Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 391: The Benefits of Thinking Like an Entrepreneur | Reid Hoffman

Episode Date: October 27, 2021

The advice to “think like an entrepreneur” can, from a certain angle, come off as the kind of rote, tech-bro guidance you’d get from a millennial lifehacker. But Reid Hoffman makes a good case that all of us, whether entrepreneurs or not, can benefit from having what he calls an “entrepreneurial mindset.” He says this mindset is a trainable skill, and he believes that capitalism and compassion (two words you don’t often hear together) are compatible. Reid Hoffman is the co-founder of LinkedIn, a partner at Greylock, the venture capital company, and the host of Masters of Scale podcast, which is all about how uber-successful people/companies got where they are. And now he has a new book, also called Masters of Scale.This episode explores: how to train for an entrepreneurial mindset; how to live a life that minimizes the odds of burnout; how to network without it feeling icky; the value of curiosity; the importance of “failing fast”; how to deliver feedback in a stressful environment; and how he thinks we can make capitalism more compassionate and equitable.Be sure to listen to our new podcast, Twenty Percent Happier, available exclusively in the Ten Percent Happier app. Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/reid-hoffman-391See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey gang, the advice to think like an entrepreneur can possibly from a certain angle come off as the kind of rote tech bro guidance that you'd get from millennial life hackers. But my guess today makes a very good case that all of us, whether we're entrepreneurs or not, can benefit from having what he calls an entrepreneurial mindset. What's more, he says, this mindset is a trainable skill. To be clear, he's not arguing, we should all become repatious capitalists. He believes that capitalism and compassion are compatible,

even though those are two words you don't often hear in the same sentence. My guest is Reed Hoffman. He's the co-founder of LinkedIn. He's a partner at Greylock, which is a big venture capital fund. He's the host of Masters of Scale, a very popular podcast, which is all about how Uber's successful people and companies got where they are. He now has a new book, which is called Masters of Scale. In this conversation, we talk about how to actually train for an entrepreneurial mindset,

how to live a life that minimizes the odds of burnout, how to network without feeling icky, the value of curiosity in the workplace, the importance of failing fast, how to deliver feedback in a stressful environment, and how he thinks we can actually make capitalism more compassionate and equitable. So we'll dive in with Reed in just a second before that, two items of business. First, today's episode with Reed is actually a bit of a preview for a new five part series

we're launching next week. It's called the Work Life series. And it's all about how to live better lives at work and to help you solidify what you're gonna to learn in the series, we also have a challenge that we're going to be running over on the 10% happier app. The challenge launches on November 8th, much more about the Work Life series and the challenge next week, but be sure to join us. Okay, next item of business.

If you've been listening to this show recently, you know that I've been joking a little bit about my imminent obsolescence as my colleague Matthew Hepburn rolls out his new podcast, which he has audaciously named 20% happier. I'm in all seriousness very, very excited about what Matthew and the team are creating. On the 20% happier podcast, Matthew and his guests who are everyday people who meditate just like you or just like most of you or just like most of you want to be. Matthew and these guests have intimate, honest conversations about how meditation can help in everyday life.

Matthew dives really deep into his guests moment to moment experiences from feeling frustrated while trying to conjure loving kindness for somebody who you don't really like, to feeling anxiety, taking hold in stressful situations, either at work or at home. So if you like what you're hearing right here on the 10% happier podcast, I think you're going to love maybe twice as much, what you will hear on Matthew's show, where he really draws back the curtain on how a meditation teacher talks to people about their practice, and how to apply that practice to their lives. If you want to listen to the 20% happier show,

and I think you do, you gotta download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps and then open it up and tap on the podcasts tab to check it out. Enjoy. Okay, we'll get started with Reed Hoffman right after this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us wanna live healthier lives,

but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelli McGonical and the great meditation teacher Alexis Santos to Access the course just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm all one word spelled out Okay on with the show Hey y'all is your girl Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress singer and entrepreneur on my new podcast One word spelled out. Okay, on with the show. baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast.

Reid Hoffman, welcome to the show. Great to be here, Dan. So in your new book, you talk about the notion of an entrepreneurial mindset. What is that and how do we train it? Well, so actually I think it's more learned than trained or self-trained, perhaps. The way that you do it is you kind of have a bias to action. So one of the things that entrepreneurs do for something is while you may plan, you may gather resources, you do things, you have a bias to act and to learn and to learn from what you do and then reiterate and improve. Sometimes, of course, frequently you fail and then or you do a micro-failure and then you what you do and then reiterate and improve. Sometimes, of course, frequently you fail

and then, or you do a micro-failure and then you adjust and do something. And the way that you kind of engage in the self-learning, this kind of self-training, you know, part of it, is that there's a set of questions that you ask, a set of tools that you bring to bear about, for example, like how to take intelligent risk or be willing to go and ask for investment or for collaboration or so forth. And when you hear knows what you get from those knows and the way that you ask people about your ideas is not, what do you think of my idea? Because then, you know, that sounds like on a 10% happier thing, please tell me that it's

good so I feel better. It's actually, in fact, tell me what you think won't work about my idea, because then I can possibly learn from it, and I can possibly iterate and improve it. And so the book, you know, alongside the podcast and the courses, is an attempt to make that more available for people to learn, to make entrepreneurial thinking, which I think is actually important to everyone, not just entrepreneurs. I think every career, I think every work project of serious sort, to make that kind of entrepreneurial mindset more available. Would it be an accurately semi-accurate summation

to say the entrepreneurial mindset is fail fast? In part, it's almost like if you did the full quote, it's fail sooner than later. Right. So fail fast rather than fail slow or fail on. And the reason for that is because if you fail fast, you have an ability to adjust. Right. So usually there's a window for creating your entrepreneurial project, would be the I only got X amount of capital, whether it's opening a corner store, a restaurant, or creating a big tech company. And so you want to learn as fast as you can, which points will be failures?

