The Jordan Harbinger Show - 207: Reid Hoffman | Mastering Your Scale for the Unexpected Part One

Episode Date: June 4, 2019

Reid Hoffman (@reidhoffman) is a cofounder of LinkedIn, investor at Greylock Partners, host of the podcast Masters of Scale, and coauthor of Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies. What We Discuss with Reid Hoffman: Why creating the best products and services on the market won't mean squat if you don't have the network to get the word out about them. Reid's flexible planning framework that adjusts navigation to suit the unexpected path rather than the imagined destination. How to know when you're informing your intuition with the best available data or just procrastinating to avoid making important decisions. Why "never give up" is terrible advice, and how to separate your winning instincts from your losing ideas. Why an honest partner is almost always your best source of ideas -- and a reminder of where the road paved with the best intentions usually leads. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/207 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Disgraceland is a true crime podcast about musicians getting away with murder. If you love true crime and you love music, get ready to love Disgraceland here! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with producer Jason DeFilippo. Today we're doing something different here on the Jordan Harbinger show. I originally wanted to interview Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, investor at Greylock, and host of the podcast Masters of Scale. People refer to Reed as the Oracle of Silicon Valley. He's a unicorn spotter, someone who can seemingly see the future in terms of the companies and ideas that will change and shape the world. It's made him very successful, and his advice is highly sought after and deeply respected. As we get into the show, you'll see why. When we first connected, what was to be an interview or a profile similar to what we usually do here on the show quickly turned into a

collaboration between our podcasts. We developed a commencement episode of sorts for Reed's podcast, Masters of Scale. This special episode brings together all the best life lessons from the last season of Masters of Scale that might be useful for a grad or anyone navigating big decisions. It'll also be useful for entrepreneurs and business owners, of course. Let me back up to just a minute to tell you about Masters of Scale in case you don't listen. In each episode, Reed sets out to prove a theory about how businesses grow from zero to a gazillion, things like why you should let fires burn or why imperfect is perfect. And he does this by talking to famous founders about their lives. It's a business show, but it doesn't sound like a business show. So what you'll

hear today is both my interview with Reed Hoffman, along with segments from Masters of Scale, where Reid interviews some truly amazing founders, such as Daniel Eck, founder of Spotify, from Ritzum, former CEO of Yahoo, and Kevin Sistram, founder of Instagram, and a whole lot of other amazing folks as well. And some of these clips never aired in full on Masters of Scale, so we have some little secret exclusive bits here and there, which is fun. Also, our course six-minute networking, Reed is heavily into networking, warm introductions, the value of creating a network.

I mean, he invented LinkedIn, and we're teaching you how to make the best of your network for personal and professional reasons. That's at Jordanharbinger.com slash course, and that's all free, Jordanharbinger.com slash course. By the way, most of the guests on the show actually subscribe to the course and the newsletter, so come join us. All right, enjoy this episode,

this commencement episode here with Reed Hoffman. Your personal brand is important for recruiting tech and entrepreneurs for Greylock, and among other ventures. Do you worry about having to perform all the time? I mean, like right now, for example, beyond? Well, I don't so much think about it from a brand management perspective is that I try to respect people's time and so forth. So what I care about is, can I say something compact and

interesting quickly? So I do switch on, but it's not a switch on from a defensive point of view as much of, like if you think sports, offense, defense, it's not so much from a defense point of view as much it is from an offense point of view. Like, let's make it interesting. Let's have something really good happen as opposed to the, well, you know, brand's one of those important things you have to do sometimes, you know. Yeah, that makes sense. I just wondered, because around here, this is, as you know, in Silicon Valley, people will go, I saw Mark Zuckerberg eating a sandwich here once. We should go there. And I'm like, he's not going to be there again. Also, that was 10 years ago. The kid hasn't eaten a sandwich here without 17 bodyguards since 2005. Like, come on. So I just thought, like, oh, people are walking up to you and Michelle like, hey,

love LinkedIn or whatever people do as fanning in Silicon Valley? Even last night I was having dinner with a friend of mine at the Rosewood and someone walked over and said, are you, Reid Hoffman? And I used to say no because I was trying to get a preserve a privacy. And I say yes. And I said, oh, I really love your podcast master's scaling. Oh, great. Thank you.

You know, nice to meet you. Because it's, you know, for them, it's an expression of shared joy and you should respect that. And so I've now kind of gone to, okay, that's what happens. That's fair. So it's less I've given up on privacy and more, hey, I created something that people enjoy. I shouldn't shun that. Yes, exactly.

That's fair. I think there's a lot of people in similar positions of you that have pretty much said, I can't have privacy. And it actually, that sort of mindset, I think, makes them a little bit annoyed and sad. So embracing it is probably a better strategy. And realize that when someone's coming up to you to talk to you, they're doing so because they go, I love this thing. Right. And you're like, great.

thank you. It's a gift from you. Yeah, that's true. I guess if you're in the NBA and you just lose a big game, you're like, what's this person want right now? But you know, you've kind of got you're in a nice sort of innocuous niche where somebody would really have had to have a very specific problem with something you did in order to have a problem. I have yet to have that in honor. Knock wood, right? Yes. Yeah. You do recommend people build their network early and I've, I've heard and seen that a lot from you and it makes sense because you founded LinkedIn, you know, etc. But I hear people tell me all the time because I teach networking on the show and I even have a little mini course about this that's free. And I'll say, look, it's free because networking will

change your life. It'll change your business. It'll make you happier. You'll have friends. Your kids will be better. Whatever. Every benefit that I've ever had that's big has come from reaching out and connecting with people. And people will say, well, I work at a school. So I don't, I don't need this. Or, well, I'm not going to leave my job. I work for the government. I don't need networking. What do you think of that when people say things like that? Well, so I think we live in a networked age. So I actually think everyone needs a network. Sure. And whether or not you're a high school student or whether or not you're a massively successful CEO, the whole range you need it. It affects what you learn, right? Because what should you be paying attention to? What should your

considerations be about how the world's changing, about what are kind of opportunities and threats and possibilities actually all look like? The best place that comes from is your network. Yes, you can Google searching, yes, you can read a lot, and that's nice to do too. But the network helps you learn. And like the clearest way you can say this is that most people, when they go through the university experience and go through a college experience, see, look, you learned a bunch from your classes. You learned a bunch of professors. But actually, in fact, for almost everyone, the most you learned was from your peers, from the students around you, rather than it, and that continues through life. And that's what your network is. Yeah, that's really true. I remember

