Few figures have shaped the way we think about business over the past 20 years more than Reid Hoffman. The co-founder of LinkedIn and former PayPal executive is also a wildly successful venture capitalist, author and podcaster, but he didn’t get to his place as a Silicon Valley giant without making plenty of crucial decisions. On this episode Hoffman discusses lessons learned from decades spent as a hands-on operator and investor, including what he knows about scaling that others miss, the three principles of decision making, how to constantly evolve your learning pattern, and why the best leaders adapt to the crisis at hand.
Listen and Learn: YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Transcript
Hoffman is perhaps best known for co-founding the professional networking site LinkedIn, which he started in 2003 and later sold for a reported $26.2 billion to Microsoft in 2016. Prior to founding LinkedIn, Hoffman was one of the first employees at PayPal, where he served as an executive vice president. He is also a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners, an investor in Airbnb, the author of a series of successful business books including Masters of Scale, and the host of the podcast of the same name.
Some highlights from our conversation:
“One of the difficult things about making decisions is it reduces opportunity in the short term, but that’s the only thing that really creates great opportunity in the long term.”
“Part of what you want to do is you want to give people as much of an opportunity as you can to be their better selves, to be to where they realize that rising above a simple narcissism or a simple very narrow self-interest and making decisions that are better for the group, because ultimately in many cases, this also helps them become better people, that helps them become better leaders.”
“Understanding where alpha tendencies are and how they will cause someone to behave and not behave is really important. … If you put someone who doesn’t have really strong alpha tendencies in charge of a project, that person, generally speaking, won’t drive the project as hard. That might be a good thing. But generally speaking, for example, the only people who become CEOs have very strong alpha tendencies. The only people who run for president have very strong alpha tendencies, et cetera, because there’s so much difficulty and functioning in those jobs.”
“Sometimes a little bit of stress can help you amplify up to higher thing, but not a lot usually. Usually, you have to make sure it’s tuned at a good level for your long-term health.”
Timestamps:
00:00 – Intro
00:33 – On scaling businesses
03:13 – Common mistakes CEOs make
05:35 – On scaling yourself
08:55 – On writing vs. using PowerPoint
11:55 – “Rooting for better angels”
17:57 – Understanding people’s Alpha Tendencies
21:30 – On making board meetings successful
27:33 – On leading through a crisis
34:09 – 3 Principles for Decision Making
42:30 – On opportunity costs
51:18 – Outro