You want to tackle the difficult points, the points that are most likely to actually sink you so that if they do sink you, they sink you early, and you can adjust. So one of the kind of Silicon Valley proponents where it says, oh, fail fast is our dictum. And then people say, we celebrate failures. I's like, no, I don't celebrate failure. I celebrate learning, right? And you want to learn as fast and as much as possible. And so

therefore, steering into the real problems, trying them, seeing if you can make it work, and if you can make it work great, and if you can't, then learning something from it and adjusting. You said this entrepreneur reminds that can be learned or maybe self-trained. How? Well, it's primarily through acting, right? So it's primarily through going and trying and doing things. Now, with that, you want to have the right mindset for doing it. You want to have, like for example, it isn't just, you know, the kind of the classic

10,000 hours, and part of how additional psychology is learned is that it isn't actually, in fact, just 10,000 hours, it's the quality of learning per hour. And if you learn very well per hour, you know, someone who does a hundred hours could learn what someone else might do in a thousand. So you want to be learning per hour, per action, per activity very well, which means that you need to be paying attention to what kinds of things you need to be learning. And part of the reason why we focus in the Master's of the Go podcast and the book on the people who have done successful scale activities is, here are the positive lessons, because there's many ways to fail. There's many ways to fail to scale.

And what you want to do, each time you make the effort, each time that you take that jump, you know, possibly into the unknown, that you're learning from it, right? So it's kind of like always be learning and you're learning really well. You're learning the things that most matter, you're learning the thing that's most repeatable and that's part of the reason why, for example, within entrepreneurship, engaging directly with your prospective customers because learning what your customers really want and don't want and what really is magical and delightful for them is actually, in fact, one of the things that's

really key. And so you need to be learning that much more importantly than you say, well, I learned a new organizational system. I learned that these mineral folders are better than those mineral folders. And you're like, OK, that's a learning. But that learning is not nearly as important in an entrepreneurship is what really is a great thing for your customers. In your book, you talk about,

I don't really love this phrase, but sort of self-care practices. Things you can do to take care of yourself. I'm just curious, I could imagine how some people might think these two things are at odds. Taking care of yourself, trying to make yourself a more mindful, compassionate person. Could that be at odds with scaling a massive company or being massively successful in whatever you're doing? I think ultimately no, although there's a local timing question. So part of what happens with entrepreneurship and building scale companies is you sometimes have a day or a week or a month to do this. And you go, okay, well, maybe this week, I'm not going to the gym. Maybe this week, I am going to be sleeping six hours a night, maybe this week. And so, you know, you do have to occasionally push yourself in those ways because there's world time constraints. And you would say, well,

but that's not a self-care practice. That's not a happiness practice. That as you do that over time, that really degrades you. And you do have to pay attention to self-care and happiness over time, because if you're doing that five years, ten years, then you're just kind of wrecking yourself. And your overall, your performance is going way down. It's like, for example, a classic one of these is,

are you making good decisions? You need to be making good decisions in order to learn well in order to navigate away from landmines and to success in entrepreneurial efforts. So degrading your sleep and making bad decisions over time is a very bad thing. Now, it may very well be that, oh my god, we have to ship this product tomorrow. All of the press is all lined up for it. All of the customers are ready to come. The advertising campaign is going to run. And if I don't stay up all night doing this, it's going to be like a big, you know, tarball and a smoking cloud. And so you do that. And so sometimes you'll make micro or local, like, would seem to be sub-optimal self-care

decisions. But that doesn't obviate the point, which is, no, no, you need to take care of yourself in good decision making and happiness and so forth. A startup is a marathon of sprints, and you need to be able to run the marathon of the sprints. That would cover classic self-care, get yourself to the gym type of thing. What about the steps that I know you've taken and many people in leadership positions, thankfully, are increasingly taking to become more mindful and compassionate, is there something about that that would be at odds with achieving financial outcomes and a hockey stick like growth? Well, I guess it depends on what your learning curve is, a little bit like the learning per hour and the 100,000,

10,000 hours, which is if it takes a lot of time for you to do your self-care, like you're like, well, the only way that I really calm my mind and my soul is to meditate two hours, four hours a day. Then two or four hours is a big decrement to the work that you need to do in order to build a massive scale company. Because a massive scale company really is strapping onto a rocket, trying to go with it and have it not blow up. And just involves prodigious amounts of work. And it is super stressful. It's not the same stress as going into a war zone, but it's something where you, where everything can blow up, you could be a big failure, you could be responsible for lots of

people who have joined your efforts, economic setbacks and so forth. And so, you know, you have to hire people, you have to hire people, all of which is very stressful. You're doing all that stuff. And that's not the same thing as, you know, I spent time being meditive in my garden. So there is that kind of tensions. But you know, classically, people have these kind of false dichotomies. And you say, well, so therefore, self-care or like mental stuff is irrelevant. And you're like, that's absolutely