having smart roommates, which was lucky, because it certainly wasn't me going, I need smart roommates. It was guys going, hey, you should live in our house and it was a bunch of go-getter, gunner guys. And I thought, these guys taught me how to study. They taught me about world of events. They taught me how to pay attention to the right kind of news. I didn't know things like some news sources are biased. It's, you know, I'm 19, you know, think about that stuff. But I do vaguely also remember skull shapes of Australopithecines. It's just been less useful in terms of my, my daily life. Other people, and this is more of your alley, people will say, well, my idea, my work is so good, I want it to speak for itself, so I don't need to make connections. And when I go to a VC,

they'll go, wow, this idea is amazing. I don't need to network. So again, it's, people frequently have false dichotomies. That's great to have great work. It's great to have an amazing set of stuff that you've done. That's awesome. And yes, you should have that. But one of the pieces of advice I most often give entrepreneurs is don't just work on the product, work on your go-to-market. Because the, oh, I build this thing in a corner, no one sees it. It may be the best thing ever, but no one sees it, so it's never used. That's the problem on the entrepreneurship side. The same parallel is true for individuals, which is, you may have done all this great work, but the fact that what's awareness of what's other people saying about it, what's the way that you present it, what's the way

that people can understand it and get to know it, because by the way, it's a huge world. It's 8 billion people. How do you stand out against eight billion people? Actually, in fact, that's kind of challenging. Yeah, that's a good, are we at eight already? Yes. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. I'm already feeling claustrophobic. Yes. Yeah. My gosh. All right. So as I mentioned in the introduction, we're doing a commencement episode of Master's of Scale combined with the Jordan Harbinger show here. So we're going to play clips from Masters of Scale with the amazing entrepreneurs that you've interviewed, and then we'll discuss slash poke holes in the concepts in the clips. This first segment from Masters of scale features Daniel Eck, founder of Spotify. In this clip, Reed is sharing a story from Daniel's

childhood, one that shows his early passion for both music and computers. It's fair to say, we have Sweden to thank for Daniel's lifelong love affair with music. It started with his family. It's one of those weird families, like a normal family, so you would get a college degree, and that would be like the important thing. Not really in our family. In fact, no one had a college degree, but having a music education was super important. But his country made sure that no child left music behind. And in Sweden, where I grew up, there's actually free music education, which I think explains a lot about how music is so big in that country and why it's such a big export

for us as well. You get taken to this place when you're about four or five years old, and you walk around, and you get to sample every instrument you can imagine. So I walked around and I saw people playing piano. I saw people doing the flutes. I saw people doing all sorts of things. That's the sitar and this is the Glockenspiel. And in one of the rooms was this person was playing the drums.

And I saw that and I was like, holy shit, this is amazing. I really want to play the drums. Five-year-old Daniel was blown away by the possibilities. But there was one inescapable reality. My parents, because I wasn't really that into music at that time, nor did I really want to do it, they said you can pick any instrument you want. I said, I wanted to play the drums.

They said, well, any instrument you want, but the drums, because we were living in an apartment and we didn't want to get evicted. Daniel turned to a cool, older cousin for advice. He had told me that I should pick the guitar, because if I picked the guitar, I could actually have a shot with the girl. And as a five-year-old, I didn't know what have a shot with the girls actually meant. I thought he was a pretty cool guy, so I ended up playing guitar. And that's the story of how I started picking up the guitar.

And so when did you start picking up programming? And then was there any connection between music and programming at that time? No, it wasn't really any connection between the two. It was a C-64. The C-64 is also known as the Commodore 64. It was an 8-bit home computer, popular in the 1980s. With the cassette? Yes, with the cassettes, indeed.

And then one day the cassette broke, the actual player broke down. So I started deconstructing the player and figured out how to fix it. Next time the computer broke down, I took it apart and then put it back together again and fixed it. Got a bit overconfidence, so I asked it. someone who was an engineer, what's the hardest thing to learn? And the person said, well, C++ is probably the hardest thing to learn. C++ is a computer programming language. It is indeed one of the hardest things to learn.

So by age nine, I thought, hey, I'm going to learn how to program C++. And about 40 pages of code later, I could construct a mouse cursor that moved around, which felt like a lot of work for something relatively simple. music was something Daniel's family was clearly really passionate about. And you hear that actually quite a bit about Swedish kids. I guess they just have a really good public music education there. It's not considered something that you do when your kid just gets into pot here like it is in America. It turns out he was more passionate about girls, no big surprise. So he picks up the guitar, which is probably good advice to a young Daniel Eck. I do wonder if he ever got the drums now that he's a billionaire. It's like, can finally afford. to get the drums and you can live in a house where your neighbors won't complain. One issue that I might take with this advice, though, is he mentions, he says something akin to follow your passion. It's not quite that simplified. But I find that to be often bad advice, because we hear it from successful people, but this is kind of survivor bias where they're successful.

They've got a big platform because somebody, Mark Cuban, tweeted it or something, right? Not to put him on blast. I'm making that up. But they're also a minority. of people. We don't hear from all of these entrepreneurs or would-be entrepreneurs or creators that followed their passions straight into their mom's basement, never to be seen again, essentially. So where do you stand on all this? So my very first book was called The Startup of You. And part of what I was trying to do is to give people how to say, yes, your passion's important, but you should be paying attention to market realities. You should say, well, what do the opportunities look like? What does competition look like? Do I have a plan for getting

here? Do I have the resources for getting there? So the, oh, I'll follow my passions, and my passions will lead me to an amazing career. Lots of people don't work out in the video gaming industry. Lots of people don't work out in Hollywood. Lots of people don't work out. Like, there's just these pools where people get exposed to them when they're in, you know, high school or college or younger, and they go, that's what I want to be. And you're like, yeah, actually, you know, there's millions that go into it, and there's tens or hundreds where it works out. And you have to understand that reality of these things. And so I think it's important to identify your passions. It's important to kind of figure out, all right, which passions are the things that would really trigger,

but also to be, what's the best match for me to what the opportunity landscape looks like? How do you evaluate that landscape? I mean, that's a very complex question, of course. I mean, if you're really good at it, you work in an office like this with a bunch of partners investing in things, which maybe you're a great person to ask about that. Because I think for me, I would go, 20-year-old me would go, huh, okay, pretty soon this internet thing is going to be everywhere. I have fast internet in my dorm, so I download MP3s. Pretty soon people are going to have this in their home. What advantage can I take out of that? That would be advanced thinking for 2000, 2003.

