The Jordan Harbinger Show - 208: Reid Hoffman | Mastering Your Scale for the Unexpected Part Two

Episode Date: June 6, 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 and The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career. This is part two of a two-part episode. Check out part one here! What We Discuss with Reid Hoffman: Why surviving a horrible childhood isn't a prerequisite for developing grit -- and what you can do to learn resilience. What it takes to gather the data points necessary for unpacking the secret subtext of indirect feedback. How we can steer into good crises to strengthen relationships and better our circumstances. What running Dungeons & Dragons and RuneQuest campaigns taught Reid about complex human motivations and the power of heroic collaboration. Aligning goals between employers and employees of any generation with Star Wars-inspired rotational, transformational, and foundational tours of duty. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/208 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! In the Big Questions podcast, Cal Fussman uncovers the heart, head, and soul of his guests in thoughtful, deep, and entertaining conversations. Give Big Questions a little bit of your time 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 back with part two of my interview with Reed Hoffman. He's the founder of LinkedIn, investor at Greylock, and host of the podcast Masters of Scaling. People refer to Reed as the Oracle of Silicon Valley. He can spot unicorns, companies that are just going to explode and value, change the world, change the world, shape the way that we live. His advice is highly sought after, and his companies and ideas have really just changed the shape of investing and the tech sphere in general. Now, this was originally supposed to be an interview with Reed on the Jordan Harbinger Show and has evolved into a collaboration between our podcasts. We developed a commencement episode of sorts for Reed's podcast, Masters of Scale. And this special episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show brings together all the best life lessons from the last season on Masters of Scale that might be useful for a grad, entrepreneur, or anyone navigating big decisions.

A quick backgrounder on Masters of Scale. In each episode, Reed sets out to prove it theory about how businesses grow up, from zero to a gazillion. Theories like why you should let fires burn, or why imperfect is perfect. And he does this by talking to a famous founder 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 Reid Hoffman and also segments from Masters of Scale, where Reid interviews some truly amazing founders.

In part one of this episode, you heard from Spotify's Daniel Eck, Instagram's Kevin Systrom, and Marissa Mayer of Google and Yahoo. Today, we're back at it and kicking things off with someone from my hometown of Detroit, Michigan. It's Stacey Brown Philpott, CEO of TaskRabbit. In this Masters of Scale clip, Stacey talks about her first job and how it taught her grit pretty early in the game. Let's have a listen. I grew up on the west side of Detroit. It wasn't the best neighborhood.

It wasn't the worst neighborhood. But people looked out for each other. Of course, later on, things got worse for a lot of people very, very fast. But it was home for me. The Motor City was struggling as the auto industry's engine faltered and died. Times were tough. Communities were devastated by unemployment and despair. Stacey got an unflinching look at this reality from her very first job, the paper route.

Stacey shared hers with her older brother. We would deliver the papers in the mornings, and then on the weekends we had to go collect from people. And of course, there's always people who didn't want to pay. so I had to make sure we got paid. And how old were you then? Oh, I was about 10 years old. And so how did you get people to pay? Well, you just knock on their door a lot and often.

And then you kind of watch when people's cars would pull up and see them going in the house and you'd run out and catch them before they close the door. Where's my money? And then I'm 10. So, of course, they're going to look at me and say, I need to give Stacey her money. But sometimes they just wouldn't answer the door if they didn't have it. So you have to watch people when they go into their house. Most people would agree that stiffing a 10-year-old girl out of her paperout money is a jerk move.

But Stacey wasn't deterred. Some people would see us and it's like four degrees outside and they would just give us that extra dollar. And that just meant so much. Because I know it came from people who didn't have a whole lot of money. But they were proud of us for doing real work, good work, you know, legal work. in a community where a lot of people did illegal work to make money. And so I think that helped inspire me probably later on, that, like, if you do good work for good people, it'll pay off. But there was a less sentimental reason that drove Stacey to lug heavy bags of paper through freezing Detroit streets.

I like to buy candy. I think that's universal amongst 10-year-olds. There's a use for this money. It's called candy. Exactly. Cash equals candy. It's a fun equation you learn as a kid. But Stacey learned some tougher lessons too.