not. Right? Because like, for example, if you're more balanced in equilibrium, don't have an anger management problem or building a healthy culture in your company. Even if you're like, oh my god, we've got a week to solve this problem. Otherwise, the whole ship is blowing up. You know, people can be happier. They may still be totally stressed, but there's like stressed and massively distressed. Right. So I think there's still the range. What do you thoughts about how to. In a startup, really in any environment, we could be talking about parenting, volunteer work, marriages. It's important to give clear

feedback. But sometimes that feedback can be really hard to hear. What are your thoughts about how to deliver feedback in a stressful, frated environment? That's a great question. And part of it is you frequently see people who under the guise of I'm giving honest feedback and I'm giving brass tax feedback to do it in ungentle ways. Because what you want to do is you want to be, you know, give clear, you want it to have heard, you need it to sometimes be part of the compact that you have with the person because like if they're having performance issues and you may be firing them, if they have, continue to have performance issues, you must be clear, they must have a chance to hear it,

you know, etc. But on the other hand, there's ways to say it, right? So obviously, you know, like hyperbolic way A, you say, because you're a complete loser and an incompetent, the way that you're failing here is just, you know, endemic about how bad of a human being you are. And I can't understand why you would anyone would allow you to work there. here is just, you know, in-demick about how bad of a human being you are, and I can't understand why you, what anyone would allow you to work there, like, okay, that's, you know, parable, and obviously not even factual, but it's like kind of the extreme edge,

where you could say, hey, I think she think the performance bar for this task actually looks like this. And right now, you're not getting there, we're not getting there, and let's talk about it some, and let's talk about what are the ways that make it possible. And I didn't, by the way, if it feels like too much of a stretch, then what I should do is I should help you, like find another job, move on, do something else,

get a different job here. But let's approach it as I respect you as human being, I respect you that you're trying, and I'm approaching it collaboratively, even though I haven't given up, though I haven't given up, or I haven't given up the notion that there is a competent bar in this. And there's a great book by Fred Kaufman

that kind of says that look, part of managing clearly is not just being compassionate to the individual, which it can be, which is clear feedback, but also to the teammates and the customers and everything else. Do you feel like your game is pretty tight on this or do you still struggle with it? I would say this is probably one of the areas where I have unusually high superpowers.

I think you could probably call everyone who's worked for me and worked with me and they'd say, I'm good on this one. They might say that sometimes I'm a little slow. Like I should have said it last Monday versus this Monday, right? That I was kind of like work my way up to it or that I was allowing it to be inefficient by having two conversations rather than one to build up to the points to bring the person with me. So those would be the criticisms. I think that people would have of my style on this is by over waiting to go on this conversational feedback journey together, but doing it with compassion and doing it with a constructive, how can you have the best possible outcome

for everyone out of the conversation? I think I get good marks on that. And so what's going on for you if you're waiting, making it two conversations instead of one, is it fear of hurting somebody's feelings, wanting to do it right? Well, I don't mind if hurting someone's feelings is good for them, like they will become better and stronger for it. It's a little bit like compassion is not saving a person from pain. It's trying to make the pain in a way, something they can learn from, grow from, help them. It's like, for example, you shouldn't try to save your children from pain. You should try to save them from pain that destroys them or a pain that locks them in

a mental box so they can't learn from or random pain, like pain that no point. But like a pain where like they picked a fight with a friend and a friend yelled at them and laughed and they said, well, why do I friend leave? It's like, well, actually, in fact, let's try to figure out, you know, you should be respectful to your friends. You should express joy and affection and care for your friends. And that if you don't, you'll have painful experiences. And so, you know, that image being simplistic, but, you know, that kind of thing, I think, is very important.

So, for me, I think what happens is, it may be like a little bit of a superhuman complex. Like, no, no, I'm sure within the time parameter of us needing to solve this startup problem, which by the way is always very short, I can still do that conversation in a way that with the two conversations are having one and then they understand it

and then they're on board with it, then it's good for them as well as good for the group and good for the project. You know, I would have to remind myself sometimes, no, no, we only have today. Like this has to be done today. Right now, this meeting, this minute, and sometimes you have to move quickly and sometimes that causes, you know, you break some glass, you break some China when that happens.

Much more of my conversation with Reed Huffman right after this celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellissi. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out

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You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or The Wondering App. I'll share or something that I've learned with you just to see if you think this makes sense. I don't think anybody would describe compassionate feedback as one of my strengths. I'm not happy to admit this, but I can err on the side of it. Definitely, it's erring on the side of just kind of being in my own head and then sometimes bottling things up and letting them come out in unconstructive ways. And a, this is not the right word, but it's the only word that's coming to mind. A hack or a approach that's been useful that was taught to me by, I talk about these guys

a lot on the show, Dan, Clermann, and Wuditha Nisker, a pair of communications coaches who are going to be on the show soon. And I work with them personally. And one of the things they've recommended is to have in mind your positive intention. In other words, what are you trying to achieve that is truly positive here? And to think about that in advance as you're planning your message and to try to hold it in your mind as you're delivering the feedback. How does that land for you?

Very well. And actually, in fact, what it is is the way I would amplify it is what I have is a forced ranked list of goods. Right? So, for example, it might be good for the success of the company, then, you know, good for the team, then, you know, good for this individual, and then good for me. And so we're going to go, okay, here's what my list of goods are because sometimes there's trade-offs between them and go, and here's my operational parameter I want you to do.