And I remember thinking along the lines of, I had a lot of kind of dumb ideas about that, but they weren't all terrible because one of them turned into Spotify, which of course I have nothing to do with. But I was like, this Napster thing, this guy's on to something, probably going to get sued into oblivion, but you can't stop this train. It turned out that I would have been right, but I wouldn't have thought to license the music. I would have just thought to move it to China and not get caught. So first part is I use your network. And what people mostly mistake is they think, well, if I can get to the head of this record label or something else, that would inform me on this question. Usually we don't have access to that. Usually the question is, well, I have some family, I have some friends. I have some people the friends know, have some people the family knows. That's my network when I'm young. Yeah.

But what you do is, well, who are the smartest people that know me, that may have a good sense of this, that may be able to connect me with someone? that is interesting, that could then give me some sense where I can go, okay, is this a good idea where I have enough of a unique edge? I could pick up some momentum. I could run an experiment with it. And the questions to ask the network. So first is not just ask the people you know, but ask them if they know someone who would be useful to talk to.

Second is the question you ask them is, what's wrong with this idea? Not do you like this idea? Right. Because they'll go, yes, I do. Yeah, you seem nice. I want to be supportive. Yeah, yeah, it's great. No, what could go wrong?

Right. If this fails, why would it fail? Right. And so you're getting a sense of that because you go, okay, I think I can navigate that stuff. So network, one key component. Another one is, and this is again from my book startup view, I have this framework called A, B, Z planning, which is you have a plan A, you have plans B, which is how to think about like, well, if A is not working out, maybe B will work, or maybe B would be a different path or, you know, that kind of thing. And then you have a Z plan, which is, it's not working out. at all. What's my lifeboat plan? I'm going to row to a different set of plan A and plan B's. So having that as a planning framework. And if you can build that planning framework around your particular idea, maybe your passion and so forth, you go, okay, I'm respecting the fact that I'm going to change. I'm going to change. The world's going to change. I'm going to learn new things. I'm going to figure out, oh, yeah, 3,000 people who are in better positions have this music idea than I do. And this isn't going to work. I need to change. Then you can keep moving and you can keep playing forward. So having a flexible planning framework that accounts for your changes,

your changes in your knowledge, and your changes in the way the world, the market is working, are all really critical. That's really solid advice. Thank you. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Reid Hoffman. We'll be right back. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. To learn more about our sponsors and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. If you'd like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash subscribe. Subscribing to the show is absolutely free. It just means that you get all of the latest episodes in your podcast player as they're released so you don't miss a single thing from the show.

And now back to our show with Reed Hoffman. I know Daniel was really young when he started his first business, which I think leads people to maybe get a little discouraged. He was also very young, though, when he started skill stacking. So he learned music, he learned programming because he got as in his words, kind of cocky. He was like, what's the hardest thing to learn? I would love to hear that story. So in this next segment from Masters of Scale, Daniel tells Reid about that first business he started at age 14.

Let's talk about your first entrepreneurial venture. Yeah, probably like 1997 or so. People had started talking about webpages. In Sweden, at least, it was kind of the craze that everyone should have a web page. So one day, there was someone who asked me if I could create a web page for it. them. I didn't know how to do HTML and I certainly didn't know how to do anything in design. So my instinct was kind of to say no. The person kept coming back and asking me again if I could do it. And so about the third time the person asked, I decided to just take an absurd number

that I could think of just to make sure I get rid of the person. So I said, well, sure, I'll do it. But I want $5,000 to do it. And the person said, done. And I'm like, oh, holy I know I actually have to learn how to do this. Daniel built those web pages and he built them well. Word spread. More people sought him out. He raised his price to $10,000 and they agreed to pay. What happened next is one of the most audacious examples of scale I know of,

especially for a teenager. Fast forward, I'm now like in later stages in elementary school. So I had like all the people in my class that were good at math. I taught them how to do HTML for me and the people that were really good at design. I taught them Photoshop. So I was basically like running an illegal sweatshop when I was like 14. And that was the start of my entrepreneurial career. Well, it wasn't so much as a sweatshop because unlike, you know, classic child labor things,

which is like, oh, they're working 12 hours a day and so forth. This is very high-priced goods with skills that help them have entire careers later and so forth. So, you know, the entrepreneurial side of this. is cool. Like, one would normally think that when you experience this much success early, you would just keep doing it. So what caused you to kind of go, look, like, this is great? I've got a huge income coming in. Yeah. I did that. Time to move on. What was the thinking? What I started off doing was I bought, like, the TV I wanted. I bought the guitars that I wanted, and I got the computer that I wanted, and eventually I ran out of things to buy.

Notice that among all the material possessions he lists, Daniel the music fan doesn't mention buying records or CDs. It's not because his love of music has died, quite the opposite. Daniel was listening to more music than ever, but like most people across Sweden, he was buying less of it. The age of music piracy had begun, and Sweden was leading the way. Thanks to government-mandated broadband, the country was way ahead of the rest of the world, in terms of internet speeds. Music files that took hours to download in other countries could be downloaded in Sweden in seconds.

People became used to fast free access to stolen music, and Daniel was no exception. But piracy did more than supersized his music library. It gave him a calling. The pivotal moment when I realized that I wanted to work with the Internet, specifically not just as a software developer, It was the first time I tried Napster. Napster was a file sharing service that launched in 1999.

It was infamous for allowing people to illegally share huge amounts of copyrighted music. For me, it was like really an epiphany. Up until that point, the Internet was mostly about text and maybe some blinking gifts. And all of a sudden came this Napster thing, which enabled you to get access to the entire world's music. and for someone who's really into music, it was phenomenal. I discovered so much great music from it, and when it got shut down, I figured that you can't put the genie back in the bottle,

so something like it must exist. Daniel was right. The genie was out, and there was no going back, despite the best efforts of record companies. Napster may have been sunk by a legal broadside in 2001, but others sprung up to take. its place. The genie had granted every music fan their wildest dream, no less than every piece of music ever recorded for free. The record companies went to desperate extremes to stop it.

