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 1 individual could be involved in so many companies that have had such a big impact on society, but at the same time, someone be able to seemingly see the future over and over and over and over again. So because as I read through your life, I thought this can't be 1 individual.

This can't be 1 lifetime. It 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 the fact that my passion is who are we as human beings and where are we going? Mhmm. 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 kinda like, what is the scope of humanity? Like, you know, Isaac Asimov's foundation and, you know, this kind of stuff. And then, I ended up growing up.

I was born in the Stanford Hospital. I ended up growing up in Silicon Valley. And and so I got the exposure to technology can change the world. Mhmm. And so focusing on thinking about, you know, kind of this intersection of humanity and technology.

And, of course, obviously, science fiction has some play to that too. Although most of the technology in science fiction is just fiction. Mhmm. Right? It's just like we have wormholes, and we do intergalactic travel.

And 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. Mhmm.

I mean,

there may be wormholes, but they're not for, you know, put your Star Trek spaceship in it and go somewhere. Mhmm. 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. Exact wow.

This 1 here. You probably remember this.

Yes. I do remember that. Right? And the names on the cover. Borderlands.

What age were you when you started playing Rune Quest? You were very young.

When I started playing Rune Quest, probably 10.

And what is the link between the life you lived and the Horde 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, like, an adventure is both a narrative experience, but it's also a strategic experience. Like, you know, how do you save the town from the from the, you know, the bandits? You know, that kind of thing.

Mhmm. And so, so it gave me a deep sense of kind of, like, how to 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 Mhmm. You know, especially when I was doing it as a kid, a set of blokes around the table.

Mhmm. I hear it's now a little bit more gender balanced, which is good, and especially especially for the blokes. He's like, oh, we're not 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 were were down the street from a friend of mine's.

And so I literally walked in the door and started hanging out of their office.

And they're the maker of this game.

The 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 pre the the in development draft of this and said, here, go look at this. And so I took it home. As an obsessive kid, I I, like, redlined it.

I worked my way through it, and I brought it back. Like, he gave me to a Friday, and I brought it back on Monday. So he failed on his get this kid out of the office mission. Right? But he's he was then and I I I still remember this look 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 wanna be a mean guy. And he started looking at it and went, oh, this is actually good work. And it was like, I want to use this work. And I was a kid, so I didn't understand.

He needed to pay me to use it. I was that wasn't why I was just doing it because I wanted to show that I that I knew how to do this stuff. Mhmm. And so he then wrote me a check. So it was my, like, my very first paycheck to to be able to to use the work in the publication, because, you know, this is how copyright that that means he then owns all the work that I did so he could publish it.

And is your work still in here today? Yes. Uh-huh. 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 a $160 or something.

It's not

bad for a 12 year old.

No. No. No. My dad that's like My dad was originally opposed to fantasy role playing games. It was like, what what are you doing?

Like, you know, go like, be on a path to a real life. And then when I brought home the paycheck, I was like, well, maybe that works.

And what was your what were your dreams at that age? What did you think you were gonna 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, look, obviously, a bunch of or 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, you know, being a full time employee and so forth.

And it's quality work. It's important for society, but, like, I was like, no. No. I wanna create things. I don't wanna be a, you know, you know, belt on my sword and, you know, go to verbal battle for Mhmm.

You know, whatever the, you know, contract or or litigation or any of those things. And I was like, no. No. No. I I actually wanna 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 2 to 3 year plan that's iterating. Mhmm. Right? And that's that's tends to be what I do.

And being born at Stanford Hospital is pertinent as well. I don't think people in the UK and around the world necessarily know the significance of that. Yeah. But can you explain why that's important?

Silicon Valley, is a it's a network of a generative platform. So, like, 1 of the things that it that I have learned to think about is networks amplify productivity. That's not just as we get to, you know, why it is. I thought I conceptualized and founded LinkedIn, but but it's think in terms of networks. It's 1 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 and and knowledge and communication and and strategic lenses onto the world. And so Silicon Valley has been an like like, people go, oh, I'm a genius.

It's like, no. No. I'm in Silicon Valley. Right? That really helps.

And so being born in Stanford gave me this a set of different, you know, kind of perspectives. 1, technology is a lens into the future. Another 1 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, I don't choose you don't choose where you're born.

But a lot of people were born there, and they didn't go on to do the things that you did.

People like to tell stories of manifest destiny. It's because I am great. It I would have been great anywhere that I was. Right? And it's self delusional.

I mean, yes, I think I'm smart. Yes, I think I'm hardworking. Yes, I think I'm strategic. Yes, I think I have skills that are rare in in in human condition. But any great achievement also has luck.

Right? And and I can point it in any companies. I can point it at any individuals. And, for example, 1 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. I we just Spotify Wrapped just came out, and, globally, we have quite an extensive audience. Yeah. It's funny it's funny that it's so globally distributed, but I think a factor of being on YouTube and speaking English.

What would you say to people that are born in we've got an audience in Cape Town, in Indonesia, in Australia, New Zealand. What would you say to people in those parts of the world? Can you still be, quote, unquote, massively successful?

Yes. But but you have to think so, and I see you have a few of my books there. Yeah. 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?

Mhmm.

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 the passion your passion might be very passionate, but do you do you have a strategic advantage there? Is that something you can do?

And so applying the rules of entrepreneurship, yes, of course, you have to be passionate about what you're doing. Because if you're not passionate, you can never be world class unless you're passionate about what you're doing. But that's not the only thing. And so you look at, okay, what are market realities? What's the market?

What does competition look like? And within those, what can your aspirations be? And there's a whole chapter on that in that book because that's, by the way, similar to how you plot out if you're founding a company. Right? If you're founding a company, you have to think the same way about this, but think about it as an individual.

So if you're in Cape Town, there's many great things you could do. Now if you say, what I'm gonna do is a search company to compete with Google, don't do that. Right? 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 it as, okay, what can the thing I do? So, for example, you know, I'm I love podcasts, as you know. I, you know, master of scale, possible, etcetera. And so I had the delight of of, of doing, like, interviews with Toby Lutka or or Daniel Ek. Mhmm.

And what you do is you look at part of their success, Shopify, you know, Spotify, is is what how do I run my strategy from here? Like, how is it that I'm competitive and and can win a global field marketplace that Silicon Valley doesn't do. And so, for example, 1 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. Mhmm.

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, ecommerce is over. It's owned by Amazon.

We're not gonna do any of that as a platform. Maybe, you know, this thing or that thing, but we're not gonna 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 ecommerce, then I am the platform for that. So it's kind of a long under the radar strategy where you're not directly competing with Silicon Valley companies.

And by the time the 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 note, like, Toby Lutka, like, is deeply informed of what what's going on in Silicon Valley. Like, when he's charting a strategy, he is aware of that. He's got connections. He visits.

I mean, I'm a friend of his. Right? And, and that's part of like, if you're doing a global software play, you have to be aware that your competition is global.

There's an element of self awareness required here. Yeah. And it's funny because when I was younger, I certainly didn't have that self awareness. I thought that I could start a social network from my bedroom without ever doing it before, and I wasn't necessarily thinking about the geographical situation or Silicon Valley. How important is self awareness as an entrepreneur, and how does 1 cultivate it to know what make it 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 and just, you know, immense ambition sometimes don't go together. It's better when they do, but that's fine. What you do have to do is be very aware of what your competitive space looks like. Right?

So just about everybody who succeeds in substantive in a substantial way is good at being competitive. Right? And and you if you're blind to your competition, you're kinda hosed. If you're successful, it's just because you're lucky. Right?

Because, and that's part of what I was referring to earlier on luck. If you if you start a business where you have the luck where competitors haven't haven't identified it, haven't gotten you get a long head start on it. That's an instance of luck. Not all the successful companies are that way, but that's very that that can be very good and very useful on that. Mhmm.

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

Mhmm.

And still be very successful because of the way it works. But if you're competitively blind leading a business, leading a start up, almost always that's host.

Mhmm.

Right? That's 1 of the reasons why, like, you know, the all investors in Silicon Valley always ask about your competition. And if you say, I don't have any competition. You're like, well, if they disagree with you, they're not gonna invest because they go, you're competitively blind.

Is there any such thing as an entrepreneur in the sense of you know, people always ask me. They say, can anyone be an entrepreneur and a founder? And there's so many different types of companies 1 can start these days that it's a quite tricky question to answer. But do you think any because there's gonna be people listening to this now that are in they're managers in companies. They're Yeah.

You know, they're they're working in a law firm or whatever, and maybe they've got an idea. I mean, everyone's got an idea, and they don't know if they're the type of person that should pursue it or not. Is there a framework 1 can run through run through to decide that?

Yeah. I'll run through a framework to to help the folks. The, the short answer is no. Not everyone should be an entrepreneur, just like not everyone should try to be a professional musician.

Mhmm.

Not everyone should try to be an athlete. Not everyone should be you have to look at what your competitive advantages are. And does your disposition, skill sets, path give you a competitive edge, in this case of being an entrepreneur?

Mhmm.

Right? Because any game that's competitive right? And entrepreneurship's a highly competitive game. That's that's part of the you know, it's as competitive as trying to become, you know, a, a globally renowned actor. It's as competitive as trying to become the CEO of a major bank or anything else.

So it's it's a competitive game. Mhmm. So for an entrepreneur, what you have to do is you have to say, okay. Well, I have to be able, 1 of the classic ones, to 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 I'm 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. Mhmm. Then there's a whole bunch of different things that go into that game. So 1 is, well, can you go get the capital?

Are you in a in a market that'll 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 this kind of flywheel going between, you know, 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, etcetera. 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's dead. You didn't learn how to launch a new product. You didn't learn how to how do you start with a small product and grow to a larger product. Right? You didn't learn how do you set up a team from scratch.

And, by the way, a team from scratch when the vast majority of human beings like more certainty

Mhmm.

In what their week looks like. Yeah. Right? Like, I'm gonna 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 with certainty. So so entrepreneurs have to do all that sort of thing. So in addition to kind of risk taking, you have to be good at bringing many resources from different, vectors into your vision and working with you. So there's investors, there's employees, there's customers, there's advisors, there's partners. You have to bring the right set of those people along with you in this iterative, this this kind of, you know, iterative journey.

You have to be able to grow yourself and learn because the game changes. Like 1 of the metaphors I use to to to train and and conceptualize young entrepreneurs is is kind and there's a whole bunch of different parallels between military strategies, part of, like, the board games thing and

Mhmm.

And and business strategy. But it's like, marines take the beach, army takes the country, police governs the country. 33 very crude broad generalizations about how you do it. So you go, what's your marine strategy? Do you because you must, as a seed series a, you must have a good strategy how you get on the beach, how you get, you know, initial product market fit, how you're heading towards scale product market fit.

Okay. You're there. How do you win the country? Right? The market.

Right? What how do you get to scale product market fit? How is that gonna work? How are you gonna play against competition? Different in these twos.

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, 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 1 at day 1 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 an 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 and through that. And and and and that's part of how you 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 win that. And then you then a new generation of heavy competitors come in.

So can you can you kind of keep your position and grow your position in a market?

Which is the police part. Right?

The police part. Yes. Exactly. And so so you have to you have to look. And each of these 3 is different games.

And there's more games than that, but it's a a way of kind of simply understanding it. So, always being learning, being an infra 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 1, 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 gonna go to market. I understand what the competition looks like. Because if they go, oh, you're right. I should totally change it.

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. We encounter that.

Yeah. We'd have to do something about that. Like, if our competitors started doing that, and maybe we do this. Right? So they also are learning.

They have flexibility. So you want that combination. Like, 1 of the things about startups is, you have to, bring kind of this dual lens focus of things that seemingly are a little contradictory. So, like, persistence, flexibility. Another 1 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, no. You're never gonna get there. If if if you shoot for the hillside, you're never gonna get to the moon. You have to shoot for the moon.