I would say that my upbringing in Detroit taught me grit. It taught me about not just the cold weather, but there's a community that needs to thrive and you need to figure out a way. I've noticed that many successful people, not just CEOs and entrepreneurs, they have a lot of resilience. They do have a lot of grit. And there are books about this. It's almost, I don't want to say buzzwordy because it cheapens it,

but it's very, it's trending right now, especially around here. But if we didn't grow up selling newspapers in below freezing Michigan winters and getting stiffed by our elderly customers running into the house to avoid paying, how do we go about developing some grit as adults? I think a lot of people write into my inbox and they'll go, hey, I'm 25 and I've now realizing I've never had it hard at all. Can I actually accomplish great things? because my parents did a great job raising me. I have good values. I'm kind of a hard worker.

But the second someone's like, nah, I don't want to hire you. I go into my shell or I feel defeated completely. How do we develop this? Where do we start? So I think grit, some of us have a more natural predisposition for it. Some of us don't. It's a nature, but it's always nature plus nurture. So I think grit can be learned. the principal way is anytime that you run into a difficult circumstance, realize it's a learning opportunity. Realize that it's like, this is where I can learn grit. This is where I can go, okay, I pick myself up, I dust myself off, and I do it again. And we've all encountered it, at least in minor ways. Like you play sports when you're in school, you try your handed art,

and you're a terrible painter. Yeah. You know, we actually in back, and you go, okay, I pick myself up, I keep going. And what you do is you say, it's something to learn, it's something to get better at. It's the same way as can I express myself in language. Can I pick out a good outfit? Can I, like all the, it's the same thing. Everyone can learn it. And it doesn't mean that everyone can learn it to be Olympic level. That's that, look, it's a whole spectrum on this. But you can learn it to be better and it's super important because basically where things really get tragic is where you take yourself out of the game. You don't, you stop playing. And that's you. You decide to do that, right? There are these people in these war-torn regions, Syria, et cetera, who like literally take

life-threatening risks to cross an ocean to try to make a life for themselves and their families. You can, you can take some risk. You can actually have the grit to do it. You just need to say, it's a learning thing. And you, okay, I fell. I fell down. I failed at this. Great. Try again. How do we know if we're learning grit and resilience or we're just punishing ourselves because, okay, I'm in pain. If I lean into this, Reed said it's going to, grit's going to come out the other side. Resilience is going to come out the other side. Simply putting your finger continually in the light socket. It's not necessarily a particularly good learning experience. So what you want to be doing is you want to be saying, okay, how am I measuring that I'm learning? And so one of the ways that I do it is I come up with principles.

So it isn't just I go, okay, I'll take more pain. I'll go, okay, here is a place where I took the pain. How do I play again where at least if I'm failing again, I'm learning new lessons. Right? Like I learn some lessons from that time. So you go, it isn't just like, oh, that was painful. Now I'm going to try again. It's like, what did you learn from it?

What did you say, now I'm going to play differently? Right. Like I'm now going to say, okay, I'm going to, next time I take on that challenge, I'm going to get two or three friends to do it with me. Or next time I'm going to take on that challenge, I'm going to make sure that I've built up some momentum before I get into it. That kind of thing is say, okay, that's what I've learned. And by the way, sometimes you have to relearn because you go, well, that was actually the wrong learning. I now need to adjust that. Fine.

But if you have that, then you have confidence that you're making progress, and it isn't just that, well, there's a 20-foot concrete wall, and I'm trying to pound my head against it to go through it. And that's never going to work. Your head's going to break before the concrete wall does. But you're going, okay, well, I studied the wall a little bit better. And I said, well, not the concrete wall, the wood wall. I'm going to go after the wood wall. Fine. That's the kind of thing.

And if you know that you're learning, you're asking other people, you're trying to figure out what's the way that I do it better, then you're making progress. And grit's one of the things that comes out of it. Because part of how you learn grid is you go, well, that was painful and difficult. But then I played again and I did better. Oh, grits useful. And that's how you need to do it. This next clip is right up my alley, given that what I teach so much on the show,

and to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and companies are soft skills. So networking, relationship development, and especially reading between the lines to the cipher communication and figure out why people are saying what they're saying. So in this clip from Masters of Scale, you'll hear the co-founder and CEO of Eventbrate, Julia Hartz, talking about her not-so-favor feedback from her first job as a barista. I think we all have one of those memorable a-holes, if we can use that term, from our past,

or depending on where you are in your career, you might even be dealing with one right now. Let's hear it. Julie was learning to hear what people said and react to it in real time. It's a skill she developed not only in the dance studio, but in all the jobs that would follow. She learned to listen to what people say and then cut to the core of what they actually. actually mean, and she learned fast. Like the time she was working at a local coffee shop. I was 14 at the ugly mug in Santa Cruz, where I grew up.