But I'm focusing on the good, and I'm not forgetting that the individual themselves is there, and that I am there in this, and trying to make it happen. And it's like, look, I'm trying to do as good as I can by all of these constituencies as I go. And if I'm forced in a circumstance where I have to make a decision right now, like, well, okay, you're fired right now, and you just have to do that, then you do it, right?

But you try to do it keeping in mind that I'm doing this for this reason of good, and not, of course, for I'm angry, you know, because that clouds decision-making, I have ego issues, and it's like, you just respected me, you know, or this is how I project that I'm important. And you need to set those things aside because those things ultimately in a karmic way will come back to roost. And it's best to be, you know, present, not selfless, present, but not egotistical. In my experience, setting those things aside is hard to do. Yeah, it's that's a life's times work. And you can always be better. Getting back to what you said a few seconds ago about firing somebody, I take from that that it is possible to fire somebody

compassionately. Yes, I've done it. I've done it in multiple ways. I've done it as a board member, firing CEOs. I've done it as an executive firing people, it's doable. And by the way, the test for compassion is not that they think you're a good person afterwards or that they go, oh, that was great. Sometimes by the way, that's great. When they go, look, I appreciate the way you did that, right? And there's there are people who I've fired who I'm still in regular contact with because they went, okay, like I disagree with you, they almost always disagree with you, but like I felt you approached it as a fellow human being who respected me.

Right. And that's part of the thing is too often in firing, like you have to like take the person's face off for your own emotional thing, like, they're bad. This is on them. They're terrible. It's not my problem. It's their problem. But you can still approach it as a human being.

You can still realize that there's not a human being who is in shock at the other side of this, who has Emotional difficulty and too often what they try to do is they try to get the person to agree with them It's like you agree that you should be fired because you suck and you're like, okay, that's terrible You should have them be present and be able to learn and feel like okay like okay I got it and I'm gonna learn and I'm gonna be better next time now sometimes to say, well, I'm never going to work for a jackass like you again, right? Fine. You know, that's okay, right? You know, but is approaching it as we are human beings on this journey of life together. As you're talking, I'm having these thoughts. And I'm going

to see if I can articulate them well. I'm, you know, only 50% confident that I can do that. But, you know, we're talking about compassion in the context of capitalism. And we're in an era where there are increasingly vocal critiques of capitalism. One that's come to mind recently is a book I've talked about on the show a couple of times called The Overstory by a guy named Richard Powers. It's a novel, brilliant novel. You're nodding. It seems like you may have read it. I haven't read it yet, but it's on my bookshelf, because I want to read it.

You should, I would put it in pole position, it's a beautiful, beautiful book, and it's a plotty novel, but it's about the forests and our dysfunctional relationship to nature. And one of the characters says something in there about a fundamental misconception in capitalism is that it's striving for infinite growth in a finite system.

So that's just one of the many critiques. You know, we were seeing a rise in interest, especially among young people and socialism or democratic socialism. So I'm just curious. What do you say would you hear? I don't know if people are saying it straight out or implying it that somehow capitalism is just not compatible with compassion and the common good. Well, I think that's a reflexive belief, especially kind of broadly on the left. And I think it's, you know, a little bit of like this aphorism, common wisdom usually isn't wisdom.

And by the way, because also a lot of people approach business in justifying bad behavior. So well, the only thing I have to do is maximize my assureholder value. I don't care if I lay waste to a community or the kind of Godfather, it's just business. And it's like, oh, I'm just a sociopath, okay. Right?

And so there's a whole bunch of tropes that kind of lead to that, but it, by no means, means that it needs to be. I mean, if you go back all the way to Adam Smith in the theory of moral sentiments, you know, part of what was so brilliant about Adam Smith, which many of his proponents forget, is that he was kind of saying, look, it's, it's really important to be human. It's really important to have these, these aspirational human attributes. Well, if I have to mill the product or service for you, I'm being of service to you.

And I have to focus on doing that. And that's a good thing. And that's actually much better than the alternatives. Most of the critics of capitalism are simply very simple minded when you go, well, what are the alternatives that you have in mind? Right? It's like, well, the government will decide everything. It's like, well, we've tried that in a number of different ways over a number of different centuries in human history, and it's a disaster.

I mean, so unless you have a radically new idea that's totally different than the ones that have led to mass starvation, mass genocide, elite, etc. Be a little bit more sophisticated in your point of view. Well, does that mean that capitalism is the one final end solution? Well, clearly not. We've modified it a lot, right? So we go, well, let's see. Let's have rules on child labor. Let's have rules on work weeks. Let's try to make sure that capital can't overbalance against labor and treat it as like

kind of like indentured servitude against the machine. You know, let's do things like that to make capitalism work better and to be more human. And so, what I'm normally talking to a critic of capitalism, if they're legitimately engaging in an honest discourse that's trying to do it, where most of these critics are just trying to yell from a hilltop saying, I'm really important because I recognize capitalism is bad. You're like, well, actually, in fact, you haven't realized anything and I get you're yelling from the hilltop. But if they're legitimately doing, you say, look, the real thing that it was figured out what mods would you make? Or if you have a whole new system idea, that's fantastic. What is it? Right? Because that really matters. Because one could say about

capitalism, what Winston Churchill said about democracy, which is it's the worst of all systems except when you consider all the other ones. Right. So what I try to do is modify capitalism. How do you make it more human, more compassionate, et cetera, and you can do it? The reason why, and I want to hear how you can do it, but just to put a little meat on the bone of where this question is coming from, it really is just out of some personal reflections I've had lately and thinking about my own conditioning. I think I'm a year older than you.