So you're shooting for the moon, but it's me and my 2 friends in a garage right now.

It's interesting because the middle bit Yes. Does that matter?

It does, but it's it's a remember, like, the marines, army, police

Yeah.

Army, when you're doing the marines, is the middle bit.

Right. Okay. Right? Right. Yeah.

So so it does, but it's not by the way and 1 of, again, mistakes, and that's part of the reason why there's another chapter in StarView is a v z planning. The mistakes is, like, you have all 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 b's. Right? So you're kinda like, well, if that doesn't work, then let's try this. If that doesn't work, then let's try this. Mhmm.

You know? And and you're iterating through them. And when you know to do a major pivot

Mhmm.

Because, by the way, many successful businesses also do major pivots. PayPal started as encryption on cell phones. Mhmm. Right? That's that's where it started.

Right? So you 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. Mhmm.

That's when you think about, okay. Let's do a major pivot.

So with your analogy of evading the beach, how do you know what beach to invade? Like, how do you know if you've got a good idea, and how do you know what a good idea is? Because most people, as I said, listen

to this. They've got a business idea.

Yeah. And they how do they know if it's good? And the part of the issue they often have is they've heard anecdotally or they've seen that someone else is already doing it. So they go, oh, gosh. It's already been done.

Yeah. There's call it 2 kinds of ideas. And, frankly, by the way, you think, you know, there's over 8,000,000,000 people in the world. The fact that you think you're the 1 person who's thought of this idea, you may not be doing math well. Right?

So so thinking you're the 1 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 a 100 people.

Okay. Well, am I the 1 who's in motion right now? Am I the motion person who's willing to take the risk? Quit my job and do it. And you never really get down to 1.

Right? So so start ups are risky businesses. Like, 1 of the things, let's get back to entrepreneurs, like, I think the greatest chance and even when I was starting LinkedIn, after having started SocialNet, after having, you know, cofounded 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, Right? Just to be clear.

Right? We're gonna try to grow that to a 100%. Right? But but we're a couple people in a garage right now. Right?

Like, there's all kinds of things that can go wrong. Anyone who's telling you it's a 100% now, they're lying to themselves or they're lying to you. And and, you know, like, I'm very realist and ambitious in my strategy. And so so you you should never think you're starting something a 100%. Now within the ideas, you go there's roughly speaking 2 kinds of ideas.

1 kind of idea is, yeah, 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? Mhmm.

They go to they go, oh, well, hey. AI is gonna create a whole bunch of new SaaS businesses. Right? Oh, yeah. That makes sense.

A new new technology trans transformation. I know what is that. Or people in ecommerce, they're gonna wanna 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. Like, you can measure them with customers. You can you can you can do feedback and polling and other kinds of things. Now the good new there's good news, bad news on this category. The good news is you can derisk, is there a market for your idea mostly?

Not not entirely, but mostly. The bad news is so can a lot of other people. Yeah. Right? And so in this category, there always tends to be competition, and your competitive strategy, generally speaking, needs to be, why against like, you in this category, you should be expecting competition.

Why am I gonna win out sufficiently against this competition in a global arena? I have invested in those businesses. Greylock invests in a bunch of those businesses. Could we do a we're, you know, 1 of the best VCs at enterprise on the planet, you know, blah blah blah. Then, the other kind of I think, which is the 1 I tend to start and the 1 I tend to most invest in, is people think that you're, 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. Mhmm.

Right? Yeah.

But but people think you're crazy, which means most people think you're crazy, which means your competitive field is a lot less. Mhmm. 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 and use that even as the vast majority of the 1,000,000,000 people registered for LinkedIn are, you know, basically work at companies. Right? Right? They're not starting company. Like, it's a great platform for entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs get it right away. But, like, I'm like, well, I'm working in a company. Is am I gonna seem disloyal to my company if I establish a profile here? You know? Interesting.

Because back back when we started it, like, no one's gonna use that. Right. 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 disoiled.

So it looks like they're shopping because, I mean Yes. 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 Okay. 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? Mhmm. And, and so, I'm gonna take that risk. And that's the contrarian risk. I'm gonna take that risk, and I'm gonna I'm gonna play it forward.

And if I'm right, I will create something that will transform the industry, that will be amazing for individuals, amazing for companies, etcetera. And we can go, obviously, whatever length you wanna go through LinkedIn journey, we can do it. Now Airbnb is an is an investor example. So Airbnb was my first investment at Greylock. And so and I was at Greylock because David Zee, 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 gonna 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, you know, 5 minutes of phone call, you know, through 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 gonna hate it.

Hotel lobbies, you're gonna try to outlaw within cities. You know, da da da. Like, this is just gonna be a train wreck all over the place. And I was like, nope. But I wanna 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, 6 months later, the tran the transaction volume in Airbnb is like this classic hockey stick. It was years of very small, and then it grew to being very big. Mhmm. So that hockey stick hadn't started yet. And David came to me and said, okay.

Because 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 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 gonna be a total failure?

You said, nope. I'm not I wanna do this. I said, well, look. You were right about all of the risks about that could happen with Airbnb. You were absolutely right.

Any of those things could have made the business worth 0. But this is the reason as investors, we do a portfolio. Because, yes, Airbnb could be 0, but if it worked, it was gonna be huge. Right? It was gonna 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 gonna try to navigate. It isn't that we could guarantee the risk, but the fact that everyone else saw those risks meant that we had years of no competition, that we could establish the network. We could establish the marketplace. And then once we're there, we are the marketplace for how that works. And that's the kind of investment I like doing.

That's the same thing with LinkedIn as I as I founded it, same thing with, you know, kind of, with Airbnb as an investment. And so that category of investment, you cannot validate with the customers.

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

Yes. It it's much more challenging to

be a big idea. Interesting. Really interesting. Because it's funny because when people pitch to you, they say, I've asked everybody, and everybody thinks it's great. Yes.

So that's probably an indicator that it's probably not big or their bullshit

is. Yes. And I'm looking for both in my creation of ideas and in my funding of ideas. It's not dumb people who think it's a bad idea. It's smart people who think it's a bad idea.

You want smart people to think.

Because then you have something that's contrarian because that's what contrarian is. Contrarian isn't, I don't understand technology at all. I think it's a terrible idea. It's like, well, who cares? You won't understand anything.

Right? Mhmm. It's smart people who think it's a bad idea.

Right? Right.

And then you have a theory of the game that's a good 1, not perfect, very risk 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 wanna have the conversation of them go, oh, it's great. Useless.

Doesn't help me. Right? What's wrong with it? Why will this go why will this fail? And so I sat down with John.

We had breakfast at a at a breakfast place in Silicon Valley. I said, dah dah dah. And he said, okay. You you know, I'll come your friend. You know, it's never gonna work.

Right? Right? And I said, okay. Well, why do you think it's never gonna work? He said, well, look.

You'll never grow the network. Like, the first person who comes in, no 1 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 1000000 people, there's no value in the network.

So there's 0 value. So it's never gonna grow. You you're never gonna get anywhere. Right? And it was a very smart, crisp vacation 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. Mhmm. Right? I knew that if you had a 1,000 people come in, 900 of those people would be exactly like John. They'd go, I don't see anyone else here in this network, etcetera.

But I knew that some of them, somewhere between 10 a 100 of them, would go, oh, I see what this could be, and I kinda wanna play with it.

Mhmm.

So, you know, I'll invite Steven. I'll invite, you know, I'll invite some people in. And then as it very slowly starts going, then all of a sudden there's enough people in. It's interesting. It's curious, and you could grow to being valuable.

So I knew that that by persistence through those initial exploratory people, people who are curious, people who wanna experiment with, people who got the vision of it, you know, etcetera, etcetera. But all of that, I could grow to your initial critical mass, and then it would kick in.

The model of LinkedIn obviously, I I know LinkedIn more today than I did back then in what? 90 no. So 2,002

2003. 2,002,003,

and then really got through in 2,003.

2003 is when we turned it on.

Really? Yes. Wow. And back then, was it a social network as it is now where there's a news feed and people talking to each other, or was it more of a a public CV?

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 Yes. A lot of people today using it not to search for a job or or a professional, but to talk about themselves or to share their life, etcetera.

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. 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, 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. Yeah. Because if I go in there and make a profile and put my CV up, it it doesn't really matter if I don't come back for 4 days.

Yes. Exactly.

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

Yes. And that that's a virtue, not a bug because it was part of how we solve the critical mass problem.

Yeah. I I I could never understand how LinkedIn did that, but now it makes sense to me.

Yes. Because

I always think, guys, building a social network is just it's asking for, like, hell in your life.

Yeah. Well, I'm kind of a specialist. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

You know, for 1 of the first investors in Facebook, 1 of the first investors in Friendster.

Oh, right. I didn't realize you were gonna invest in Friendster as well. Yes. You were part of what they call the PayPal mafia. I know you used a different term.

Network. It's it's it's less it has less pizzazz, but we weren't really a criminal group.

But mafia's call is Yes. Yes. People 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 asked this question about PayPal and why it was so successful, but also why so many of the alumni of PayPal went on to become multibillionaires. I think 7 people that that were part in that sort of part of that study sort of early PayPal farming team went on to create Tesla, YouTube, Reddit, SpaceX, LinkedIn. Was it talent density? Was it was that what made the PayPal mafia?

Well, it certainly was a component. And so it's it's it's it's a couple of things. So 1, 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 1 part. Another part is, when PayPal went public, it was 1 of it was a it was a technology winter.

It was 1 of 2 technology companies that went public that year. Wow. Right? So all of a sudden and then got bought by eBay. So all of a sudden, you had this talent group of people that had a bunch of money in their pockets and the network within and that believed in the consumer Internet.

So the network of Silicon Valley at that point had thought the consumer Internet was played. They were going into cleantech and to enterprise. So if you ask if you try to ping a venture capitalist about I have a new consumer in it, they 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. Right?

Now then you get all the the the PayPal people coming out going, hey. I can fund my own initial idea. I've got this great idea, YouTube. Right? LinkedIn.

And I can fund it, and I can get it going. And then and this is part of the Web 2 o movement. This is a I I coined the term Internet 2 o, and then Tim, O'Reilly, made the much better term Web 2. Right? And so the, these folks going, no.

No. The consumer Internet is like, that was just the first wave on the beach. The tsunami is still coming. Mhmm. Right?

And so we were all out investing, and we were talking to each other because, frankly, we're like, well, these these VCs don't get it. Like, this is coming. And then, of course, you started seeing, you know, YouTube, and you started seeing LinkedIn, and you started seeing and it was like, okay. Like, we will like, these are important things that we're gonna invest in. And that that's that's part of the reason why the the that's the, because by the way, remember, you know, bad competition.

Right? That's 1 of the reasons why. Not just talent, not just capital, but also competitive steering is part of the reason why the PayPal network or PayPal mafia had such a massive, suite of success.

You know, I often hazard a guess at what the, like, the the fundamental game of business is for a start up founder. And I've hazard a guess before that it's recruiting the best group of people you possibly can, binding them with a culture that gets the best out of them, and setting them a vision that's worthwhile. But from reading your work, there's a couple of things. Just from hearing you today, sales is so, like, pertinent to what

your go to market is, and it can be sales, b to b enterprise, etcetera. But, like, for example, in in social networks, it's usually a viral, you know, a viral marketing or viral growth plan.

So when I say sales, I actually mean, like, selling to

Oh, yes. Employees.

A 100%. Yes. Yeah.

And, like, you must.

You said, like, partners, investors. Yes.

Because you have to come come onboard my vision. Yeah. Invest in my vision. Because, by the way, a partner, when you're a start up, is also investing in your vision. Yeah.

An employee is investing in your vision.

Yeah. Right? How do you be good at that?