I learned how to make a great latte, but the biggest lesson was this woman would show up at the door at 5.55 a.m. and walk in and yell at me for like a good 15-20 about how bad the coffee was that I was making. her. And I would get like a pit in my stomach for the first few weeks. And then I just realized one day she didn't have anyone to talk to. And it wasn't about me. And it wasn't, it's not about the latte. Yes. Right. So it's like that lesson was one of the most important lessons I've ever learned in my life. I learned it at 14. It's not about the latte. It's a deceptively simple statement, one that can save you a lot of time and effort if you learn the lesson well. Because what sounds like direct feedback. The kind of feedback that calls for clear action is often something quite different.

If Julie had taken that customer's feedback at face value, she would have tied herself into knots trying to satisfy impossible demands, and she'd never have mastered making a great latte. I remember thinking it's not about the latte. You know, with those people, you're like, wait, they need someone to talk to, and they're not upset about you or it or it's about something else, Right? So you got to kind of like put it into context. All right, Reed. So what sounds like direct feedback, the kind of feedback that calls for clear action is often something quite different. Great. How do we know what feedback is direct feedback? And how do we know which is the crazy old lady going ballistic about a perfectly good latte? There's two things. So one is integrate data for multiple data points. So for example, you have one person saying, that's a terrible latte. And a bunch of other people are like, oh, great. And they're regular. and they're coming in, well, you've got multiple data points. So the likelihood that that's a

terrible latte is much lower. So multiple data points is super helpful. And sometimes it's tricky to get multiple data points or compare apples to apples versus apples to oranges and to make that happen. But multiple data points is very useful. And then also, and this gets the second point, which is ask your network, right? Ask people, you know, say, oh, I'm having this experience. How should I interpret it? And those folks should be able to say, well, like, for example, if I had been friends with a young Julian, and say, well, I'll come in, I'll try your latte. I'll tell you what I think.

And I'll tell you what I actually think. Like, I'm not going to go, oh, it's great. It'll be like, no, no, I'm trying to help my friend. Oh, it's pretty good. I don't know what the problem is. And by the way, that's how you get a second data point. And so the really key thing is to realize that the learnings very rarely, I mean, occasionally come from one data point.

Then you have your network to help you understand it, analyze it, understand what the key learnings are. but frequently it's multiple data points, and then you integrate across them. And that's how you, that's how you understand. When we come across this in a work or corporate situation, how should we sort of ask clarifying questions, right? Because if our data point is our boss, we might not want to be like, eh, it's one data point, or if it's the market especially, but let's assume it's a person. And maybe it's our direct supervisor. We probably should investigate this directly with them, don't you think? Well, so on a boss, yes, it's basically if you don't have a good relationship with boss,

you should be thinking about your next job, and you should be working on it. And this is kind of the pivot early. You're like, ah, this doesn't work, pivot early, right? Now, so it is the kind of thing that you shouldn't rest. You have a bad relationship with boss. That's not the kind of thing that improves accidentally over time, et cetera. It has to be something to work on. So working on the relationship with the boss, fundamentally a good idea.

The second thing is, say you're having a problem with the boss, and you're trying to figure out, is it the boss or is it me? Or what combination. That's, again, why network is useful. And network of people who are not going to, like, oh, yeah, your boss is terrible. I'm your friend. Your boss is terrible. That doesn't help you because you also want to learn because you go to the next boss

and you have the same problem. You're not making progress in your career. You want the people who go, look, I care about you. I care about you making progress, but I'm going to help you sort out how much of it's you, how much is your boss, what's the issue? Is it a chemistry problem? Is it a, is it a, your boss is terrible problem? Is it your terrible problem?

Because getting back to the first point, your relationship with your boss here will really matter. And if your relationship with boss isn't good, like, and you can't fix it, move on. Gotcha. How do you handle this in your marriage? Don't worry. I don't think Michelle's going to listen. Because pivoting early can get messy. Well, hopefully you've dated for a while.