So we grew up in the same era. And there was a TV show called Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, where you were brought into the wealthy people's homes. And I remember watching them thinking, yeah, well, that's how I want to live. And this was the era in which Donald Trump rose to prominence in the art of the deal and

Gordon Gecko, the bad guy in the movie Wall Street talking about greed is good and of late, I've just become increasingly aware of how this has created what is sometimes sub-roso, sometimes subconscious, but sometimes very much conscious, a quizzidiveness. And I don't have any answers here, but I'm just in the process of trying to suss that out and question it when I see that arise. Anyway, I've said that was a bit of a word salad. I'm curious to see if you have any response to it. Well, I very much appreciate that.

I think we should re-own the term progressive, because like I like making progress. Progress is good. So yes, I'm a progressive. I appreciate the progressive characteristic to say, look, part of how do we make society nobler? We try to make every individual more noble. We try to make them all educated. We try to make them less free of suffering and fear and pain that by having less of those things, you can rise to your noble yourself.

And that we should aspire to where everybody in society has more noble impulses, acts less on their fears, less on hatred, 100%. Absolutely. The great thing. Now, the question is, is how brittle should you be in your strategy? Because what do you think your chances of getting there are? Because most of the historical utopians in getting there, like you go marks and goes,

well, once we have a whole bunch of abundance of stuff then everyone will be great. You're like, well, one, that's not true, and B, right? Like we've almost even run it because we've got an abundance of stuff for all of it. And people are still have their fears and appetites and like, I want what the Joneses have and get a da, da, and you know, so you want

to design a system that's more resilient to that where you could actually have people acting like schmucks, right, or selfish or narcissists or whatever. And the system still broadly works, right? And that's part of the reason why I was early referring to the Adam Smith thing, which is, look, there could be noble capitalists who are like, actually, I'm really thinking about how this new product or service makes the whole world a lot better. And that's really what the mission is. You can have people who are faking it saying, wow, I'm inventing this in Georgia, change the world. But I'm really doing it for my own fame or money, right? And you've got people who don't care.

But the overall system still produces a bunch of things that make our society better. It produces better medical care, more wealth for education, more people in the middle class. And you say, yes, it has climate change implications. But by the way, the climate change implications come from a number of human beings in the middle class. So unless you're volunteering to shuffle off this mortal coil, and how would you make that decision for other people, the question is, how do we target these scale mechanisms to say, well, okay, now we need to target capitalism and technology and everything else to making climate work, right? The same things which have enabled this massive rise of a middle class to also take out the carbon and all the rest that causes that to be a real problem. And so that's the detailed

response to that. You were talking before about mods or modifications one could make to capitalism to make it more compassionate, equitable. What did you have in mind? Well, I think there's a number. So like a simple one, like if you said, could I wave a wand and do one thing? I think there's a bunch of intellectual work to do this, but could you get the bulk of shareholders to agree that there are some important metrics that are commonly agreed upon that need to be reported on by companies that are audited and

accountable, that then are part of the reporting so they could make a differential choice about whether or not to buy the share or not. And it could be on climate goals and impact. It could be on could be on climate goals and impact, it could be on labor force treatment, it could be on community participation. Within all of that, that one thing, if the shareholders could then be kind of putting some pressure on it, could make changes around the whole world. So, there are things to do just at the level of board governance that could have widespread impact. Yeah, and actually, when you're hired as a board member, your Fudishare responsibility defined by law is essentially to some conception of the shareholder.

Now what if you said that part of my responsibility within that is to also make sure that we are accurately telling the world about where we fit on the social impact measures and what we're doing and where we're projecting and where we're going on them and that we are being honest with the world about that. And then that would be part of your company responsibility. We've been talking at a high level, a macro level, and you've humored me, which I appreciate. Let's just go back to the micro level and in particular, you, you've had so much experience, so much success in business and you interview all of these people who've had so much success in business. What have you learned about personal management,

you know, how to live your life in a way that allows you to minimize the odds of burnout? So one of them I already hinted at a little bit, which is really emphasize getting good sleep. There's this kind of classic of like, sleep is for the week, sleep is when you die. You're like, lack of sleep is how you die, right in some ways. And people understand that really great entrepreneurship

journeys are intensely learning curves. Well, part of intensely learning curves is good decision making. And it's very difficult to make good decisions if you don't have at least adequate sleep. You might stay up all night this one night. For example, the next night, I had to get up early, and so I only got five hours of sleep,

but then last night, I got nine. Right? Another one is to make sure that you're in a good, kind of centered position. So pay attention to your emotional state. Pay attention to what kinds of things stress you out. Try to avoid doing them or do them in ways that stress you less. Try to pay attention to things like what's the easiest ways that you can make yourself

happy and give yourself the fortitude and the grit and so forth to keep going. Don't just say, you know, it's just to live with a suffering. It's like, well, try to make the suffering as little as possible and then live with whatever's left. Right? You know, for me, like take, for example, some people need like a week vacation or a three week vacation. I actually don't, like, I love them, but I don't need them. What I need is an occasional three day weekend, where the three day weekend is really like, I'm taking a break. And a lot of times like vacations are stressful. You like have to plan and you have to organize everything. You have to go to the airport and get there and then things change and all the rest.