There's a limited set of skills that you can actually teach to entrepreneurs versus the entrepreneurs just learning by doing. Mhmm. 1 of them is pitching. Right? 1 of them is understanding the how do I communicate my vision in a way that other people cannot go, that's really exciting.

I want to join your vision with you.

And if I was a young entrepreneur telling you, right, I wanna 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?

Yeah. Absolutely. And by the way, there's we could spend the entire podcast only doing this. I mean, there's there's a very deep well. But here's some simple tips.

So 1 is the mistaken lesson that most people learn is to try to do reality distortion. It's 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. Right? Like, you're literally like, please leave now.

Yeah. Right? So you have to realize that all pitches are dialogs. Right? And you wanna be listening to smart people.

And you like, generally speaking, everyone you wanna be recruiting, you wanna be recruiting smart people. You want the absolute best talent working with you. You want the absolute best talent working in your company. You want the absolute best. So you want people who are who are thoughtful and asking good questions.

Like, for example, I pitch insanely aspirational businesses, but I don't pitch them saying, oh, LinkedIn is guaranteed to succeed. There's no universe in which LinkedIn won't be the transformer of professional work and careers. What I do is say, it can get here. Like, we have a real chance at this. Now we have to navigate these risks.

But if we navigate these risks, we're gonna be here. Mhmm. Right? And then people say, ah, you're credible. You have a huge vision.

You're compelling. I think you can do this.

Mhmm.

Right? And then they come on board with you. So 1 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 1. 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. It's 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 Glengarry 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 gonna be a couple of winners.

Yes. And so, like, this is why we can win. Right? And so, now there's also mechanics in pitching, which is, you know, how do you tell a story of it? Part of the thing I tell entrepreneurs is to even if the person doesn't ask you the risk, tell them what the risks are and how you're navigating them because it'll establish trust.

Right? So, like, for example, in in pitching investment now this, I didn't know until I started learning it in terms of a mechanic of pitching is and entrepreneurs tend to go, oh, when I need money is when I, you know, write off my PowerPoint and I hit you know, 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 if you like, as much as you can in all of these things, start the conversation well before you're getting to a potential contract of any sort, a partnership or or a investment or even an employment contract. Like, so example, always be recruiting doesn't mean, oh, I wanna hire you right now. It's like, okay. Find great talent. This is 1 of the things I learned from social and brought in to 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 wanna be talking to people that, you know, you either really would love them to join at some point, not too distant future, or they know other people who would be like that. Because, by the way, part of when you, when you meet great talent, you realize how to like, because because you're always you're always adding new great talent. You're like, oh my god. We need people like this.

How do we bring them in? So, for example, 1 of the things that I learned that was, you know, from SocialNet that I brought to PayPal wasn't 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 2 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 Yes. Self teaching?

Yes. Okay. And learning on the job and going and figuring it out. And so when I went to PayPal and I was up I when the company was founded, I was on the board of directors. I was like, this is what you're looking for, not this.

Okay.

Right? And so back to your, like, PayPal mafia question, that's because we hired those kind of people. Right? Interesting. There was a very limited set of people in the company who had had more than a couple years experience working within payments, within banking, within you know, because it was the, I don't know, learning curve.

When you look at your portfolio of investments, so the entrepreneurs you meet, do you think young entrepreneurs realize how significant hiring is to their eventual outcome? Because they tend to focus on, like, how good the product is or sometimes capital. But I just looking at my own portfolio, I I often find myself, like, I'm feeling like an old man because I'm telling them that, like, spend more time hiring. It's 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 you know, you use a European football analogy. I've got a really good striker.

Great. Well, we don't need to worry about the halfbacks or defensive or, you know, goalkeeper. No. No. You have to hire at all things, and you go, well, I'm a really good halfback.

That's great. You need the others too.

I think when I was young, I was 18, 19 years old, I, somewhere in my brain, thought my outcomes were gonna be determined by how hard I worked and how good my ideas were. And it wasn't until I accidentally hired someone fantastic that I realized

Yes.

The absolute tremendous impact that an a player can

have

Yes. On everything. Yes. And that was just such a mental shift for me.

Yeah. 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 wanna come work here or I can't afford them or

You wanna hire the best people you can. And by the way, if you can hire people better than you, oh my god. It makes you much more likely to be successful.

Yeah. Yeah. It's my experience that young founders don't really think about that. They're also insecure, so they think, I can't manage that person.

Well but but your theory of management is look. If you're if you can hire someone where your only management technique needs to

be let them loose, that's the

that's best. Like, just go.

Right? And is there any anything practical about hiring? You know, people say, like, hire slower, fire fast, or, other sort of, like, cliche advice around hiring that matters. Like, how important is it that they're culturally aligned? Or So culture can matter.

I would say look. In terms of and I hopefully, it's not a cliche, but, hopefully, a heuristic principle. References are more important than interviews. Right? Mhmm.

We get a lot of repetitive experience at being compelling in an interview. And if you can't and by the way, some great people aren't compelling in interviews. Right? They're they're they're not really great at selling themselves, but, oh my god, are they amazing in the field? They're made like, an engineer.

Like, an engineer might be like, you know, like, okay. But, oh my god, can they do great things? Mhmm. In which case, like like, do whatever you can to hire that person. So if you if you ask me, you can only have references or only interview.

10 out of 10 times, I'll take the I'll hire the person on the references.

You you surely, you're not talking about the types of references where they give you the references themselves? No.

No. No. No. And this is 1 of the features in LinkedIn. Like, you wanna 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 it or is what we refer to frequently as an off balance reference sheet, usually not the 1 they give you to be a reference. So even if they say, oh, here's you know, I'm reading. Here's my reference, you know, Bob or Susan. You call Bob or Susan, and you say, this is a standard question I will use all the time, but especially if I'm calling someone who's a given reference. Hey.

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 if you say there's no weakness, I'll just go, okay.

I understand. I shouldn't hire this person. Thank you very much.

Mhmm.

Right? In that, they will always almost always give you something. Mhmm. Right? And you can think of it because we are all combinations of strengths and weaknesses.

Like, I'm 1 of the best people to have on your side for creative strategic problem solving. Like, 1 of my employees once told me, he's like, I would never hire you to run a McDonald's. 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 1 who is all strengths. I mean, people tell themselves that, but that's self delusion.

Right? And so so you have that conversation with a reference, and the reference will tell you something because because they're not used to saying it. So they might say, oh, you know, you know, Susan or Bob, they're a perfectionist. He's like, oh, so they get their work done slowly because they're, you know, like, you know, like, you you push them, like, because they're trying to get the 1 that's actually, like, more all the they spend too much time working. You're like, oh, that means they're unintelligent about how they do the work?

Yeah.

Right. So you can push them into where they're like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, they can get

a little disorganized when they're stressed. Okay.

Great.

Right? And then you can that gives you by the way because when you get that from reference 1, then when you're calling reference 2, you say, oh, I heard that the person is disorganized. Like, can you tell me a little bit about that? Mhmm. Right?

Yeah. Got some ammo, and they can't then say, oh, no. No. I've never seen that. They'll probably give you a little bit more context.

Yes.

On all these great people you've worked with, specifically, you know, you during that PayPal period of your life, 1 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 1 version of success. 100%. There's many different types of success. Presumably, there's many different types of entrepreneur, leader.

Yes. Give me a flavor of the different types of entrepreneurs you've worked with and and and what you know, because I I sat with Walter Isaacson.

Mhmm. And he

talked to me about Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, etcetera. And I was like, Steve's really great at hiring people. Elon's not as good as at the people team building part, but he's better at this part.

Yes. So no entrepreneur wins at every game. Mhmm. Generally speaking, as an entrepreneur, you should try to win to to play the games that you have a massive competitive edge on. Same thing is true.

So some people, for example, 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 the people were gonna do cloud software.

For the first, I think it was 500 people, the work they hired, he would always do a cultural interview at the end because to make sure that the first 500 people all kinda 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, 1 example. Right? Another example, Elon is the like, I have a big idea, and I convinced myself 100% that it's absolutely going to be the case.

Like, I am going to settle Mars. We're gonna terraform Mars in our lifetime, which is no. It's impossible. It no no human being on the planet, including Elon, is going to do that within Elon's lifetime. Right?

But I'm gonna go all in. I'm gonna work really hard. I'm gonna be technologically sophisticated. I'm gonna work against the odds, right, in order to make that work. That's a, you know, Anil, very professional, understands the workplace market.

Elon, like, I think I was, like, the second person he pitched SpaceX to. And and his pitch though, to my defense, was I'm gonna send a turtle to Mars. And I'm like, that's not a business. And you're competing with national governments and, like, Russian subsidized rocket programs and so forth. This is not a good I was wrong.

He was right. Right? There's not a good equity, you know, kind of play.

He pitched you to an investor? Yes. Yeah. Right. At what point was SpaceX at when he pitched it?

That was before he started.

So it was an idea?

And I'm gonna send a turtle to Mars, and then it became, I'm gonna send a gelatinous cube with plant seeds in it to Mars because they'll grow. I'll be the 1st person who will send life to Mars. And you're like, okay. Right?

What did you think genuinely when he said that to you?

I thought he'd gone off his rocker.

Really? Well, yeah. Of course, you would. Yeah. Like, someone's my friend said that to me.

I think I'd make a couple of calls just to check-in. Do you know what I mean? Like, is Elon doing okay? He just told me about this turtle. He was just

Yes. It's like, that's not a business. Right.

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 1 of the world's great entrepreneurs. Always? Yeah.

All all the way back to PayPal days. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. No. Look. He has done repetitively amazing things. Now he pitches everything with the same level of certainty.

Right? Like, you know, I have this idea for online banking. I have this idea for boring tunnels under cities. I have this idea for creating a pneumatic tube for Hyperloop tube. All of them, he has the same level of, I am 1000% 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 his, you know, on base batting is pretty good.

Yeah. For such major ideas. But it's

not a it's not a 100%.

Yeah. People kind of excuse that though if

Of course.

If you get If if you're in a

If you get 1 that's big, that's fine. Right? Yeah. But

yeah. On the hiring side, has he been is he up there with the best, or is he not a direct hire of people like Steve Jobs was?

He hires well. Matter of fact, you can't be a great entrepreneur and not ultimately hire well. Mhmm. I think some people are better hires. 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 wanna work from again. And other people said, that was the worst work work experience ever, and I never wanna work from again. So they're all, I never wanna work from again.

Mhmm. Right? Mhmm. So, you know, as kind of a a dynamic because he basically looks at them as disposable parts and, you know, go as hard as you can. Right?

And then afterwards, you're out. Don't care.

Because he goes so hard.

Yeah. He goes hard, but he also thinks your only relevance to me is your relevance. Your only relevance to

me is, can you help me

with my mission? And after you're done after you can no longer help me with my mission, you're not relevant to me anymore.

What do you think of that approach?

That's not my approach. Right? Link LinkedIn mirrors my approach. I 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. Right? But, like, like, literally, like, when I'm pitching an entrepreneur, I just, like, call anyone that I've worked with. Right?

Because you I try to work with people in a way that even when we're at a at a at a difficult moment, because I disagree with them intensely about how well they're doing or what they're doing or something else, that I'm doing it in a collaborative, constructive way. And so my goal is to work with people, like anyone I wanna work work with, Brian Chesky, you know, Mark Pincus, etcetera. I wanna 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 Yeah. 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.

Yes. But

there's a trade off happening here. Yes. And we often because Elon's done these crazy things like the cars and the Nuralinx and these tunnels and then 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 someone who's like, you know, 1 person could do that much. Yeah. We almost never talk about the trade off.

Yes. Yep. You're 100% right.

And we and and it's so this goes back to the point about self awareness. It's like you it's so tempting for the the, like, the brain to go, oh my god. I want that. That's what I want. Yeah.

Because you're not seeing the trade off. Yes. You're not seeing the darkness.

That is a 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's very successful doing that.

Mhmm.

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.