Yeah. Hopefully you've gotten a bunch of data from that. Sure. Look, I think, you know, part of the thing in marriage, again is address problems early. Think about getting marriage counseling, for example. So going to saying, hey, we have this difference of opinion on X. Well, let's go find some third party that we both trust and have the conversation and sit down and work through that. And by the way, if you can do that, it makes your marriage much stronger. Right. So it's a little bit of like don't waste good crises.

right like I'm kind of it's like looking for pivots and look for the crises because those can make things much better and so you know one of the things that I tell people is like one of the great things about having a crisis in any relationship including the capital our relationship is when you get to a crisis this is an opportunity by which you can actually be stronger that isn't just a risk it's also an opportunity and and I in across my relationship with everyone in my life I actually look for those and I steer into them to try to make it good and stronger. By the way, if it turns out that it doesn't become stronger, then maybe it's not the right thing. Maybe it's not the right thing for either of you. That's really, I like the idea of steering into a crisis because a lot of people go,

ooh, this is going to be thorny. I don't really want to deal with this. That's, of course, going to crop up later along with the other 15 crises that you buried, and then that's how people end up just. And at that point, it might not be fixable. Right, right. Then it's like, well, you bury all these other problems. Well, I was trying to smooth things over. Yeah, then it's just explosion. Someone leaves a cap off the toothpaste and you're getting shived. Yeah. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Reid Hoffman. We'll be right back. Don't forget, we have a worksheet for today's episode so you can make sure you solidify your understanding of the key takeaways from Reed Hoffman. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com

slash podcast. 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 like some tips on how to subscribe 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 players as they're released so you don't miss a single thing. And now back to our show with Reid Hoffman. All right, this next clip was actually with you. And it centers around one of the lessons you learned playing Dungeons and Dragons, which I think is, it's funny how many people play this and take lessons away that they use for the rest of their life.

I know you went to the game creator of a different RPG Roon Quest. You marked up the whole thing and created edits. And to this day, your name is on, is listed as a contributor in Roon Quest, which actually is pretty awesome. I get amazing show ideas from fans all the time. Our most popular episodes are often just me giving advice from Feedback Friday, and that's a fan idea. So in this clip read, you're being interviewed by Masters of Scale executive producer Jen Cohen. And she's about to share what happened as you got more and more into Dungeons and Dragons. Let's see what we can take from this next clip. Reed's thirst for adventure grew.

He recruited a band of classmates and took on the role of Game Master himself. He was now responsible for creating and running a fantasy world, a world in which his friends were spending more and more time. Reed soon realized this involved more than coming up with fantastical situations and presiding over geeky dice roles. As part of it, you also want to be a lot of it. to have people feel like they kind of earned their heroism. So what they did is they would have a difficult challenge. They'd have something that really have to figure out. It would take effort

and they might not get it right and you had to make sure they didn't die because no one likes to be in the story where like, oh, you all died. But that struggle, you would set that up with some depth to it so that people would enjoy the path for figuring out how they could be heroes. It's interesting because by your description, it is very much a game of complex human motivations. What did you learn about human motivation playing Dungeons and Dragons? I did learn that people wanted to be the hero of their own story, that that was a fundamental kind of human drive across, you know, almost everybody. I learned that kids tend to be a little simplistic and shallow, so their definition of heroism has kind of a pretty simple, like,

hit dragon with sword. Now that gets richer for some of us as we get older. I suspect there have been moments as a CEO and investor when you longed for the days when people were as simple as just wanting to kill something with a sword. Yes, although sometimes all you have to do is scratch at it to figure out where that is. Very often, people's motives have a fairly simple character. Like, I want to be the important person who solve that problem. I want to have the credit for it. I was like, well, actually, in fact, there were five of us who were all working on it, who all contributed to Kamonan. And yes, your component was important, but your weird behavior is because you're trying to kind of assert that claim.

Life is a team sport, not an individual sport. And once you start thinking that way, everything goes a lot better. It's funny how human motivation can really parallel something like D&D, Dungeons and Dragons. The team sport angle makes a lot of sense. I'm wondering what else you learned about working with others from these sort of old school RPGs. You know, one of the things, which is the title of that master of the scale, episode is make everyone a hero, is that part of how a team comes together is everyone wants to feel that their part, their role, their contribution is meaningful. And so composing a good

team, whether it's the team of your own personal board of directors, the team that you're working on in an organization, is that does everyone go, yeah, I'm a hero here, and they're bought into that hero role. And so part of what I found in playing RoomQuest, which I played, you know, much more than I played D&D, but, you know, play both. was that where everyone had a magical experience and it was reinforcing. So, so you had four players and you were there as a game master and where, you know, the five, one plus one plus one was like 20, not five, was in it was like, oh yeah, that was great.