And you find yourself getting back from your vacation. And you're like, well, that was really fun, but I'm really tired now. So I really focus on, for me, what are the maximum ways that I can rest quickly? And then the last thing is to make sure that you that you're engaging with people because other people can help happiness a lot. So even small engagements where you remember that you're kind of going through this life with your friends, going through this life with these people that you love and respect and so forth. Even brief ones can be hugely charging.

And that's part of the reason why, like I think one can go, okay, I'm gonna spend 100 hours a week building this massive scale company and do that, and not forget about the being human component and not forget about how do I run this marathon of sprints? When you talk about personal connection, doing this life together with other people

in your orbit, be it professionally or personally, have you found a way to sort of systematize this to make sure that you're getting enough of dopamine and oxytocin in your life from interpersonal connection? In a couple of ways, I try to as much as possible spend time with people that if they aren't friends that could be friends, I go against one form of common wisdom and that I prefer to hire friends if I can. Now, there's an additional high beta component to that because what if it's not working out and so forth. Like I have a little standard spiel that I talked to with friends when I hire. That's like, look, it doesn't mean that I might never fire you, but it does mean that I will be always human and I will go extra miles because we're friends and help you No matter what if it doesn't work out into the next thing

By the way, this isn't just that personal bias thing. There's also increase of performance I like to hire people where I think oh, I could be friends with this person like it's possible because When they do studies of for example Why do people fight in these most stressful circumstances like a war? Well, they're fighting for the person next to them. And so if you have that kind of in-depth connectivity, where you respect and have high regard, even if you don't yet know the person,

well, I have to know if you're going to be friends or not, with the people you're in the trench with, then that's also a high performance characteristic. You, I know, have thought a lot about diversity and you made it a rule to have a 50% at least of your guests on Masters of Scale, female. The common knock on the hiring your friends, especially if you're a white man, is you're probably going to get a lot of other white men who are privileged enough to be in this

network. How do you work around that? A couple of ways. And by the way, great question, great challenge. Everyone should pay attention to that. Right? So the fundamental structural one is that you're always building your network.

You try to make sure that your network isn't just the network of privilege that if you yourself are lucky enough to have been born into privilege or worked your way into these elite circles that you yourself are not doing that. So for example, at LinkedIn, we have this plus one initiative where it's like go and build your network to underrepresented minorities and deliberately make an effort

to do that. That could sometimes just be mentoring, but find out ways of doing that. We do that at Greylock by working with organizations like Management Leaders to Tomorrow, which are building pathways for people of color into technology, executive jobs, and founders, and investing jobs. So fundamentally build your network, but not just structurally, but also be building your network in that way.

Just listening to you now gets me thinking a little bit about where we started this conversation on the entrepreneurial mindset. And I just wonder, do you think there's something about our culture that might disadvantage women and minorities in this regard in that perhaps white men are sent the message that the entrepreneurial mindset is the right one and you should be encouraged to go out there and fail fast, et cetera, et cetera, whereas others are not given that message.

So one, what you just said, that's 100% true, which is part of the reason why we did the 50-50 representation on the vastness of the scale episodes in terms of showing that there are these amazing people, seroblacly, amongst many, many others, the way that Tori Birch approached her modeling career was on an entrepreneurial mindset and was the most successful supermodel in history, not just because she looks amazing, but that she knew how to approach it. And so one is just the messaging, the expectations, the feedback from society, the role modeling, all the things.

The other one is, it's much easier to be entrepreneurial when you have a safety margin. So if you have a safety margin because your father, like mine, is kind of upper middle class, and if I failed at my entrepreneurial thing, I can call him and say, hey, can I rent a bedroom and you'll go get a job and pay you back and I have that kind of safety net? Well, that's a safety net that only less than 50% of the population have, right? Subdainstly less. And so that's kind of a place of privilege. And frequently, these underrepresented minorities don't have that.

Sometimes they don't have it because their parents are biased and that's not a job for a woman or something. And they don't provide it, which is what my mother's parents were like to her. And so you have to respect that it's not just this heroic wall. It's everyone is self-created from zero. No, no, where you start from is a great help in which risks you can take, which things you can make happen. And there is no fully quality opportunity.

Now, by the way, there's never a fully quality on anything. What you try to do is you try to make it better and better and better, because the more, the more we make this network, it's trampoline for everyone who's talented. They better off we all are as society. It's part of the reason why I do a lot of philanthropy that's in entrepreneurship.

And I do philanthropy like opportunity at work. You know, how do you get underrepresented minorities to begin to have the first tech jobs in their family, to begin to participate in that and bring their whole family into these kinds of things. So you do that because that makes us all better. This kind of, my term, not yours, idealistic capitalism seems to be a through line for you. I was reading in your bio that your goal early on, you were thinking about going into academics, you ended up going into entrepreneurship, and your goal was how do I help humanity evolve? Yes. And I got this kind of what might seem ridiculously aspirational, ridiculously arrogant

goal because I was reading a lot of science fiction as a kid. And science fiction is all about the story of like, what is the evolution of humanity in various ways? You know, if technology has created this way or technology comes into the economic ecosystem in the following ways and thinking about that and that level of scale, which is the thing that may be start thinking about what's the canvas in which I am trying to apply my life to. And it's like, well, I would like humanity to be better in some ways because I was here and I was working.