So, like, of course, I work for him again. Interesting. Because there's a lot of entrepreneurs that are coming rising through the ranks at the moment that have kind of been raised on the Elon philosophy of do shit tons of things, do them intently, do them with, less of a regard for the, I guess, the human consequence. Yeah. Do them with less of a regard for work life balance.

Yeah. Well, you have to have the nature of this thing because it's it's you know, you're by nature dead as a start up. Work life balance is not the start up game. Right? So, like, like, what when, when, like, when we started LinkedIn, we started with people who had families.

So we said, sure. Go home, have dinner with your family. Then after you're dealing 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 the start up game, and they're just wrong. Right? The the game is intense. And by the way, if you don't do that, then eventually you're out of a job.

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

Yes. And and look. That's fine. It's not that everyone has to work at start ups. Working at start ups is a voluntary choice.

Right? But that's the game for a start up. And so that's how we try to balance in the early days of LinkedIn, we try to balance how to be human because we like, a third of the company had kids. Right? And so you're like, okay.

Like, we all have to work this way, so we can't say, oh, you 3rd. You sure you guys can go home, and you're out of the office and then and then, then call in or whatever. No. Look. Look.

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. Mhmm.

Right? But we're working hard. And Saturday morning, we're working.

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

often. Only in 2 circumstances. 1, it's a small start up. Though it's both comp it's both an absence of competition. That's the general.

1 is, it's so small. No one's really competing with you. That's fine.

Okay. Right. Right. My screen's bad in the village. Yeah.

Yeah. That's

fine. Right? Number 2, you have some such intense competitive mode that people can't compete with you.

Like, say, for example, you have some like, the only thing that matters in

this business has contracts with these 3 companies, and you have those 3 contracts. Okay. Fine. But absent that, that's reason because the the startups that you're if you're in a valuable space, the startups that you're competing with right? Like, we had to make the deliberate decision.

Like, startups we're competing with aren't going home for dinner. Right? They're serving dinner at the office. That's what we did PayPal. We served dinner at the office of PayPal.

Yeah. Right? Right? And that was a deliberate thing. We were 1 of the first companies that started not only serving lunch, but serving dinner.

Right? And then other because it's the learning network you get with Silicon Valley. Other companies are looking at it. Oh, yeah. We're gonna serve dinner too.

So people don't go in. Yeah. Don't know. Keep working.

Right? 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 and what gives you the right to tell other people that they can't do that?

I mean, like, what are you, patronizing? Like, people choose their own lives. Right? So and and people can choose that. Now you have to understand the game.

It's like, well, I'd like to be a world class Olympic athlete, but I really only wanna swim 2 hours a day. Well, that's nice. Mhmm. Right? Not gonna happen.

Right? You have to understand the game you're playing. If if you're playing an Olympics game, like someone who's trying to compete in the Olympics and swimming, they're swimming 7 days a week, 12 hours a day. Right? So that that 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 facts.

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 6 and a half days a week.

Right? We, do get people home for dinner, but everyone, including Reid, is expected, you know you know, you know, online working after dinner.

And do you pay people more for that than the average rate?

Or So they get paid in equity. And this is 1 of the things again, is, you know, the the first, I don't know, some hundreds of people at LinkedIn, all don't need to work anymore because their equity is enough that if they choose not to work anymore, that's totally fine.

Which is a a trade off that was clearly worth making. Yeah. You stepped back as CEO after 4 years when you're at LinkedIn. Right? Yes.

Why did you do that?

So, I had 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 that that scale of CEO job, is a scale that I that operates within my strengths and weaknesses. When you start getting to, call it, 500 people, a 1000 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, with the kinds of things that Jeff Weiner that I learned from him on was, alright. 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 1 of the onboarding days, and they start as a group together. Right? So it's kinda like, okay.

We're going through kinda how it works, and we're integrating people into the different groups. They like, you know, the salespeople in the engineering, they're all start, and they're going into the groups. We're like, we're approaching it as 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, the kind of the big idea for what you're doing there.

And I love working with super high powered talent. And 1 of the things that I had kinda learned is, well, that's the reason I like working with founders. That's the reason I like working with CEOs. Mhmm. Because to some degree, it's like, okay.

You're the talent I'm working with on this company Mhmm. Right, in order to do that. And so I was like, yeah, I like doing more of being a board member working with CEOs more than I like being the CEO once you get past, you know, a 150 people.

Mhmm.

So that's what I should be doing. And what I need to do is I need to get LinkedIn to a point where it's already, you know, it's it's already kind of hit breakout velocity. Mhmm. Right? And so you can recruit now a world class CEO that you can work with.

Mhmm. Right? And that's what that's what I should do. And, you know, I 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 stayed close, but you Yeah. Yeah. Again, this is another point of self awareness, which a lot of founders don't have. But the great founders that I've met and interviewed, whether it's, I don't know, Brian Chesky or whether it was some founders from the UK like Bennett Gymshark and Julian from Pure, 1 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 Yes.

Because they knew that their skill set was in branding or marketing or something else or just vision for the the future of the company. A lot of CEOs don't do that because the CEO title comes with a certain Yeah.

I understand.

Esteem.

And, yes, everybody, myself included, does have a big ego. Right? But my ego is you you have to attach the right way. My ego is attached to LinkedIn succeeding. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's a big difference. Yes. LinkedIn went public in 2011 with a 4,300,000,000 valuation, and then Microsoft later paid 26,000,000,000 to buy LinkedIn. And at the time, it was reported you owned about 11% of the company, which made you a multibillionaire. How does life change when 1 becomes a multibillionaire?

So it's funny. I try to never like like, 1 of the funny things, I never repost things that call me billionaire and so on, because I try to not have that identity. I am aware that it's an accurate descriptor.

Yeah. Yeah.

Right? 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, you know, strategist, Reid Hoffman, etcetera. So I try to, change my life as in those directions, not in the the wealth direction.

Now, of course, you know, I travel around in a private plane. You know, I own houses in several different areas of the world. You know, that kind of stuff. Yeah. Right?

But, I try to live a life within those, you know, high wealth things as much of a as an upper middle class person as I can. So, for example, before I came here to do the interview, I I got here a little early. So I went to the nearby Starbucks, had a cup of coffee, pull up my laptop Mhmm. Was working on it. Interesting.

You know? Because because that's the way that I wanna 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 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 to to say the least. I heard that you got pepper sprayed when you were a kid because

because I was I was a kid on my, father's shoulder at a demonstration against against the against the Vietnam War.

Okay. So that's I mean, it's in your DNA.

Yes.

The the thing about being on the left is it's typically the left that have a opinion of billionaires that they're evil.

Yes. I'm aware of that.

But not just billionaire.

I've been

I've been called evil by a number of people on the left.

Really?

Yes. Of course. Look. I I they are wrong that that is a necessary correlation. Mhmm.

Right? But I you look. I I try to understand people. I understand their perspective. I disagree with it, but I understand.

It's I mean, you've you're 1 of the few people that's still a billionaire on the left, it seems.

No. I'm not. I

actually In

the valley, especially in the selection cycle. Well It's the public facing people that we see on the podcast and stuff. And

Look. So part of the reason why I think less people were public about it, this cycle was because, you know, president Trump was threatening, you know, personal and political retaliation.

Mhmm.

And so you had to have a certain degree of courage to stand up.

Mhmm.

Right? And so encourage in the public area, not just encourage in taking risks and so forth, but in the public arena for doing that. And so I literally had conversations with billionaires who were like, oh, look. I really applaud what you're doing, and I think what you're doing is that the right thing. And that's for you, not for me.

Right? I mean, trying to get people into it. And so, so I was aware. And because they kinda did the simple mini max, and they said, well, if if Harris is elected, I won't get penalized for not having supportive. And if Trump is elected, I will get penalized.

So I'm just gonna stand out of it. And Do you think you'll be penalized? I think that, I think that there's a greater than 50% chance that there will be, repercussions, from a misdirection and corruption of the institutions of state, 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, you know, he owns The Washington Post, and I don't like him. You know, that kind of stuff. I hope it's in that arena.

Right? Could get much worse, but I don't really wanna speculate on it because I don't wanna give anybody any ideas. Mhmm. Right? But, like, I think it's like, I think I would safely win a bet that there will be political repercussions that are that are essentially undemocratic, un American.

And direct on you. And direct to me.

Yes. I I'd think I'd safely win that bet. I'm hoping that it's in the what I'm terming the soft arena.

You're not planning on leaving the US, are you? No.

No. Well, my resident's outside of Seattle and, you know, we have a constitution, you know, 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 Kamala 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 watched it play out. And it was kinda 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 chuck the fuck up or fall in line or something.

You know

what I mean? Well but that's the problem. You can't allow that form of neo fascism. Right? 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. Right? And if you're not gonna stand up, who is?

Right? Can you

see any redeeming qualities in Trump? I know you're pro common

Oh, yeah. Well, I think he's gonna bring a wrecking ball, and some of the places a wrecking ball are useful. Like, so for example, if you say, hey. On regulation, you want a new regulation? Replace 2.

That kind of refactoring is a good thing. Hey. We're gonna need a bunch of energy in in the future, and we're gonna need good clean energy. I understand everyone doesn't like nuclear. I don't care.

We're gonna do nuclear. Like, I can see a number of things that could come out that'd be very positive. And I want those things to happen. And matter of fact, you know, part of being an American, you know, I'm gonna try to make the next 4 years as great for America as I can. Right?

My precise complaint with some of the people I'm in political opposition for is don't ever try to break the country. Try to always be building the country. It doesn't matter if the person you agree with is in power or not, be working towards a good collective future. And so I'll be doing all all of that, and I I'm hopeful for some of that from this administration.

Do you think 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 1 is,

like, you have a good idea.

The time's now. Go do it. Yeah. Capital markets, harder? Fine.

Actually, if you can get capital, you get competitive differentiation from 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 and the positives in terms of what you're doing. Now I think Trump will be broadly, very good for entrepreneurship because I think he's gonna reduce a lot of regulation. Some of that regulation will have very negative consequences on the society, which, you know, as a society person, I'll be concerned about, like climate. Like, you know, you get the new EPA person coming in, Environmental Protection Agency.

You ask him what the job is, and he says, we need to drill more oil wells. Right? You know, like, that's not the EPA. That might be the commerce secretary or something. Oh, the energy secretary that's left the EPA.

So there will be a reduction of regulation because we do have climate change. We're living in it, and it's gonna get worse. So those will be places where there'll be real damage from the wrecking ball. But for entrepreneurs, building new businesses, like, for example, I've invested in a number of fusion and fission businesses because nuclear, because that's the clean energy that we're gonna need to, you know, just to bring more pea more of the billions of people into the middle class and and to and to try to remove carbon from the environment and so forth. So and I've known the regulatory stuff is is ferociously bad for that.

Well, actually, in fact, I have hoped that that they are gonna they're gonna reset the that thing. And so all of a sudden, that entrepreneurship turns out to be in retrospect wise. Mhmm. But I think they're gonna reduce regulation across the board for all entrepreneurs.

Mhmm.

Right? So I think on like, that's helpful on entrepreneurship. Now they're gonna be probably much more close at the border, and immigration is an important part of entrepreneurship. You wanna you wanna be able to get the best talent from anywhere in the world. It's 1 of the advantages that's helped built the US.

That, I think, is gonna be more uneven. Anyway so it's, like, goods goods and bads.

1 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 0 experience ever doing the thing they were doing before?

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

So, David Elon, obviously, super smart, very accomplished.

You work with both at PayPal. Right?

Yes. Yeah. Right. And now David knows crypto very well. So he's the AI and crypto czar and the PCAST person.

He knows crypto very well. He hasn't yet done anything in AI. Like, he hasn't been mentioned as an investor or a like, when I talk to all the AI entrepreneurs, you know, as a desired person for them to work with and so and so. You know, he's very smart, so I presume he knows something. But, you know, AI, I think yet TBD.