And this was great too. And everyone was like, and we were all their heroes together. And the more that you can make this happen, I think the better delight everyone has and the more massive increase of value. And the geeky technical term for this is to try to seek playing non-zero-sum games. There's this notion of zero-sum is, well, one of us wins, one of us loses. It's a fixed pot. You know, what do you get?

What do I get? The more that you can be in life circumstances where when we all play this, the pot grows. We all win more. That's a much better place to be. That makes sense. Yeah. The zero-sum game, we see it a lot in diplomacy, politics. Like, okay, I'm going to lose, but you're going to lose more.

so we're good. Or I'm going to win, but it has to be at your expense. Not a great way to make friends or do business, actually. Or have a quality life. Right. Yeah, it's very sort of Machiavelli, but old school version. Working with some of the high-level executives, maybe egos that are present in Silicon Valley, how do you get those types of people to play on a team when it seems like a lot of accolades just go to the loudest person gunning for credit? A lot depends on the specifics of the circumstance in this one. Usually the mistake is to try to explicitly just go, wait a minute, this is my credit, this is my thing, because then usually it sets the wrong dynamic. Part of it is you recognize it's a multi-transaction game, so you go, oh, that didn't work out this

well. So next time I'm going to angle a little bit better to make sure the credit is delivered. Sometimes you could do, it takes extra work, but you can like write a report or a memo saying, oh, you know, here's how things, and you kind of state it in the way that you're looking at it. sometimes you go, well, the recognition of credit really matters to this specific person, like the boss or so forth, and you could sit down and go, you know, I felt a little awkward and I didn't know what the right way to be a good team player was, but I felt like maybe I should get a little bit more credit for this kind of thing because X, Y, and Z, and the real audience that mattered was the boss's opinion. The boss goes, oh, you handled it socially appropriately,

rather than making a big scene at the office, possibly breaking team dynamics. You came to me. you expressed it in a way that was partially a question. Like, I kind of thought that I thought, internally I felt like I deserved more credit, but, you know, I'm asking you about it because I'd like your feedback on this and here's why. And they go, oh, great. And they could say, then they may say, well, actually, the credit should be more distributed the following way.

And you go, okay, I learned something. Maybe I disagree with you, but I hear how you're looking at this and so forth. So there's a whole bunch of specifics that really matter. Probably the real take home is don't just try to go beat the drum louder. try to maneuver so that the credit is kind of, it's kind of shown rather than you're telling people. Gotcha. And it will identify which audiences really matter versus the whole world, because which audiences is an easier problem. Yeah, that's true, right?

Like if everyone in the boardroom knows that you took point on it, but the public face says, look at what this team did, it kind of doesn't matter if your goal is, look, I'm just trying to do good things for my venture capital firm. I don't care if Twitter knows that this is my idea. Exactly. Coming up here, this next Masters of Scale clip features Britt Morin, founder of the Lifestyle and Skills Community, Britt and co. Britt has just killed it, reaching and working with millennials.

Most of Brit's users are millennials, as is Britt and her team. What really stands out for me in this clip is your idea around tours of duty, Reed. I'd like to talk about that afterward. Here's the clip. For me, passion in the workplace isn't something that can be bought. All the backrubs and bento boxes in the world aren't going to help your employees feel fulfilled if their goals are fundamentally different to yours. Instilling true passion is about aligning goals. And while it is true that this will encourage loyalty or retention or whatever you want to

call it, you have to realize that goals change. The alignments can drift apart until they are following separate courses. And this is certainly not unique to millennials. always aware that oftentimes people might leave the company to take a whole different type of spin at a new career. We've had people leave to become nurses and yoga instructors and to start companies of their own. And to be honest, we just agree that that's normal for this generation and that we have to always be open to the idea of hiring replacements for many of our employees because at the end of the day, our average tenure is about two and a half years, which is sad but true to believe. Here's where I disagree with Britt. A two and a half year tenure is only sad if your expectations are

wrong. Think of it as a tour of duty. You agree to work together for the length of a particular project or for as long as the evolution makes sense. The only thing you have to be careful about is being true to your word. When you sign up for a tour of duty, You finish it. So this is an area of friction for the older generation and a lot of millennials sort of butt heads on this. Because my parents are someone my parents' age, common topic of the internet. Nobody could stick with anything anymore. Everyone's always moving around.