And obviously, all scale success can involve super hard work and smart strategic action and taking smart risk, but also has a lot of serendipity and a lot of luck. Now, you try to be strategic so luck can break your way and there's various ways to try to do that. You know, you're fortunate to be able to do so. Much more of my conversation with Reed Huffman right after this. more of my conversation with Reed Huffman right after this.

I'm going to go back to your list before of the personal practices that you engage in to avoid burnout and be it maximally happy and effective. You talked about, you know, three day weekend sleep connections, both to the team and to your people in your personal life. And one of the things you mentioned was avoiding stressful situations. I'm curious, what stressful for you and how do you avoid it? So I think many of the things that are stressful for me are stressful for a lot of people, which is, for example, when you're giving someone bad news, like they're fired or they're

not getting a promotion or you're not going to hire them or you don't want to invest in them and so forth. Just like most people, I hate failing. When I say take intelligent risks, that's not because I'm risk blind. Those kinds of things are the kinds of things. Also exhaustion, where you just go, I'm just tired of doing that. I've been doing that again and again and again. All of those things kind of lead to stress. But it's not, I'm not saying that you're saying this, but one cannot avoid all stressors, obviously. So it's about identifying the egregious ones for you and do your best to avoid them, well, still leading a responsible life. Yeah, ameliorate them as you can.

And by the way, one of the backward choices in life is to choose a high stress life or not. A entrepreneurial path is a high stress path, right? You know, joining the military to go into wartime is a high stress path. That's a higher stress path. You know, all kinds of things are deeply scary and difficult about that.

And some people choose not to do that in various ways. And it kind of depends on which things matter to you and which things you're willing to do. Now, that being said, life always has stress. You're attracted to this person. They're not attracted to you. That is stressful to you and makes you feel like maybe you're not as good as a person and maybe that reflects on you in some way. Their life is full of these things and you have to navigate them. And the way you navigate them is by being clear-eyed about them and knowing yourself and navigating and having the right friends and allies and colleagues to do that.

And that's, it's always a complicated thing. Now for me, I like the achieving really, really big things. So I'm willing to go into deeply stressful things because over 50% of entrepreneurial projects fail. And that's always psychologically crushing and draining. Yeah, it's well over 50%. Yes. If there's my own little bias, right?

Like it's supposed to 80%. It's like, oh no, it's only 50. My brother's a venture capitalist. And when I co-founded my first startup six years ago, my brother took me aside and said, just so you know, he used the number 90% of startups fail. And I actually found it was liberating because then I was like the odds of that are very low. So I'm just going to approach this with some lightness. Yes. And that's a good idea, by the way, as when I started being an entrepreneur and

I told my dad that I was planning to succeed at this, he said, well, do you know how many these things can fail? And I said, yeah, yeah, I realized that I need to start a sequence of these to have a good probability of having one of them succeed. And, and that I need to have as a learning curve in each one, that as I'm doing each one, it's not like, oh, this one do or die, it's this one, give it my all. And then if it doesn't work, then learn a lot and then give the next one my all. You've had a pretty good run and I've actually been meaning to ask a question about one of the the bigger startups, which is now a huge company linked in. And I'm curious about networking because this is a social network all about professional networking. And I wonder what your thoughts are about the line between healthy, productive networking and Iki careerist

networking? Well, probably not surprised to you. Now, the way you've been having this conversation, it's a question of how much do you treat the other person as a human being that you're collaborating with? So the Iki networking is, you know, hi, I'm Reed. Can I have your business card? Can you do things for me? Can you be part of my assets, right?

And it's like a, right? And by the way, typically networking is thought about that way because the most of the people you meet who identify themselves as networks who really walk up to you and do that are those people. Now, I think there's a really important part of when you say actually networking based out of mutuality, of shared interests, of alliances and what we're doing in the world, of ICU and what's important to you, and I respect your interest and what you want to accomplish

and respect your time. Then when you do that, you build a very strong, in my first book, The Startup of You, we call it Life to Team Sport, not an Individual Sport, and you build that team that is your life team as you're going through your work and your life and your career. And that's really important. And actually being smart and proactive on the network, not as these are my assets. And I have so and so. It's like, no, no, no, these are your allies. And by the way, they have to be as equally engaged.

It's just like a friendship. If you're like, I want to be friends with you, but that person doesn't want to be friends with you, then they may be friendly, but they're not your friends, and that's okay, because they have other priorities. And so you have to kind of build that up as a sequence of allies, and you see it in all kinds of ways. Like for example, when you go up and meet someone, do you say, hey, can you do this for me or can you introduce me to someone so or,

could you buy my product? You know, like, okay, well clearly your interaction here is for you. Whereas if you say something like, what's an interesting thought you've had in the last week or an interesting experience? And then it's like, hey, you know, it's like, okay, where it's a give and take. There's a way in which network can be icky. There's a way which it can be really awesome because it's not just assets. It's allies, as you said, but being an ally means

you can get help from somebody, but you also have to help them. Exactly. A big part of your book is about corporate culture, and one of your chapters in your book is called the Never Ending Project colon culture. So how do you, especially in a large organization, how do you create a tone that is positive that actually is abiding? So there's a number of different ways to do it and not all cultures should be the same. Some people need kind of like fear-based high performance cultures. Some people need

mutually supportive. Some people need fear-syn- of intellectual debate cultures, it's a stack of things. And so what I find the way you should resolve it is say well for solving this kind of problem with the kind of talent in a persistent way that's healthy for human beings, what's the culture that we should have? And what are the ways to do it? So for example, one of the classic mistakes that people have in culture is they think cultural fit, rather just cultural evolution. Like you don't go, do you match my culture?