They sued piracy services and even private individuals. Meanwhile, artists from Britney Spears to Metallica railed against the illegal downloaders saying it was as bad as shoplifting CDs. musicians had lost trust in their fans, and fans lost trust in musicians. Trust was in an all-time low across the board, and this was Daniel's opportunity. I thought long and hard about what I was passionate about and what made me get into technology to begin with. Funnily enough, I took a stint off for a few months and just played guitar, like as on the road, with various Swedish artists. So I was kind of like doing more soul-searching than anything else. And what came back to me was like I had these two passions in life, music and technology.

And so it started dawning upon myself, like, why haven't anyone like fixed this? Why haven't anyone made the NAPS or thing work, both for consumers and work for artists as well? I think what worries a lot of people when they hear things like this is they hear of literal children or teenagers and they go, I can't do anything big. I'm too late. I'm 23 or I'm 43. I didn't learn C++ when I was eight and a half or whatever how old he was. I missed the personal computer and internet explosion. And guys like me who were right there and obsessed with computers at the time, but just didn't do anything with them, it's easy for us to go, you know, I was so early and I just squandered that advantage. How much of success, especially at scale, comes down to timing?

There's always luck. There's always timing. And so part of the thing to say to compare yourself to a Bill Gates, a Mark Zuckerberg, et cetera, is frankly foolishness, right? Because there's a bunch of people. They're enormously brilliant, talented, grit-driven people. But there's other people who also have those characteristics. And it comes down to, look, were you in the right place at the right time? Did you realize that opportunity? Did you pursue it? How did the competition work out? How did the stuff work out? So there's always a range that comes from serendipity. It's one of the reasons why having a flexible planning approach, planning for risks like thinking what could go right, what could go wrong,

navigating across that landscape of what you're doing is really important general strategy. Now that being said, my general belief is that in most circumstances, especially places where we're lucky to be, the U.S., other places, where you can say, well, I always can make opportunity. I can actually make the opportunity. It may be much harder for me than it was for someone who is sitting in Silicon Valley or was for someone in an elite college, but it's doable. I can do it. And it may require 2x to work, 3x to work, 4x to work. That's what happens. It's still better than being in the Congo, like an area where it's war-torn and terrible and so forth. And sometimes you're like, well, you just got to move. You just got to try to get out. So I think that that opportunity is always there. And look, the game is not so much. Can I be one of the heroes that's written about in the next hundred years? Sometimes that happens. That's almost always a healthy dose of serendipity and luck.

But the game is, can I do something that where I started from, I can make something interesting? I can do something where people say, well, yeah, you went from there to there, and that's pretty impressive. And that's the game that's in front of all of us. It's tricky because I think we often move the goalposts on ourselves. And I'm wondering if someone in your position does this. So for me, grew up in Michigan, mom's a school teacher. Dad was an engineer at Ford.

Pretty common story for Detroiter. And then it's like, oh, your son went to Michigan. Oh, he went to law school. Oh, he moved to New York and then California. And he's got this business on the internet that nobody understands. I don't know what a podcast is, right? And that's going to be hearing that until I'm 50 or beyond. But then it's like, oh, well, it's great that I have this big interview podcast.

But what I should have done is start. Facebook or Spotify, especially living here, you just go, well, I'm not a billionaire. This is, my life is unfair or something. And I wonder if people who are in your position go, dang, you know, I should have started a rocket company. And then I could have started an electric car company or I could have started this giant other thing.

What's wrong with me? I, you know, only started LinkedIn and work at this amazing firm. I think that's a common human condition. So I think there are a number of highly wealthy, highly successful people are like, Well, wait, wait, wait, I could still, like, be better. And I think the key thing is to not measure yourself really relatively to other people other than to figure out how to do better. Like, it's not a question of, like, which of us is better in the league rankings,

which of us made more money, which of us has more mentions on the internet, you know, in some kind of positive sense. Like, if you get wrapped up in that game, you're not playing your own game. You're not playing the game. It's like, well, who are you? What impact do you want to have in the world and in life? What do you stand for? What makes you, you?

And so it's worth paying attention to other people and what they're learning and how they're doing and how you could do better, but only for how you could do better. And so I do think across the whole spectrum, the goalpost move, and that people go, well, now I want to play this game in order to be the bigger, you know, more important person in some registration of that. But I actually think that it's very good to learn as early as you can. You're playing your own game, right? And what success looks like is, well, what's your measurement for success?

What's your sense of, well, this is a life worth leaving, right? Like, this is what I want to have been known for and this is what I want to do. And part of how you know that is who are the people that you respect and what would they think, yeah, that's great, right? That's important. So it's important to realize the goalpost might move. But if you use that to challenge yourself and sharpen your skill set, great. But if you use it to beat yourself up, you're just going to beat yourself up until you're dead. Yes.

Which is kind of like, I teeter between those two things, if I'm being honest. But I think most people probably do. I think it's good to always, like in the startup view, we have this concept permanent beta, which is you're always learning, you're always changing. So I think it's good to have that and have that always be learning, always be stretching yourself. Oh yeah, I got here. Well, now maybe I can get here.

That's a good impulse. But the notion is to say, also reflect on, well, I'm doing some good stuff. Right. And by the way, sometimes doing some good stuff is you helped out one of your friends. That's great. Right? I mean, so really take pride in the things also that you're doing that are contributing well. Easier said than done for some of us. But I think also some of the drive that makes people really good at whatever it is they're doing, it's almost cliche, is the same thing that's making them miserable personally. Right. Like the tortured artist is one thing, but we see the tortured entrepreneur who's like, I only have 100 million users. I'm never going to amount to anything.

Or this is failing because we're going through our burn rate is so high. and yet, I mean, even things like PayPal, it's like, is this really going to do anything? Is this going to be successful? And then it was. And by the way, I think it's that balance. It's worth owning that sense of, well, I want to be more. Like, own it, right? And go, but don't own it in a way that you're making it less true that you'll get there

and making it in a way that you're part of life is to have some joy in the good things you're doing. Make sure you experience that. Okay. So our next segment from Masters of Scale features Marissa Mayer. And Marissa is famous for, among other things, being an early employee at Google and later the CEO of Yahoo. And she's also famous for making decisions based on a ton of data. In the story we're about to hear, Marissa is still in college and she's agonizing over a decision she doesn't know how to make. Marissa herself is one of Silicon Valley's more famous names.