Mhmm. What he knows and what he tweets about is anti woke AI is the most important thing. You're like, that is not that is not even even on the top 100 of the issues around how to, you know, promote and build and navigate AI. But he's very good at crypto. He's done a bunch of good stuff there.

So that'll be and Elon obviously understands, AI quite well.

On this point of, speech as well, obviously, there's quite a big shift in speech that's happened in the last, I'd say, 2 years. Really look from Elon buying Twitters where I I saw a drastic shift in globally Yes. In what we think is okay and not okay. What's your thoughts on the the change in speech speech? Good, bad, positive, negative?

So I, you know, gave a couple days ago here in London the Sir Isaiah Berlin speech. And 1 of the lines that I used in the speech was, the there's competing freedoms. You could say, there's the freedom of speech to say whatever I wanna say, and then there's a freedom to try to offer something in civil discourse where I'm not gonna get harassed Mhmm. By a whole bunch of antagonists. Right?

And, obviously, they're both good virtues, and what you want is the right blend right from

them. I think that

a lot of folks, like, for example, what's happening on, you know, Twitter and and x, right, is, 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. Oh, okay. I was tweeting about this great entrepreneurship thing. Right?

And that's the kind of theme 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 gonna be as good as you think, and this is why. What's the difference

in the in the design of the platform that results in 2 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 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. Right?

Just uncivil. Like, you're you're you're cautioned. Right? It's removed, and you're saying, hey. By the way, that's not for for the platform.

And if you keep doing that, we'll remove your ability to post. Right.

So on the Twitter example, what Elon said is that if it's legal, then it's fine. Yeah. 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 1 of the things I think that online platforms give us the difference between freedom of speech and freedom of reach. Like, I think it's okay for people to say such thing as vaccines are evil plots to put chips in people, and they give us autism. It's 100% wrong. Right?

And every credible medical authority goes, vaccines are good. And so you go, okay. A 1000 people get vaccinated or call it, you know, a 100000 people get vaccinated, and 50 of them have adverse conditions to the vaccine. Right? That happens out of a 100000.

Right? But a 1000 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? Mhmm. Because, by the way, you are 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 say all that, and you see all that rampant on Twitter, rampant, you know, in talk radio and, you know, and all the other sort of 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 wanna I wanna interrogate a little bit. With the 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 lab leak. If if if I had said that on this podcast a couple of years ago, I would have been kicked off YouTube.

Uh-huh. Yes.

And so having a forum where you can even entertain ideas that are contrarian Yes. I also think is important. Yes. 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, I was on the support people being able to say lab leak Yeah. Category. Because, by the way, I do think freedom of speech is a good thing.

And part of the reason I have freedom of speech is sometimes you have a contrarian idea that should have freedom of reach. Yeah. But there should be and, look, how do we make decisions as a society of what expertise like, how what truth is 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. Right? Right? Now that doesn't mean that even while 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 gonna put a little box around it that says, oh, and by the way, experts disagree. Here's where you can go get the facts. Mhmm. So you can say it.

Right? Mhmm. But we'll also put in in selective cases expert opinion. Mhmm. 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 scientific true true. It's you must say something that's civil.

I also think people shouldn't be deplatformed or canceled because of their speech even if you disagree with it, providing it's in the constraint like, constraints of the law. I sat with a Oh, 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 gonna say astrologist. I don't even know if that's the right word. It's not astrology, was it? It was it was proseptologist. And he told me the story of Galileo discovering that the world was round and Galileo basically being threatened by everybody Mhmm.

Because it threatened the, I think, the Catholic institution at the time. And then Well,

because the preach the preaching of the church was a was odd.

Yeah. And so that's a cautionary tale, although it's a long time ago, in there are always gonna be strong forces that are heavily incentivized around some kind of ideology. Yes. And I mean, that does happen today. Yes.

A 100%. And and these forces are powerful forces. So allowing dissent, even if it's coming from someone who is not credible

Yes. A 100%. I'm I'm strongly in defense of that. Yeah. Right?

I just think that and, look, 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 gonna support politically. Mhmm. Right?

What I'm gonna do philanthropically. I strongly prefer that those credo those those criticisms be backed with, some knowledge and intelligence and some argue good argument point of view. And I really want it to be a civil discourse.

It's interesting because the human brain, when we think about it from an evolutionary standpoint, wasn't designed to deal with a thousand people tweeting at you that you're you're an asshole. 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 you have to deal with that in a way that's just our we weren't designed to. Yeah. And I struggle with it.

I struggle with when I first came into the public spotlight, when I started doing Dragon's Den, the the shark tank in in US, opening my phone and being exposed to just a barrage of, like, noise on the brain. Yes. Now whose responsibility is that? Is it my responsibility to, like, delete the app, or is it the platform's responsibility to moderate people expressing their innate human jealous, whatever it is. You know?

So so the classic thing that humans make in reasoning is they go a or b.

Right. Okay.

And your answer is both.

Okay.

Right? So there's responsibility on both sides. Like, you say, oh, no. It's the responsibility of the individuals. Like, well, like, are you kind of saying I have 0 responsibility?

There's 0 I can do to be possibly contributory here?

Mhmm.

Of course, you can. Mhmm. 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? You know? So it's totally doable to say violence has no place on this platform or threats of violence. Now violence is illegal.

Threats of violence is not.

Right? 1 of the theories I had many years ago, and I I don't actually think this theory was based on anything other than I read it, and it sounded good, so I used to say it, was that over the next 10 years, and I used to say this about 6, 7 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 tax, 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, 2 decades?

I'm always open as an investor to interesting ideas. Yeah. Right? And 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 gonna do a business network. It's only gonna be social networks.

Mhmm. Right? It was only gonna be at the time, it was, like, Friendster, then it was Myspace, then it was Facebook. It's like, look, there's only gonna be that. There's never gonna be those.

And then people say, well, there's only gonna ever be 1 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's there is multiple ones. And I think there will be more. So I think they're gonna have more social networks, and they're they're gonna fit in to different people's lives.

They're gonna 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 I then part of that invention, like, 1 of the things I tend to think people say, well, what ideas are you looking at as an investor? And I'm like, look. I'm looking for that great idea that I haven't thought of that someone out there amongst the millions of entrepreneurs has got that great thing and can possibly make it work.

That's what I'm looking for. So when I look to future of social networks now to to give a little bit more of a specific answer, like, I tend to think social networks need to both have individuals as customers and societies as customers. So you need to think about, like, that balance of you need to think about both in how you're designing them. Right? So it's and that doesn't mean no freedom of speech and, you know, autocratic and because I actually think, more or less, you should allow people to post whatever they want as long as it's civil.

Right? And if you wanna choose to have an anonymous social arc, that's fine. Like, there's the definite rule for especially when you get to places where the government is oppressive. You know, go to, you know, in Iran or or or Russia or something else. It's like, well, anonymity is important for saving your life.

Mhmm. Right? But on the other hand, you should also be thinking about, like, okay. What does this mean as a society? And part of what we want in media networks is we wanna be collectively learning.

So if I'm posting that, you know, vaccines are an evil plot for corporations to try to kill our children, You're like, well, you're trying to persuade people to do something that's bad for them and bad for society, so we should respond in some way. We may still allow you to post, but we may put a little box around it saying, you know, here's what experts you know, here's what all of the doctors at all the elite hospitals, you know, survey says 99.999% of them. You know, there's only 1 out of all the doctors at elite hospitals who don't think that these vaccines are a good idea. Mhmm.

And do you think social networks have been a net positive for society?

I think broadly. Look. It doesn't mean that they're that that they don't have some challenges.

Mhmm.

Like, people criticize Facebook, for example. But actually, in fact, a 1000000000 people get on every day. They share their experiences, pictures, lives with loved ones, friends, etcetera. 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 untrubs on it? I think it's Twitter. Right? But, you know, that doesn't mean it can also be improved and fixed over time.

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That's linkedin.com/doac24. Terms and conditions apply. There's so many different takes that I've heard on AI. I've spoken to Mustafa Solomon. I've spoken to lots of different I know you know Mustafa because you invested in his company.

Right?

We cofounded Inflection.

Ah, okay. So you cofounded Inflection, which then sold to Microsoft?

Well, it's it did a commercial deal with them. It's still going as a company.

Oh, okay. Alright. Because Mustafa moved over.

Yeah. He moved over because he wanted to do consumer agent, and Inflection is doing b to b, 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 start up, 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 cowritten with AI. Right? Yeah. To show as well as tell that AI is not just artificial intelligence, it's amplification intelligence.

It gives us superpowers. Right? As part of that, I'm publishing a book in January called Super Agency, which is our human agency, even with this agentic technology, can and will be magnified. We will get these superpowers. And superagency is the time where, when a lot of people get access 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 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 increase my agency. So, for example, you're a doctor who now has access to AI, your ability to help tend to lots of people's hells now just get amplified. And it's the same thing like when a car was created. A doctor could now do have a broader range of places they could visit to go help. That part of his cars have that super 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.

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 gonna destroy society. It's gonna destroy human learning and knowledge. You know, it's gonna disable the current people who are the who are the the custodians of knowledge, which are mostly priests, you know, in society from from from being able to control the flow of information.

We're gonna have all this misinformation, etcetera, etcetera. Now, by the way, you don't have a scientific revolution without the printing press. Right? So, now so there's always this fear. But and you say, is the fear completely unwarranted?

Well, look. Human societies are bad at new general purpose technologies. Right? So, with the printing press, we had it 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's gonna have pain. There's gonna be challenges and reordering and some of the disruption because of it. No question. What I'm hoping and part of the reason I write these books is say, look.

Let's manage this transition better than we've managed the previous transitions. Right? Let's I have 100% confidence that the other side, this will be enormously amazing super agency. What I wanted to do is manage the transition as best we can. Now people say, well, shouldn't you manage this 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, etcetera. And we don't set the clock. Like, there's no 1 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 the the the drumbeat for the globe for centuries?

The answer is Europe embraced the industrial revolution robustly and early. Right? The, the you know, it's part of what, you know, made, the British Empire. Right? And so that clock is set by different human beings all running at it.

And, by the way, they have different theories of the good. They have different theories of how technology should be in society. They have different theories of what the risks are, technologies. Like, you know, when these people publish this pause letter, that was like, that's a mistake. Like, other people aren't gonna 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 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 its simple terms, the the way that I've I've been thinking about it, and this is not a perfect analogy or whatever, but it's just a simple way to think about it, is if there was 1 Steven Bartlett here that has an IQ of a 100 and there was another 1 sat next to me that had the IQ of a1000, what would this Steve do, and what would that Steve do?

That's a good question.

Is that an apt analogy? Is that somewhat

Well

an interesting

this is part of the thing is we, human beings, are very bad at imagining future technology. Mhmm. So I can tell you stories about where we have created AIs with IQ of a 1000. I can tell you stories where we've created AIs with IQs of, 200, of a 150. And I can also tell you stories of AIs where we created that are kind of equivalent, because today, we have this, is it forms 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 human beings and say, explain to me mixture of experts creation of AI within AI. What is that? It's a it's a technique by which modern AIs are created that have, different kind of expertise roles in the like, ChatGPT is created this way that create their output.

It's a it's a particular technical definition for the way of creating a 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. 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 a100. Right? Then I say, okay. Compare those 2 to modern oceanography.

Right? Okay. Now we're at 0 human beings. There's no human beings who can do this, but I can go to gbd 4, and I can run this. Gbd 4, because it's ingested a mill a trillion words of knowledge, can write the comparisons between these 3 things.

Because it knows all 3.

Because it knows all 3. That's a superpower that no human being has. We have AI superpower today. Right? But, of course, no one's alarmed about that.