It's will you help grow my culture in a great and healthy way? That's actually the question. For example, LinkedIn, part of it was to say, well, we want to be an intensely learning culture. So we want to be able to have everyone be able to challenge anyone else's assertion or point of view or say, no, I don't think that works the right way. I don't think that works the way you think, but no expressions of essentially anger or no dehumanizing statements because we're trying to be learning and constructive and how we do this. And you codify it, you

onboard people with it, you have explicit discussions of the values, you write them down in principles, you include culture in your performance reviews, and you do all that. And this is all the stuff that you can do from the top down as ways of getting the system to go here in a way that's both high performance and high humanity. But it's not one and done. It is, as you said, a never ending project. Yes, and specifically, you're always looking for other people's positive contributions to making it better. So, for example, I think the very first rule of culture is we are all working for the

mission, and you can challenge me on the mission and culture like how can we better do it? Like you say, well, we're supposed to be enabling every individual to have better work and better career outcomes, matching talent with opportunity at LinkedIn. And this is the way that we're trying to do that, but I actually think you're not doing it the right way because we should be doing X versus Y. Like, okay, you know,

you can have that conversation with the CEO and co-founder. That's a good thing to have as long as you're aspirational in the same direction co-founder. That's a good thing to have as long as you're aspirationally in the same direction, same mission. A lot of companies are embracing things like mindfulness or napprooms for the benefit at least ostensibly of their employee base. There's a critique, especially in the mindfulness world, there's a critique of, it's sometimes called, mick mindfulness, that you're really using this as a bandaid over the essentially sort of an overly demanding system. So you're using it as a bandaid to cover up root causes.

What's your take on that critique? Well, obviously, it could be true in some companies. It's kind of a judgment call per company. But I'm more sympathetic to those critics when they realize that part of the goal within these companies is high performance play high performance output. And just like if you use a sports analogy, you know, well, who won the game? Who won the championship? And putting some stress on is the only way that you do that.

When you're trying to learn high performance, some stress is part of it. Some stress is also a natural outcome of competition. Now, what you want to do is you want it to be as human as possible. You want to be as learning as possible. You want the stress that you grow from. Like, you know, for example, when you wait left

to put some stress on your muscles, but you're building your muscles. And so you want to do it in that way. And so the notion that you shouldn't have stress as part of what's going on in work is most times fairly naive. I could see a world where it is possible that employers are going well past healthy stress to a truly mistreating the employee base and then adding on a, hey, here's the subscription to a meditation app.

Harborset, that was the reason I said it depends on specific. Yes. Right. Like if this specific is, the beatings will continue until the morale improves. Oh, and by the way, here's your meditation app. Like, okay, you got a problem. Another thing I want to talk about that you talk about in your book is this value of curiosity. I imagine you're talking about it in the context of entrepreneurial mindset, whether you're an entrepreneur or not.

So, can you say more about what you see as the value of curiosity? Well, it's almost like if I were to kind of say what should be cardinal virtues, I think curiosity might actually in fact be one of them because I think curiosity obviously is a lot of how we learn, how we have, we imagine how the future can be better than today, how we can imagine the possible, how we can also learn about other people, like, you know, not all curious people are necessarily curious about other people, but it's helpful to actually, in fact, be curious about other people about their humanity, about their hopes and fears and desires and capabilities and what they're doing and so forth, and that's part of how you create a more human, you know,

kind of ecosystem. And so I think curiosity is fundamental to learning and improvement. And so I would say it's a universal life virtue. Now, it's critical in high performance entrepreneurship, high performance careers because you know, learning the right skills, learning the right gameplay, learning how the market's changing, learning how the competition is changing, curiosity is part of that. And that's an important thing that is worth having everyone recognize.

And then the last question I want to ask you is you've mentioned the book in the podcast and the courses, but can you just go through it all again? Can I get you to plug everything that seems relevant right now? For sure. So we started Master's Scale with podcasts because we wanted to have that emotional and intellectual touch point with these amazing journeys and learnings that these people who had gone and built,

like, there was nothing, and then there was something amazing as part of it. And then we said, okay, well, we're going to write a book because a book condenses that. It makes it more easy to kind of learn it together. And then we did courses app to say, well, another thing about learning this and democratizing entrepreneurship and making these set of tools available to everybody is also to have exercises and practices because that kind of habit of how you do it can also help you learn in ways that is both high performance and high humanity. Read, thank you very much for doing this. My pleasure and honor.

Thanks again to Reed. This show is made by Samuel Johns, Gabriel Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justin Davie, Kim Baikama, Maria Wartell, and Jen Poient with audio engineering from the good folks over at ultraviolet audio. We'll see you all on Friday for something very special. I'm going to tell you what it is, but it's very cool. That's on Friday. Hey, hey, Prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. or you can listen early and add free

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