She joined Google as employee number 20 and their first female engineer. After 13 years of Google, she moved on to become Yahoo's eighth and number. final CEO, but we're going to start at the beginning. Marissa was still a college student, and Google was one of a thousand teeny Silicon Valley startups competing for talent. Due to a long-distance relationship and a bad bowl of pasta, I was in my dorm room on a Friday night, and I told myself, if anyone else mails you want another job, like, you just have to pick. You have 13 good offers. Like, you just have to pick one. At just that moment, another email popped up on Marissa's screen. The subject line was just three words.

Work at Google. He came in late on this Friday night, and I said, like, work at Google. And I remember looking down and being like, this bowl of pasta is so bad. And I am so pathetic that I'm here on a Friday night eating bad pasta. Remember, this is 1999, the peak of the dot-com bubble. Stanford grad students were showered with offers from tech recruiters. Marissa assumed she was just being spammed. She hit delete, or at least she meant to.

But I accidentally hit the space bar, which in my email, reader program, opened the message. So I looked back up and it was open and I realized it was actually an email from Salar Commingar, another early Googler who said, you know, I've been talking to different professors at Stanford about who I should be talking to that's graduating. Your name came up. Salar Comongar, the Googler who sent that email was Google employee number nine for those keeping count. He's now senior vice president of you two. Now Marissa had another offer, 14 to choose from. It's the kind of problem most. new grads wish they had. How did she decide? Methodically. Marissa enlisted help from

Andre Vanier, a fellow Stanford student who is now a VP at Oath. I went up to his apartment in San Francisco and said, okay, I've got all these offer letters. We pulled all the values for all of the different columns off of these offer letters. So, you know, salary, stock, you know, where it was, career trajectory, promotion ability, happiness quotions. They drew up charts and plotted graphs. They buried their heads in the numbers. After six hours turning data, Marissa looked up to see the sun had set. Her head was spinning, and she felt no closer to a decision. Andre just loves working out problems like that. And turning me, he's like, well, this has been really fun. And he's like, you know, thank you so much for involving me in this. And I was like, but like, I haven't made a

decision. And I was like, this hasn't been fun for me at all. Like, I'm completely overwhelmed. So he's like, go to bed, sleep on it. The first thing you think of tomorrow morning, whether you articulated or not, that's the right decision. And so that is how I ultimately picked Google. I went to sleep. I woke up the next morning and I just wanted to work at Google for a lot of the reasons I could articulate and for a bunch of other reasons that were harder to articulate. Like the fact that I felt like the smartest people were there and I felt really unprepared to try and do what they wanted to do it overall as a company, right? They were really ambitious. And for all those reasons I picked it.

Marissa is well known for her intense use of data when she makes decisions. Indeed, it has been the target of much criticism. But what people overlook is that she's not making choices based solely on the data she collects. Each table of data she builds is like a diving board. The higher she builds it, the wider the view. And the bigger the splash when she jumps. But whether she actually takes that dive or not, that's still based on intuition. I like to be really data-driven, but I don't want to ignore sort of the human instinct element of it.

which, you know, for me, my processes a lot of times roll around in the data, get to know and really understand it really well, and then make a gut-based call, which is often supported by data and a lot of hard-to articulate factors as well. Informed intuition is, I actually think, a good way of making decisions. Totally, yes. So Marissa took the plunge and became Google employee number 20. Not a bad pick given her career trajectory, but is there such a thing as too much data? we hear about analysis, paralysis, and things like that.

How do we strike a balance? So there is almost always too much data. And part of what you have to think about is, what are the key things that would change my decision? Not let me integrate all of the information, because then you get overwhelmed with that. And by the way, that overwhelming can actually make you have bad decisions. So I'll share, like, for example,

one of the frameworks that I tend to utilize a lot, which is you say, okay, this is first priority, this is second party, this is a third priority. So frequently what I'll do is like, can I make this decision just on first priority, not looking at second or third? Like what would the decision be if it was just on the first priority? Because by the way, then it's only the data around that. It's only the things around that.

And if you say, well, this would be the decision. Then you go, okay, well, why would I allow that to change for any of the other priorities? If that's really the driving priority, then, you know, okay, maybe that should be the decision. I should tune it a little bit to respect these other interests. these other goals, these other needs, but that should be what I'm going to do. And that's one of the ways to simplify the set of data, because you go, what is the really, really key thing? The only thing that I find personally useful about doing the process that is the exhaustive, like here, I did the entire table, I did the entire spreadsheet. And some people who are deeply smart

and analytic like Marissa really make that work well. But for me, I'm just looking today, oh, this is the one question that matters. And once I figure out that question, that's the decision. That's it. Right. And so I think that's important. The other thing that is important is how do you set your goals the right way in terms of how do you evaluate the data within it? And I find that people make very commonly one of two mistakes. It's almost like the Goldilocks mistake in goal setting. So there you go, what's my next step? It's like, what's my passion? What's my next step? I should only evaluate on the next step. And you're like, well, but actually, in fact, you have this whole career and whole life in front of you. If you evaluate only on the next step, you're going to have a problem. Now, in this and they go, well, I want to be a hedge fund manager. Like, this is the thing I want to do. Like, this is the thing. And this is like, you know, 15 years out. And you go, well, don't you think you're going to learn some things? Don't you think you might change? Don't you think you're reckoning? You might be going along this path and realize you have this other great opportunity. So saying, that's the only thing. So frequently what I do is I say, the way of decisioning is I

think of as a two-step decisioning process. But would you go, integrate into this step. what is my changing landscape of possibility on the second step? Not where I'm going to be 20 years from now, but like how does that landscape change in a way that's really good for me? It's a good fit for my skills, a good fit for my passions, a good fit for what the market needs and opportunities, and do that. So you integrate to those two. Now, when you're only doing that, the amount of data is a much more compact set of data. Yeah, interesting. Marisa also mentioned informed intuition. And I'm wondering, how do we know and we're informing our intuition with data versus just like procrastinating because with there, but there's more data over there.

Maybe there's something in there that will inform my intuition, aka never pulling the trigger on anything. Well, there's additional thing I can say, which is one of the things I learned from startups is when I'm operating and what I think of as quick time, when I'm confronted with a decision, I say, what would my decision right now be? If I had to make the decision right now, I don't get any more data. this is the data I have, this is what the decision would be. Then because I go, okay, what are the key things that might change my decision?