Because, like, oh, that's a great amplification intelligence. That really helps me. I think there's a very good chance that what happens is is that what we're creating with all of every current echo AI technique that's under development is these amazing savants that are these great copilots. Right? And that's what we're creating.

Not Terminator robots, not superintelligences. 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, but the I think the likelihood is that we're gonna be having these kind of copilots that give us these informational GPSs, these cognitive superpowers that make us as human beings a lot better.

That act is gonna

Yes. That too. Yes. That's the bigger worry. So you say, 1 worry is transition, and another worry is whenever you're you're creating this new technology, you wanna say, I wanna empower all these people who are building better lives for themselves in society, and I'd wanna not empower criminals, terrorists, rogue states.

And, also, you think I also need weapons that are sufficiently, advanced attacking my my enemies, and everybody globally is thinking that? Yes. Well, China might be thinking about the the west, and Yes. The west are thinking about China. Russia are thinking about this person this person.

The Middle East are probably thinking about a couple of people. Yes. So with with all developing weapons or defense systems, they're gonna probably make those robots you talked about, the Terminator robot that can go to the battlefield. Yes. And that's super smart.

They're gonna 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 wanna 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

new new. But by the way, each technology, the printing press was different when it was created. Electricity was different when it was created. Cars were different when they were created.

Is this the most profound? Well, it's compact.

It's sir it might be. Right? That's that's that's a possibility. 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's agentic technology, which means it it's creating agents that can operate on their own. Right? We already have that, by the way. Like, the agent you can be running an agent with a connection to the Internet on your computer, and then he can go buy stuff for you.

But you can do that today. It's doable. You have agent it's just a question of what the shape is. Right? So it's agentic.

It's cognitive. Like like, it's very strange that we have a technology now that we can talk to in various ways. And so you have people mistaken going, oh, it must be conscious because they asked if 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.

It does by the way, there are conscious things that can't there's there's mute people. And the fact that they can't tell you 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 in-depth of reason of neuroscience and other kinds of things about why that is. It's not a 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 we need to figure out, because it won't be that it has gray matter. It'll be something else. Or, you know, maybe even we'll figure this out. So so that's new. The cognitive superpowers are new.

The fact that the speed of deployment is gonna be unusual, because now we have the mobile phone Internet. So I create a new agent, and tomorrow, a 1000000000 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. Mhmm.

Right? For the average person out there, that's I don't know. They might be working in a hospital or might be a lawyer or or a doctor, whatever, just someone with a a job that's heard this term AI, and they're saying chat GPT. Is there anything that they should be doing on an individual level to make sure that they can capitalize on the opportunity that AI presents?

The basic answer is absolutely yes. And that's part of the reason why, like like, I do my podcast, possible. I do super agency. I do impromptu. Because the strong advice I gave 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 on, start using it. And by the way, you'll find that, some of the things still not useful for at all. Like, when I sat down to ask GBD 4, 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, you know, market research test that.

And it's like, no. It's not the way like, go find a great entrepreneur with a great idea. Right? Mhmm. You know?

And and it's best when the idea is something you haven't thought of and few other people have thought of too, right, is a way of doing 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. He's like, no. No.

Because I kept experimenting with it. And I said, okay. I fit in a, 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.

I was like, yeah. Yeah. 1, that was I was absolutely planning on doing that. 2, I was absolute 3, yeah. I could see why you'd think that I was doing it.

That's not important. Oh, 4, I would have gotten to it would have would have gotten to it, like, 4 days down the road of doing the work. Mhmm. 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 Mallick's line, which is the worst AI you're ever gonna use in your life is the AI you're using today. So 1 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 1 since you're talking about everyday people, I'll give 1 kind of tip that I give everybody at the beginning.

It's part of the reason I wrote impromptu, etcetera, 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 1. 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 it will immediately give you an, you know, a 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 understanding, you know, what are the strengths and weaknesses. But, by the way, you can also say, take my side. Give me another argument for the thing I'm arguing for.

Like, make that argument. But that's just the beginning. You can also say like, for example, if I go, okay. I'm making this argument for, 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, etcetera. 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 you can get to like, it's literally it's only your own creativity and your own inspiration of who what role should I be talking to? And once you start realizing that, you can start using AI very powerfully for whatever you're trying to do.

Should entrepreneurs be thinking about building companies in the field of AI at the moment? You know, as a entrepreneur who's, like, roughly 30 years old, I look back and go, gosh, I wish I was of entrepreneurial age when the dotcom boom came around because everyone became billionaires. And Yeah. And is is that is this that moment in time? Yes.

So the

short answer is yes. Okay. So what so I'm an entrepreneur. I'm I'm 30 odd years old. I've got disposable income.

I'm financially free.

Mhmm.

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

Yes. Why? So so 1 of the things with Silicon Valley so Silicon Valley has built itself up of multiple the reason it's called Silicon Valley is because it started with silicon. Right? It's now Software Valley.

Silicon Valley almost never invests in silicon anymore.

Silicon being the chips.

Yes. Being the chips. Yes. Yeah. So now, really, it's much more software value.

It's like we invest 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 of dollar every year into new software companies. Mhmm. Right? So we went from silicon through, you know, networking equipment like Cisco, through, like, just stacks of different things getting to where we are now. AI is the new 1.

By the way, we did the thing with Internet. We did it with mobile phones. We did it with web 2. Now it's AI. Right?

And so, you know, the principal thing is when you get this new, like, new general, purpose technology, it opens up massive amounts of entrepreneurial space because, 1 is all the new things that can be built that were never possible before. Airbnb couldn't be done before the Internet. There's just no way. Right? So it opens up these things that weren't possible before.

And so, like, the Internet's a good proxy to the to the wave we have now with AI. Then it also, by the way, makes a massive transformative force on all existing businesses. So you say, well, I had a business of of selling, you know, kind of, of ecommerce and doing, you know, mail order catalogs. Well, now there's ecommerce. Right?

So it it it transforms all of these businesses. And And so, by the way, for example, the Internet is part of what makes the cloud revolution. So now it's like well, actually, in fact, it's not software on your desktop. It's not software on your your phone. It's in the cloud.

And, of course, it bounces back and forth a little bit, then you have, well, no. Actually, in fact, you've got this really great app on your phone and so on. But these kinds of things AI is the next 1 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 start up idea there.

Mhmm.

So so yes. Now should you go try to build your own frontier model, which is a $10,000,000,000 computer? It's a hard thing that's a hard amount of capital for startups. I don't know. Try to figure out, like, the degree to use frontier models from, you know, OpenAI or Microsoft or Google or, you know, others as ways of doing this.

But you still may build your own model. Right? That a lots of a lots of start up 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, like, I have a whole set of theories about what kinds of things will be really big, and some of my theories will be right. And I've also discovered some other people who have amazing theories.

That's 1 of the things I really think I and we at Greylock love to invest in.

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

Start using it. Start building it. If you want to if you can, if you're technical, download an open source model, Llama, Mistral, other, start playing with it.

What if you're not technical?

Well, then well, generally speaking, like, you can't do a technology it's very hard to do a technology startup without a technology cofounder. So then go find a technology cofounder.

So for someone like me who's built my my career in building teams, marketing, social media, content, media, those kinds of things, who is really interested in AI, should I go and do you think I should go learn AI now and start trying to be a technical No. Person? Or Just slow. Okay. Yeah.

Of course.

Sorry. Just slow. No. No. Speed matters.

Speed matters and start up. But by the way, like, gen because we tend to so much lionize what is usually the man versus the person, there's most of these people are men, the individual. Startups succeed because they're initial team. That's part of the hiring point we were talking about earlier. And so, generally speaking, you asked me would I rather invest in an individual, founder or 2 to 3 cofounders?

I'd rather invest in 2 to 3 cofounders. Right? So going and finding a cofounder is a great thing. Because, by the way, your your throw weight, your capability weight is so much better when you do that. And so, you know, Mark Zuckerberg had Dustin Muskovitz, Adam DeAngelo.

Right? You know, Chris Hughes. That's a really important part of how things get created.

You invested in OpenAI almost a decade ago

Yes.

Before everybody was talking about it. What did you see in that company?

So Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya, Sush Gheffer, 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. Like, apply scale to this. We are gonna bet the entire company everything we're doing on scale on it, and we're gonna be very focused on doing it. That's that's great.

But People had said the word AI for a long time, and it never manifested in it. And I

passed on a lot of AI investments. But the thing that people need to understand about AI is it's a transformation to scale computing learning systems. So as opposed to we program it, like we program the AI, we program a scale computing learning system, so it learns. Mhmm. Right?

And that only becomes available once you have scale compute. So you need the Internet. You need the cloud, you need massive data centers, and you need access to massive amounts of data, which you get from the Internet and other things, and then you need a scale team to build it.

Mhmm. Now 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, 7 days a week, going to every party that I can possibly go of and shaking people's hand and giving them my 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 the project that I'm creating? And how do I meet those people?

There's so many obvious things that people talk about when they're describing what makes 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 are really particularly good competitive advantages. I'm not saying that 1 should be rude, but, like, an emphasis, like, if an entrepreneur is like, I'm reading my etiquette manual. It's like, don't spend your time like, sure. Be nice. Be I think building a network.

Like, entrepreneurship is a team sport. It is not an individual sport. It's a team sport, so you need to be building your team.

Right? 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 it it requires high talent people around you doing it. Now, for example, you can get enough initial success going in capital that even though you're bad with your team, people will come on board because they'll go, oh, I believe this is gonna go somewhere, and I can make a bunch of money doing it.

I'll come do it. And so you like, for example, a classic trope within Silicon Valley, which is broadly correct, and that's part of the reason you have the tropes is I want missionary, not mercenary cultures. Right? Because the missionaries, I believe we're gonna change the world. We're gonna 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 culture. No. No. No.

There's mercenary cultures that have gotten big too. I'm not How do you define mercenary

in this context? All I

care about is making money. Like, all it like, the only thing that matters is I'm selling something. I'm gonna make money. That's all that matters.

Do you sometimes think the mission's bullshit, though? Just like bullshit to get people to There are something.

There are bullshit missions that that are like the, I'm just telling a story. I don't really care. Right? I'm telling a story that's incorrect. Right?

There are like like like, the Silicon Valley TV show, on HBO kinda, you know, you know, satired this in a particular way. It was like, I am creating a reverse double encryption system to change the world. Yeah. Right? You know, that kinda 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 gonna 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 change in the world. So you have to say, like, I'm LinkedIn. This is how I'm gonna change the world.

I'm OpenAI. This is how I'm gonna change the world. I'm Airbnb. This is how I'm gonna change the world.

Because humans are emotional Yes. 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'd have a good plan for how you might succeed in doing that.

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

Yes. Exactly. And you

know it's bullshit. It's it's a public company. They got shareholders who wanna return. Yes. But even they, I guess, have to do it.

Yeah. 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 1?

Insanely great ambition. Right? I'm I'm shooting for the moon. And, you know, sometimes literally, but most often, like like, if I'm successful, I will transform the industry. Right here.

An awareness of, like, a good plan for how you might do that. Right? An awareness that 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, etcetera. Like, for example, 1 of the ways that I interview executives is, I say, who are the 3 to 5? And the 5, I love it, but minimum 3 world class people who've worked for you before.

And I'm gonna call them and ask them what it's like working for you. Right? Because and by the way, if I if it really matters, I will then reference check those 3 people on are they actually world class. Mhmm. Right?

Because only hire people who are gonna hire world class people who who who play it. Now, similarly, like, who are the world class people who think you're world class as an entrepreneur? And, like, this is 1 of the things that actually on 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. Yeah.

Exactly. 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, that person's hard driving. They're difficult. That could be a very strong positive.

I've invested a number of entrepreneurs that way.

What about resilience? Well, resilience also

very important. Almost every start up 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. We're like, when when I started SocialNet, 1 of my connections from Apple dropped me who had started doing startups 2 years before, dropped me a, a 1 line email that said, welcome to where 15 minutes is the difference between exaltation and terror. I'm gonna change the world.

Oh, shit. I'm gonna die. Right? So resilience is super important because it is a dogfight. And multiple times, PayPal, LinkedIn, Airbnb.

Oh god. We're gonna die.

This is gonna be worth 0. 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 0 risk? No.

No. No. I'm guaranteed to succeed. No 1 is. Does it 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 a 100%. That gives a good probability they'll be resilient. Like traumatize people? Well, it depends on how they respond to the trauma.

Right? What did you learn from it? Like, how did you respond to it? Like because generally speaking, you need to be able to convert negatives into positives, right, on the entrepreneurial journey. So I was like, look.

That was that was really bad, and I learned from it.

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

So part of the reason I wrote Startup Review was that the advice that universities frequently give is, you know, follow your passion. 1st, do the things that you're passionate about. Oh, you wanna go volunteer in Bhutan. Do it now is tends to be and it's terrible advice. Right?

They that that actually is the the wrong end for the advice. The right thing and it doesn't mean don't follow your passion, but the right thing is to start with, how do I get to a place where I have established myself and have, like, the ability to like, economically, the platform and move. It could be enough wealth to be, you know, 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 wanna hire me and so on. And now I'm gonna go spend a year volunteering in Bhutan because I really wanna do that. Right? So the answer is go be vigorous about the thing that matters for your entire life early.

Oh, and take the big risks, Eddy.

Yeah. Take the big risk early. Right? Now you might say, I wanna be a doctor. It's not particularly risky.

It's fine. But then go to medical school. Establish yourself as as as as a medical professional and so before you do that. So whatever thing that is the thing that you think gives you the platform for resilience in your later life, go establish that now. And, by the way, that's part of the thing of, like, wealthy.

But wealthy, by the way, could be measured in, I have a bank balance, right, or on stock equity portfolio. And wealthy can also be the, I have a great network of people who wanna work with me, who wanna hire me, who value my talents. Mhmm. Right? So this whole range, for things.

But go establish that first. And that can be take big if you if by the way, some people say, I wanna 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 gonna be an entrepreneur you wanna be an entrepreneur, then, like, for example, looks like okay.

Maybe you shouldn't start a business at 18, but maybe you should go join a start up. Right? Start learning it. Start building the network. And it's roughly build the network is the broad thing.

And, by the way, build the skills and, you know, get like, frequently doing a start up is very difficult economically. Usually, you start with no salary, etcetera. 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 kinda described it is these 5 buckets. The first 1 being knowledge, and then when knowledge is applied, it becomes a skill. And the good thing about these first 2 buckets is they're the only 2 that no 1 can ever really, empty. Yes.

That's what you put in there.

Yes.

The next 1 I posited was, me trying to remember my book, was your I'm gonna say network Yep. Then your resources, then your reputation. Now anyone can take these last 3. Like, life can happen. You can get fired.

You can lose your friends, whatever.

The

net network is hard to lose if you've really authentically built it.

Right? It can be lost, though.

It can be, but it's very hard. It's kinda like a nuclear bomb kind of thing. I mean, it's like look. You may, like, 1 particular person in you may have a real difference of opinion. Mhmm.

You know, you may move, and then Get fired. 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.

Mhmm. So am I right in thinking that the knowledge and skills part is really the critical thing to, prioritize when you're

Yeah. Well, saw this is part of what we did in Sarvue. 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 size salary is not the criteria you should be looking. 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 gonna get the job with a 300% higher salary. It's the soft assets that are likely to get to the 300% economic outcome.

So short term versus long term? Yes. So soft assets are longevity. Yes. And the and the hard assets, I guess, are short term.

Yes. Immediate.

Is there a different game you play when you hit your thirties, do you think?

Well, you have to evolve it. So for example, you can when you're in your twenties, you can say, well, I'm gonna I'm gonna take more risk. Like, I can always take the the the jobs that have 0 salary or lower salary because I'm gonna live in the house with 5 of my friends. You know? We're gonna 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 forth. So so it changes as you go through.

And then you have kids? Yes. Did you have kids? No. No.

Because I'm I'm in that region now where I'm thinking about having kids, and I'm just I'm wondering how dis disruptive it's gonna be. It's another start up. Like, it's fine. You can do start ups and have it,

but it's a complete start up.

Which do you think lowers your chance of being successful at a start up? Because doing 2 start ups is more difficult than doing 1.

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 to the people around you. It it's like again, I sorry. I keep referring to start up with you, but it was my first book as advice to young people. Right? It's the I and the we.

Like like like, do things for yourself, do things for the for for me, do things for we. Right? And I I learn from people. I get delight from people. 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 1000000000 people have signed up for it. Like like, there is there is there is, like, that's part of what I think is essential in the in the meaning of life, and for me, especially.

How did you have happiness wrong when you were younger?

If if Oh. In any way. 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 8,000,000,000 people. Right? Nobody is the best at everything. Right? Some people delude themselves that they are, but but nobody is.

You could be the best at something. And by the way, being the best at something, that's a good thing. But by the way, to really be obsessive about the being the the absolute best at that thing, well, maybe you're actually, being you're you're less investing in other things. It's a little bit like your earlier question about managing. Like, you say you'll be I I I'm an oracle, and I'll tell you you'll be 4 times as economically successful if you're a shit to the people you work with.

Nah. No. Not okay for me.

And love. How does love come into all of this? You're you're in you have a long term life partner?

Yes. Yeah.

In Seattle. What role has that played in in your happiness and your professional success?

For me, all the people around me are people I learn from, and that includes Michelle. Like, I learn all kinds of things from Michelle. Michelle 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. She like like, I missed your scale. She's anti scale.

Right? She she she thinks she's fine with my doing the scale things, but, like, she wants to go connect with local people in the community. Right? Like, she's like, look. I'm volunteering at the senior center.

Will you come volunteer with me? No. No. I don't do that. I'm happy to give money to the senior center, but that's not what I do.

But that that's that's her life, and I learned from that. Because, by the way, life is both. Life is both here and here. So it's it's 1 of the balance of different people. She she is intensely going in.

She's taking this kind of, call it, Quaker Buddhist approach to creating art. Right? And and that's just amazing. Like, I love being on that journey with her. Right?

And that's her journey. Right? But I learned from it. And those are the kinds of things that are that are, you know, part of what I think the meaning of life is is how we learn from each other.

Well, then if 2 entrepreneurs come to you and they pitch the exact same thing, but 1 of them is in a long term marriage, what is the difference between those 2 entrepreneurs in terms of how they'll show up in business in your view?

I've never been asked that question. Depends. I do think, like, 1 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 that's

Yes. So, like, if a person is good to the people around them, then that's a person I I'm more likely to much more much, much more likely to wanna go through. Because, like, a startup is, like, 10 years. Like, I have passed on investments that I've literally referred to, and I won't name them because it's uncivil. But I've literally passed on investments, and 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 gonna 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, and I've seen pretty much all of them over the years. 1 of the questions I had as an investor myself is my early stage companies that aren't in cons the consumer Internet space, they're selling I don't know. They might be selling a a drink in a supermarket or something.

Should should they all be pursued pursuing this idea of blitzscaling where you go lightning fast to building a massive 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? Mhmm.

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. Mhmm.

Right? So, like, a classic example is, like, you know, Uber would interview somebody, offer them a job, and then say, who are the 3 best people at your company that that that you worked with? And send job offers to those 3 people without even interviewing them. Right? Because that's blitzscaling.

Right? That's I'm going super, super fast. And, and that that was a blitzscaling technique I learned from Uber. I was like, oh, yep. Put that 1 in the tool chest for when you need to do that.

Mhmm. Right? Because outpacing the competition when you're in Glengarry Glen Ross markets, which is 1st prize Cadillac, 2nd prize steak knives, 3rd prize you're fired. It's the game. Right?

And it's 1 of the things, like, when, you know, you and I were chatting a little bit before we started the podcast. Like, 1 of the places that things that places like, you know, London and the UK and Europe need to learn is when the competition's 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 gonna be so transformative, when you think about a country like the UK, where, you know, 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 gonna accrue because of this AI opportunity?

So I think there's 2 things. 1 is you need to enable some of your company's ability to blitzscale as much as you can. Right? Okay. So because if if if a company if company 1 is not blitzscaling and is competing against company 2 that is blitzscaling, company 1's gonna lose.

I don't think we've got any AI companies that are blitzscaling in here.

Company 1 is going to lose. Right? Company 2 might lose too. Right? But company 1 is guaranteed to lose, and company 2 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 the reason I wrote the book. It's part of the reason I give talks. It's part of the reason I help, Sherry Coutu stand up the scale the the scaling institute here in London, you know, etcetera, etcetera.

Now say, we can't. We're not gonna be able to. Well, then choose areas where the competitors are not blitzscaling.

I've got a example I wanna give you. I invest in a matcher company. They make matcher like a, you know, green tea. And they've they've grown very, very quickly. They're called Perfect Ted, hashtag ad.

I'm an investor, etcetera. 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, 0 to they'll probably do maybe £30,000,000 next year, and they've done it in a cup cup could be measured in months, really. And I wondered I was like, Matcha's 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 2 things. 1, most centrally, competition. Do they need to be outpacing their competition?

I could argue yes.

Yeah. But if yes, then and especially if their competitors are blitzscaling, then absolutely yes. If the competitors are not blitzscaling, it's global 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, you're Uber. You're you're launching in 20 cities at the same time. It's woah. You know, etcetera. Because that does add risks.

Right? But you're saying those risks that it adds are less of a risk than not Mhmm. Split scaling. That's kind of the trade off. So competition is a central reason for doing it.

And, by the way, most of the company most of the times where you can raise capital but scaling is because if you if it's a Glengarry 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, etcetera, etcetera, because they'll go, we agree that you're gonna get a great market position if you blitzscale. And, by the way, part of the problem is investors are not always right. But if some investors are willing to do it, then and are they gonna do it in your competitors? Then you absolutely have to do it if your competitors are gonna do it. So competition is the first thing.

The second thing is, do you need to get to critical mass scale? So, like, you're a payments industry. And this is 1 of the things I learned at PayPal, which is, basically, payments businesses are dead unless they have at least a1000000000 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 10,000,000,000, whatever. But it's like, if you don't get to that scale, you're dead. You're irrelevant. Right?

So getting that scale and getting through the highly unprofitable getting the scale as fast as possible really matters. And so that's 1 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 and so that would be I don't think that's probably the the matcha company. Right?

That that's probably like, doesn't need so but those are the the lessons you look at. But it's not blitzscaling for its own sake. That's 1 of the mistakes that people make when they go blitzscaling. Oh, we're doing it to blitzscaling. No.

No. No. You blitzscale as a set of strategic techniques in response to a market and in response to competition. Mhmm.

And in

the case of Matcha, there is a role of brand being the moat

a little bit? Yes. And so that may be irrelevant. That may be the relevant thing of why it's a Glengarry in the kit. I haven't looked at the market at all.

But a

Glengarry, Caroline Ross market, a first prize Cadillac, second prize steak knives, maybe that's because of brand establishment, in which case you have to be number 1.

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. Like, you give them access to capital. Do you think 1 of my fears is that AI is such a big opportunity. It's gonna revolutionize everything, and it's basically gonna be owned by America and China. That's 1 of my fears.

It's like fears as someone that lives in the UK that we're gonna your economy is gonna in the US is gonna have such a huge upswing in productivity. So good news for

you is I happen to know that 10 Downing Street is paying attention to this issue because I had meetings with them this week Mhmm. On that. There's things that they will be announcing, which I can't preannounce. Okay. Right?

But they know this is important, and they're working on it.

Okay.

And they're consulting, you know, people.

Good. Yeah. Yeah. 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 2. The first is and they're related. The first is look. Just because you don't have a 100% chance of succeeding, doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it. Right?