So I need to talk to Jordan. I need to talk to, you know, Sarah, I need to talk to, or I need to find out if this is true or not, right? Like this thing, great, do I have the time frame and the ability and the cost to go do those things? Okay, let me go get those specific things and then inform this decision. And that's a way of trying to say, what's the main? minimum set of data that I need to make were sometimes very massive decisions. Like it could be

the, are we going to launch product A and work on product A or product B? Are we going to raise money from person X or person Y? Like huge decisions. Yeah. But you could still kind of make it really compact. And that's one of the ways to do it. And so one of your tests should be is not, because you could always say, well, more data is useful. The test is what's the minimum set of data that you would actually, in fact, make this decision on? Right. So it's a almost like gut check first, and then that gut check or intuition says, okay, as long as we find out that that's really the market size and that this is really going to cost this, we should do it, as opposed to let's gather the pattern of Seagull migration in Idaho at this time of year and

then see if that affects our decision. Or talk to everyone. Right. Talk to every, yeah. We need six months of studying. That's how the government makes decisions, right? But it's not good for business. Yes.

Or for individuals. Or for individuals, right. especially not for individuals. There are people that are still trying to figure out. I mean, whatever, we can go down that road another time. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Reed Hoffman. We'll be right back after this. Thanks for listening and supporting the show.

Your support of our advertisers keeps us on the air and keeps us going. So to learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget the worksheet for today's episode. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. And don't forget, if you're listening to us on The Overcast Player, click that little star next to the episode. It really helps us out, and we really appreciate it. And now for the conclusion of our episode with Reid Hoffman.

In our next segment from Masters of Scale, we hear from Mark Pinkus, founder of Zinga, aka the Farmville people. He had some good points in this next clip. He's essentially telling us that we need to know how to kill our ideas and know when to give up on something. When the clip starts, he's telling Reed about one of his greatest failures, a startup called Tribe, which was an early social network. It's pretty amazing if you think about it that I started one of the first three social networks in 2003, and I managed to fail.

At a time when everything worked, I actually managed to fail. I think Mark is being too hard on himself. It's true that 2003 was a banner year for social networks. MySpace, Tribe, LinkedIn, high five, Friendster the year before, Facebook, the year after. of those only half are still around today. The lesson from tribe that came resoundingly out for me and still stands out, that as entrepreneurs, part of the journey that we're on

is learning how to separate our winning instincts from our losing ideas. I think as a rule of thumb, if you're a good entrepreneur, you can assume that your instincts are right 95% of the time and your ideas might be right 25% of the time. I'm not as certain as Mark when it comes to fixing percentage on things as hard to pin down as instincts and ideas. But I do believe in being able to recognize a winning instinct as an essential part of being an entrepreneur.

And I certainly agree with Mark that you can expect to see a very high mortality rate among your ideas, even if the instinct behind them is right. In the case of tribe, Mark was pursuing three instincts that, separately, would indeed turn out to be spot on. His instinct that real-name social networking would be huge, was born out by Facebook. His belief in the power of smaller sub-community forums,

powered by reputation, found form in Reddit, while creating a better way to find jobs and showcase your professional talents. Why, that's LinkedIn. But his idea to pursue all of these instincts with one product was wrong. I persisted with one losing idea, which was, what if we mashed all these things together?

And I got a bunch of the components of that wrong, and I stubbornly persisted with it. I enabled anybody to connect with anybody. And what I got wrong was that mass market people did not feel comfortable sharing everything with strangers. Mark needed to kill the extreme openness of Tribe if he wanted to attract more mainstream users and take advantage of the big opportunity.

But he could not bring himself to deliver the killing blow. The idea of Tribe wasn't right. And rather than failing fast so that you get a lot of shots on goal, we stoically, stubbornly, heroically stuck to our one idea the entire time. It was this bitter experience with Tribe that reawaken the killer and Mark. Out of that, for me, came this mentality that I brought into Zinga of, I'm not wed to any idea. Whether it's mine, yours, someone else's, I'll try anything and I'll kill anything and I'll kill it.

quickly. And I'm not going to let killing an idea kill a winning instinct. What I like most about this idea is that, especially as entrepreneurs, and this goes for creators of any kind as well, we need to separate our winning intuition or instincts from our losing ideas. He seems pretty confident about the percentages of him being 95% right in terms of intuition or instincts and 25% right in terms of ideas. I don't know how you track on that, but I love this concept because it's really easy to go, well, that idea didn't work. I'm clearly not cut out for this. I'm an idiot. I'm never going to get it right. So part of what I think is really good about Mark's framework here is there are times you're wrong with intuition and you need to actually correct for that.

But frequently, one test of the intuition does not tell you, right? You actually have to test through a sequence of ideas. And what it allows you to do is acknowledge you might be wrong about this. Like, where people frequently go wrong is they go, I'm so right about the intuition, this idea must work. And I keep working at that idea until I literally drive the bus off the cliff. Right? And you're like, no, no, no, bad idea. You need to pivot earlier. You need to figure it out.

And so actually, in fact, for one piece, it gives you the psychological space to say, well, maybe this idea is wrong. And maybe I should abandon this idea. And it's very hard when you're the author of the idea. You go, well, but that's my value. That's my idea. That's my value. Like, that's the thing I have. That's unique from everyone else.

And you know, more often than not, greater than 50% of time, you're going to have to give up on that idea, right? And that's hard for people. And that's one thing that's really useful about, you know, Mark's break of, you know, kind of a winning intuition versus a potentially losing idea. The other thing that I like about it is that part of how I advise people when they think about macro pivots and changes is you kind of measure what your idea flow is. And so you go, well, in order to make this intuition work, I've got this idea. I've got idea one. I've got idea two. I've got idea three. I've got idea four. And part of how you go, well, maybe that intuition's wrong is you go, okay, so I've now tried five ideas. Is my sixth idea as good or better than the average or the kind of set of the five ideas? Or am I now in a substantially worse ideas than I had before? And now the idea, because you're going to say, I'm now kind of sort of scraping at the bottom of the barrel for the ideas to make the intuition work. And that's when you pivot the intuition. That's when you may say, you know, I tried five different ideas, doesn't really work, I'm now going to go for a different intuition. That's actually really useful because I think most of us are so ready to throw out or actually either hold on with a

death grip or throw out an idea and then just think, well, I'm not, and I don't have what it takes or this can't be done. Or since I did this wrong, everything I do, I'm going to be making a similar mistake. And we might not have those thoughts consciously, but it's kind of hard to shake, especially if you really get your butt handed to you by mentors, peers of the market or whoever, you might just think, okay, I'm going to go work at Target. And an additional point that's really important, I think we may get to this later too, but it's always, like, oriented, always get back in the game and keep playing. It's part of the grit point. Now, the point of that doesn't mean always keep trying to do the same thing until it totally crushes you. You mean to pivot and change.

but staying in the game is part of how you win. It seems clear now that never give up is pretty terrible advice, but it's advice we hear all the time. Actually, I think the people who say, follow your passion, follow that with, and never give up. It's almost like they just looked at a bunch of Hallmark cards and we're like, I need a keynote speech. But how do we know when to give up on the idea itself?