So, like, when I said earlier when we were talking about, like, look. When I started LinkedIn, I thought we had at most 20, 25 percent chance of being successful. That's fine. Right? So and 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 in LinkedIn, about why other people see that there is like, they think there's a 0% chance you'll succeed, and you think there's a 20, 25% chance you'll succeed, that's precisely that risk window is your opportunity.

Mhmm.

Right? So think of risk not as terrifying. Think of risk as potential opportunity. Right? That's 1.

And we've talked about threads of it, but thinking of it as opportunity. Right? Because you see something other people don't see. You see the risks, but you have an idea for why that risk is something that you may be able to win on and they won't. Right?

So with LinkedIn, that was, hey. I have an idea about how the network will grow even though it's not valuable until there's a 1000000 people in network. Right? That's where that risk becomes an opportunity. Right?

So the second 1, also around risk, is have a plan b. Have plans b. Understand that you have an idea in your risk. You're playing it. And if it's not working out, how do you pivot?

Don't think, oh, the whole thing is going all in, and I'm just gonna be roadkill if it doesn't work. No. No. That's the whole point of the reason I have this framework of ABC planning, which is in the start of view, which is by the way, start of view is advice they give entrepreneurs, shrunk to advice to individuals. Mhmm.

Right? Every single chapter applies to entrepreneurs and their companies. Mhmm. 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 go all in and off.

It doesn't work. I'm dead. Okay. That's very scary. Right?

When I do entrepreneurship, I have plans b. I have a plan z. Right? I I I have thought through not every because you can't think through everything, but maneuverability and how to measure, am I on track or not? Am I am I increasing my probability of success or not?

Am I increasing my ability to get to the moon or not? And and be doing risk management, smart risk. Take smart risks. That's the thing. Right?

How do you know when to quit? And I'm saying this in a preferred 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? Mhmm. Is your new plans, your new plans a, are much worse than your previous plans a.

Your new plan a is much worse than

your previous plans a. Your new plan

a is much worse than your previous

plans. Pivoted. Yeah. 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 you've tried something else that's also messed up. Yes. Like okay. Yeah.

And on a in a professional context, when how do you know to quit when to quit the job? Well,

it could be you have a much better plan a. Right? Like like, okay. This plan a, that's okay. And then, by the way, this is the part of the difference that I tell people between should I found a company or should I join 1?

It's like, well, 1 of the problems you have as a founder is you can't really quit. You you're you're you're with the business. Alright? It's very dishonorable to quit before, you know, the business gets to whatever its 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 it's a massive growing concern. Now once the company is 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 in the alliance I call a tour of duty, which is I am I've 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 Koehler, who, you know, now lives here in London as a, you know, partner at Benchmark, Like, I recruited him out of McKinsey into LinkedIn. 3 years in, he comes to me and says, hey. I've been offered this this opportunity at Facebook. I'm like, look, Matt, I love working with you.

You're a close friend of mine, etcetera, etcetera. You should take that job at Facebook. That is the right next step for you. Right? And because we're close and so I think you probably wouldn't have taken the job if I hadn't said, but, like, LinkedIn resembles my brain.

I want people doing their best work, their best opportunities, and Facebook gave them a great opportunity.

What's really interesting about the LinkedIn story, I've got the deck in front of me here from August 22,004.

Yes. That's our Greylock series b deck.

And what's pretty remarkable

And whether Matt Koller helped me create that deck.

Oh, did he? Yes. I mean, it's a it's a pretty good deck for a series series b, especially back then. It's very simple, I'd

have to say. Simple is good.

Very, very simple. Yes. 1 of the things that really stuck out to me is on this page here, which is the sort of opening, I guess, vision mission statement, whatever you wanna 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's about. Yes.

And usually when I see these decks, I mean, they started as, I don't know, hot or not Yes. And now it's like Facebook and Instagram.

Yes.

Whereas this is still so close to what the vision was.

Yeah. Well, it's also my 3rd 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, what is the you're gonna transform the industry. Oh, and what do you mean by key?

As in, like, if you're trying to build a long term company from the outset Yeah. What are you thinking about?

Well, you're thinking about, like, if I'm successful at landing on the beach, at expanding into the market, how is it that I'm gonna be a 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 gonna be from from before this deck, I knew that was possible. I have a probability for it. Now what 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.

But Yeah. But they're like, well, some people want to be dating people who have professional like, my dating set is I want people who have good CDs. Okay. I don't want LinkedIn to ever build that business. Fine.

If you're gonna go build that business. Mhmm. Right. No problem. Right?

I mean and, like, for example, like, 1 of the like, this was, I think, a few months after we raised money from Greylock, on this deck. 1 of the surprising uses is, like, I'd never had envisioned this use case still looking for a job. An engineer wanted to move to Denver from Silicon Valley. And so I was like, didn't know what companies to look at. So this engineer went to LinkedIn and searched for profiles like his, then looked at what companies those people worked at, then decided which companies to go look for jobs at.

It was brilliant. Like, it's a very good way of saying, hey. I'm look I'm interested in going and working here. What kinds of companies that are interesting employ people like me?

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

Well, so I cofounded Inflection.

Yeah. So I'm definitely doing the cofounding thing. Mhmm. Right?

And, the cofounding thing.

Mhmm.

Right? And, you know, I 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 Suleyman, who are the CEO that I can be the cofounder with. That's great.

Yeah. I think that's the season of life I'm in. Yeah. I don't wanna be a CEO anymore, which is unfortunate because I'm in podcast. I have a CEO when I was 1.

But I just think there's an element of self awareness, which I think has really it's and for me, the older I've gotten, the more I'm orientating everything towards being happy. Yeah. And for me, it's it's hard to be a CEO and as happy as I and free as I wanna be. So

Then then then you need to build the network and skills by which you're working with other people who are the CEOs.

That's basically what I do now. So it's the companies that I've described, the software business, the media company we have here. There's people that are designed and built and much better CEOs than me. What do you do you care about legacy?

Only because I care about impact. So I don't like, I I care that I I've actually made a big difference Mhmm. To the ongoing story of humanity. But I don't care that I mean, look. It's nice.

I, like, I certainly don't mind that people go, oh, Reid Hoffman did these amazing things.

It

feels good. Mhmm. But I care much more about the substance. Like, did I do really good things? That was I a very positive name?

Now I'm I'm I'm not indicating I have no ego. You know, the the appreciation for having done that, that feels good. Mhmm. 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.

Did you 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 we're, you know, we're godparents to a number of children. We actually there's 3 kids here in London that that we're godparents too. Right? And, you know, there's all kinds of delights in being a godparent, which is, you know, you show up and spend an evening and get to participate in in the kids' lives.

And then, you know, when it's like, oh, time to change the diaper.

And it won't. 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 gonna first write when I was an undergraduate was book on friendship. I still wanna write that book. I I've been taking notes for 30 years.

On friendship?

On friendship. Yep. What

would that book be about?

Friendship.

But specifically, what part of friendship? Why why everything.

Look. There's so few books on friendship. You go into a bookstore and you say, where is your, your section on relationships? And they every bookstore will go, oh, over here. Right?

Relationship with capital r, your 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 1.

Your assistant we spoke to your assistant ahead of this conversation today, and she said that friendship and connection is a major part of your focus at the moment.

Yes. Always. But it it always has been. Now you're doing intense things with start ups. 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. It's because you wanna be spending your time with friends, and that does add difficulties. Right? But you wanna spend your time with your friends. That's really good.

Are you

still friends with Peter Thiel?

Yes. You have a lot

of disagreements in terms of politics,

but Intense disagreements on politics.

But you still are able to be friends? Yes.

But we also met, with, you know, as undergraduates, you know, in a, like, okay. 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 gonna be leaving it for. Oh. And the question that's been left for you is a very interesting 1.

Okay.

What are the 2 things you want your life partner to know about you that they do not know or do not understand about you yet?

That's an interesting thing. It's an interesting if someone has an answer to that question, it suggests that they're not being a particularly good life partner. I think I have been and will continue to be a good life partner, so I actually don't have an answer to that question.

What's her name, Michelle? Yes. Has does she misunderstand you in any way?

I don't know if it's a misunderstanding because we put a lot of energy into understanding each other. I mean, like, for example, we've seen marriage counselors together and not because we're going we're, like, fighting about something. It's because helping having a third party help you understand the other person well is, like, actually, in fact, a very good thing. Find someone who's really good and do that.

Right? I do that with my partner.

Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's great. You should do it. You shouldn't be because we're arguing.

It should be because we are putting lots of energy into understanding each other.

I still think there's things about my partner that she doesn't understand about me Well, look. Or misunderstands about me, and I misunderstand about her.

Yeah. Of course. And by the way, I can point out things that I have learned about her. Like, for example, like, the local community is what really matters to her. Mhmm.

Right? I didn't really understand that 10 years ago. Now I understand that. Right? I'm sure she has those kinda similar things about me.

But, like, the moment it occurs to me that there's something she doesn't understand about me, it comes up at a dinner, you know, not too many weeks in the future.

Mhmm.

Because that's part of how we come to our dinners. Right? We come to our dinners is that 1 of us is, you know, I had this thought. We want to have those dinners.

To 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 gonna break up with me or he's gonna break up with me because I'm just I'm absent in my head, in person.

You try to have a really good relationship. You try to be as like, like, I think you should in friendship and in relationships, you should try to identify the things in yourself that the other person may find challenging, and you should bring them up in advance.

Mhmm.

Right? That is a very good way to build deep quality friendships and relationships. So, for example, in start ups, Michelle knew that about me. So when we had planned our wedding and then we we were doing a small, you know, thing with, you know, just basically justice of the peace and so with we planned our wedding, and it was very early days at LinkedIn. And I came back home, and I said, we really need to delay it.

Right? And we delayed it a couple weeks. Right? It was like, we really need to delay it. I'm doing this thing at LinkedIn right now.

We're gonna have it. I I don't have time for that. And Michelle didn't go, ah. She went, okay. Let's make it work.

Because I'd been clear with her about what the start up journey was like. Right? I had experience with it before. Now sometimes, like, we didn't know it before, but, like, look. I'm really committed to this, and I'm 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 lot?

I hope not.

In terms of making a plan, making a day,

not being on? We had 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 1 of the things that Michelle will go, like, you know, I think you're not being fully present. Right? Like, that's 1 of the 1 of the kind of 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 as you like, 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 fuck. Like, I'm fully present tomorrow.

Because a lot of founders would gaslight their partner there and say, you don't understand. You don't get it. I'm doing this for you. This is for us. Look.

You hate my work?

Well, if you're having that conversation, if the person doesn't look. The 2 people need to believe in each other and what they're doing. Mhmm. If the person doesn't believe in you and what you're doing, right, you have a long term problem.

Yeah. 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, cowritten with Greg Beta?

Beata.

Beata. What could possibly go right with our AI future? Yeah. An optimistic take about AI?

Yes.

Why should someone in 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.

Mhmm.

That you don't get to an optimistic future by trying to avoid failure, by trying to avoid pessimism. Anyone who says, okay. It's important for me to understand that perspective about AI, they should read super agency. We we have a book blurb from 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 preorder 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 if 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 1 of the first podcasts I ever got listening to as well. Highly recommend that. 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 1.

Thank you so much. It's been such an honor, and I you so 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. Yeah. And that comes from having such a wealth of experience, but being fundamentally well intentioned, I think. Yeah.

So thank you, Reid, for the time. I really appreciate it. It's an honor to have to meet you. Thank you. And thanks for creating LinkedIn.

I fucking love LinkedIn. I think they sponsor this podcast. So Oh, awesome. Yeah.

I I didn't even know that.

Oh, really? Yeah. They do. Yeah. Yeah.

So thank you so much, Brie. I 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 2 updated conversation cards are out right now at the conversation cards dot 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.

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