Yeah, if the market kills us, maybe, or a company may be a better question. How do we know when that time is where we go, look, pivot is not going to do it. Five degrees to the left is not going to do it. This needs to be nuked because we need to take our ball and put our resources somewhere else. Well, the framework I use for this is the same framework I just outlined, which is what you do is you say, I've got a plan A, right? That's kind of idea one for this. And then it's not working and I'm adjusting. Maybe my goals are, I'm adjusting what I'm doing. Those are kind of ideas, two, three, four. But as you begin

to realize that on this path, the ideas that you're testing and aren't working are getting worse and worse, you want to pivot early. Okay. Right. So part of what the key is, is the mistake that people make is they go, oh, when the company is shutting down, now I pivot. And you're like, no, no, no, no. You actually want to be asking yourself the question, should I pivot?

And you want to ask that question before the market hits you in the face with a two-by-four. And that's true as an individual, too. You're kind of going, you shouldn't be going, I get to the end of a decade, and I go, I really should have done something different nine years ago. That's a mistake. Right. Me learning all this Symbian programming instead of iOS. Turned out not a good future-proofed idea.

But what you do is if you're good and rigorous about asking yourself the question, call it every year and going, well, do I now have more confidence or less confidence in the past I'm in? And I'm testing. I'm talking to my network. I'm asking about it. Because, by the way, sometimes a test is, hey, do you think the symbian thing is going somewhere? And you go, oh, I hear from a bunch of smart people. I don't think it's going anywhere.

Okay, do I really know something they don't? Which I might. Sometimes that's the bold thing. But consider trying to get to your pivots early and think everyone pivots. The view, because this is the whole survivor's bias thing, you just talked about, is everyone loves to tell these narratives of, well, when I was two, I knew what I was going to do when I was 40. Yeah, it sounds good. And it was a straight line that was kind of smooth sailing.

the wind was at our backs. It was kind of unproblematic. It's always fiction. That's just, that's not true. Everyone pivots. So you're going to be pivoting too. So let me pivot intelligently and early. That doesn't mean you don't have persistence. That doesn't mean you don't try the hard thing a couple of times every so often. But you're, you're knowing that pivoting is part of the game. Perfect. Yeah. I think that's, it's not defeat. You're merely steering the boat to get to the port in the right direction. Exactly. says, well, you know, I had to make a left turn, so I lose. Yes. You're not supposed to get, you, what is that, like, sort of momentum game at a bar where you, you have to throw the

little cartridge and it has to land in the exact specific spot? I guess it looks like curling on salt. This analogy is gone to hell. Let's just go to the next clip. When Instagram first launched, it was mostly just a camera app with some network features, and I know I'm just totally de-romanticizing the idea, and I'm doing that on purpose here. It arguably still is kind of like that. But what we'll see in this next clip is that the initial explosion in users came in part, in large part, because of filters, which I don't even know how to use, admittedly, but the founder, Kevin Sistram's wife, actually came up with this idea. Here's the clip. Kevin wished he could take credit for it, but he says it was actually his wife's idea. It came to them during a trip to Mexico.

We rented a little room in a bed and breakfast, and I was working on bourbon at the time, and we were pivoting to photos, but she was like, I don't think I'm going to ever use this app. I was like, why not? She's like, well, my photos aren't good. And I was like, well, that's fine. Like, you can post photos. It'll be good. And she goes, well, they're not as good as your friend Greg's. And I was like, well, Greg filters all his photos. And she looks at me and she's like, well, you should add filters. And I was like, ah, you're right. I should have filters. I hear stories like Kevin and Nicole's all the time. Entrepreneurs take note. An honest partner is always your best source of ideas. Kevin was smart enough to listen.

I went back to the bed and breakfast room, and with a dial-up connection in Mexico, of all places, I was looking up code on how to change colors and photos. And I made the first filter there on the spot. It's still in the app called X-Pro 2. X-Pro 2 was one of the 11 original filters that Instagram launched with. Each of the distinctive filters out of the kind of blurred edges, color wash, and light leaks that gave even

mediocre photos, a sense of nostalgic meaning. And when Instagram launched, there were a lot of mediocre photos. Phone cameras were still primitive. Any person we gave it to, their eyes lit up because they were like, oh, like my photos seems so much better now. And that was the moment when we realized, we think we have something. Filters were the simple feature that set Instagram apart. But Instagram also made it simple to share those beautiful photos.

And this was its true secret to scale. And I remember hearing from people, they were like, whoa, I just got a like. And I was like, yeah, because it's a network. And they're like, oh, I didn't realize it. I thought it was just a camera app. Instagram was an Insta hit. On its first day in the app store, 25,000 downloads. Within a week, 100,000.

Within 10 weeks, 1 million users, Instagram had entered multiplayer mode. So an honest partner is a lot of. almost always the best source of ideas or often the best source of ideas. Why do you think this is the case? Well, there's lots of reasons. So one is they have a certain amount of objectivity. So they don't have their own ego as invested in. Oh, no, this is brilliant. This is the exact right thing, et cetera. So they can they can both see the potential strengths and the weaknesses in a clear way. Second is that they have an investment in trying to help you. So they can say, look, I'm trying to help you get to the better place, whether it's double down or change or pivot. And the third is

they have a communications channel that you trust. You trust this person. You trust their interest in you. So that partner, and by the way, this like part of the meaning of life is seek out those people. It isn't just, you know, your spouse, et cetera, but it's your friends, your allies. Seeking that out is super critical. And those people, it's more than gold. It's more than diamonds. It's more than platinum. Those are the people that not only give meaning to your life, but also help you steer. How do you find those people? Of course, it's a matter of filtering, I would imagine. You meet 100 people and one of them turns out to be a great board member for your personal life. Do you have any specific ways where you go, ah, this person is really, I really want to spend more time

with them. They are sharp. First is lots of people have interesting perspectives and interesting experience in various different ways. The dimension could be knowledge of the world, knowledge of an industry, knowledge of what's going on here locally, their own networks of who the people they know, the kinds of things that, like, there's just lots and lots of knowledge and different things. And so the first thing is to realize that, you know, the vast majority of people have something of value and, and like figuring on what that is. Now, that doesn't mean that everything is a value. So like, for example, I meet a great artist and I go, oh, this person really understands, like, how we order our perceptions. And they're the person I want to ask

about that. I wouldn't go ask them about an investment in a company. They just wouldn't know it, it wouldn't be useful. It kind of puts them in an awkward spot and so forth. So you have a whole massive network of potential advisors that it's good to map to. Then what happens when you say, well, who are the people that are the best kind of inner circle guides for you? Well, those are people who are generally speaking somewhat balanced in their own self. So when they're giving you advice, they actually see you in giving advice. They don't go, well, if I was in your shoes, I would want to do X. It's like, well, but you're not in my shoes. I'm in my shoes.

We have different goals. We have different interests. We have different risk tolerances. We have different, like, kind of like the ways that we play and what we're willing to do. And so people who go, look, I see you and I at least know you some, and I care about you. And I care about what the right outcomes for you. And so, by the way, I'm willing to tell you the hard thing. It's like, look, I know you have your heart set on this acting career is probably not going to work out.

Right? Like it's a really long, hard path for you. And I know that you may get angry with me because I'm trying to help you this way. And I'm going to try to do it in the warmest possible, most compassionate way in order to make it happen because I want to show that I care for you and what I'm doing that. And I'm paying attention to it. So those are the kinds of people that you want to be most close in. And yes, they may have some expertise, some knowledge about the world.

They may be super smart. All those things are useful attributes. But their ability to stay true to be. being an ally with you is the really key characteristic around that inner circle. Do you find that some of us maybe have partners with terrible ideas or partners that are too close to the project? And we go, okay, they're telling me this and I should probably not listen to them. It is almost always the case that you will have some of that.

And the way that I do that is I go, okay, what do I think I know that they don't? And so I get crisp on it. They may be close to it. They may be, I may think that they're being led by their own bias. I maybe think that they have something like an emotional decision or something else or a passion decision that is biasing their decision. And I may believe all that. That's great. But the discipline you get to and you say, well, this person's close and they're smart and they're saying this.

Okay, what do I think that I know that they don't? And can I articulate myself that with some degree of precision? And if I do that, then I can feel comfortable going, okay, I'm going to not follow their advice. I'm going to have heard it. I'm going to put it in the memory bank, but I'm going to go, I'm going to continue on this course of action. You hear that, Mom?

It's nothing personal. I think actually that's a random accidental example. People who are really close to us often want to protect us. So they say things like, ooh, if he goes and tries to start this company and fails, he's going to cry, he's going to be upset, and then he's going to move back in our basement. You know, you're doing really well at the police department. Why don't you just stay there? And it's not not in your best interest, but it's also playing it safe because they don't want to see you fall on your face.

Yes. It's not naysaying. It's they're trying to protect you. Yes. It's out of love. But by the way, it isn't whether or not you take risk or not. We almost always take risk and everything. Even staying at the police department is actually taking risk.

It's a question of taking the smart risks. And this also gets down to the competencies of advice giving because if you realize that every path involves some risks and it's risk tradeoffs, then you go, okay, so how do we trade it off? and that's part of the reason why the A, B, Z planning framework. Because you go, well, look, you actually could move back in the basement. That's fine. And then we help you get the confidence to go out in the world again, and we all going to agree to do that. Like you could say, look, the conversation is,

if you start this company, you do this thing, it may not work out. Do you have a plan for it doesn't work out? And some of my plans, I move back to the basement, okay, great. You're going to move back to the basement. We will actually, in fact, do that. Do you have a plan of how you get out of the basement? Like, what are you going to do then? And are you going to have the energy and the dedicated

of wherewithal to do that. And the person says, yes, I will. Okay, great, take the risk. Perfect. So, Jason, slightly different format, but a whole lot of fun and kind of a good reason to listen to a whole bunch of other good podcasts and then ask questions. It's a little meta. It's definitely a little meta.

I enjoyed it quite a bit as I was going through the clips. I'm like, oh, this is good stuff. I really enjoy it. And Reed is such a smart guy. I mean, I met him like, what, 15 years ago. My friend Joey introduced us. Joey Ito from the MIT Media Lab introduced us. And Reed gave me business advice over breakfast that he didn't have to.

And he spent an hour with me like coaching me on how to sell my company, which was invaluable, which I ended up selling to two cows, thanks to his advice. Now that hour of consulting with Reid Hoffman is probably like six figures price tag. Plus you got to pay for the lunch. Yeah, and had to pay for it and pay for the food and give him a cut. Yeah, there you go. All right. So you paid your dues.

And look where you are now. Look where we all are now. No, but Reed is great. The clips are great. We've got a whole part two coming. So if that seemed to end a little abruptly, no worries. We have another hour coming up with Reed next time, Jason. Yes, we do.

Yes, we do. This was just, this was the teaser. The teaser. And we're going to bring you, yeah, we're going to bring you the rest of it next episode. Big thank you to Reed Hoffman. In fact, if you haven't been listening to Masters of Scale and you're interested in the business world or the tech world, it is a just phenomenal podcast. And it's done by the Wait What crew.

I worked with them on this project. And everything they produce is just so, so well done. It's called Masters of Scale. We'll link it in the show notes, and you can find that anywhere you find your favorite podcasts. And if you want to know how I managed to book these great guests and manage my relationships, well, this one, Jason, was your relationship,

and you created that over years, and of course you're also expert-level networker, and we've put some of those tiny habits and systems into our six-minute networking course, which is free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Don't wait, of course. A lot of people kick the can down the road. You've got to dig the well before you're thirsty.

Once you need relationships, you are too late. The drills take a few minutes today. This is Reid Hoffman approved or Reid Hoffman recommended in terms of networking and making sure that you've got those warm introductions going. You've got to dig that well before you're thirsty. I wish I knew this stuff 20 years ago. That's all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Speaking of building relationships, tell me your number one takeaway here from Reid Hoffman. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram, and there's a video of this interview, part one and two, on our YouTube channel.

Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. This show is produced in association with Podcast One, and this episode was co-produced by Jason Warm Introduction to Philippo and Jen Harbinger. Show notes and worksheets by Robert Fogarty, and I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends

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