These kids can't hold jobs for more than four years. I was at Ford for 32 years or whatever. But it's not quite accurate. There's something else going on here. Tell us why should we not be upset that people are switching jobs so often or that they're moving around so much? So first book was Startup You, second book is The Alliance. This is part of what I was writing about in the Alliance. And part of it was it's no longer a career ladder.

It's no longer a career escalator. It's a jungle gym. And a jungle gym is you're kind of going sideways, you're going down, going up. It's like kind of all over. And that's the nature of modern work. And so I think that the – and actually, by the way, the whole world's better off for it. The world's better off individuals. They can have essentially multiple careers, right, in kind of different ways.

they can learn and stay fresh and be interesting. Businesses can be infused with new talent, with bold ideas and different learnings from different areas and kind of adjust how they think of the market, how they play, how they operate. It's one of the things that makes Silicon Valley magical because actually, in fact, people move around from companies a lot. And so all of the companies are fiercely learning machines because they're all learning together through the exchanges of these biological parts that go, oh, I learn this.

And I'm not taking any confidential information, but I did take what I learned and I'm applying it over here, and that sharing of information is super important. And, you know, part of it is, there's this kind of, like, think of how foolish it is to say, well, I'm 20, and I've picked the exact right thing for me for the next 45 years. Like, really? You don't think you're going to learn anything in the next 45 years? You think you do all your learning where you're 20 and you're done, right? And the world's not changing and all the rest. So it's a good thing. The important thing, and this is part of the alliance in the book, was to say, actually, in fact, staying synced and being forthright and being well allied with the companies you're

at, with the managers you're working with is super important because you can say, look, what's the magical thing that I can accomplish by working here such that you think that that was a good tour of duty? Like, and what's that thing? And let me, let's, let's agree on that. Let me do that. And that's part of what I contribute as part of this being a significant and interesting part of my career path, and then vice versa of, okay, what's the thing that, how do I get transformed with this? How does this help amplify my career? And maybe it'll end up being here my entire life. Great. Awesome. And maybe it won't. And that should be great, too. I think the advantages are pretty clear. And I know there are different types of tours of duty. We'll get to those in the next clip. But I'm wondering if there are

any limitations we should be aware of. Which do you prefer to see, for example, inside your own companies? Do you love it when people are doing tours of duty or are you like, look, I'd like to ideally retain people for longer? Well, the greater percentage of people that are retained for longer is better for the company for sure. They have a depth of knowledge. So they may, like having worked there eight years, they understand a bunch of things that have been tried or not. They're cultural standard bears. They're more aligned with the mission of the company and what they're doing. So that is a useful thing. Now, if that was 100%, usually that's a problem

because then you're not getting new blood, you're not getting new ideas. So it isn't that the goal is 100%. But a significant group of people who go, this is something I'm doing for multiple tours or duty, something that is really valuable to me. And the company should try to work in a way to make that the case. That it's valuable for the individuals. Because, by the way, they're also thinking,

well, how does my life work out and so forth? And if it's staying here along at the company, it's great for the company, but only indifferent for me, how does that work? It should be an aligned set of interest. And so the company needs to be worked on it. The individuals need to be work on it. But it is useful to have a group of people who are,

we are long timers at the company. And frequently, when you look at the exec staffs of most really well-run companies, occasionally executives are hired in from the outside. That's, again, fresh blood, new ideas is useful. But usually a bulk of them tend to be promoted up from within the company because they have that depth of knowledge. They have that depth of their expertise.

And that's one of the things that's useful to think about is if I'm starting out my career, it's like, well, action, in fact, I really love Netflix. You know, I really love LinkedIn. I really love, you know, whichever the company might be. And, okay, I may iterate my way through this, and, of course, I'll stay flexible. Maybe something else is the right thing at some point.

But maybe it's a sequence of tour of duties right here at this one company. If I'm listening to this and I want to do more tour of duty, like work, how do you recommend that I bring this up with the companies that I work with? Because it might be a little bit like, wait, are they leaving? I don't get what they, they want to work on a project basis. Does that mean they're transitioning out? In the alliance, we recommend the manager bring it up because they have a little bit more of a position of power. But say you're an individual and you're working for someone and you feel like you have, because as we describe, it's a dishonest connection because

you're not actually talking about the elephant in the room, which maybe I'm going to go somewhere else. The best way to do is say, look, I love this company. I love the mission. It would be awesome for me if it worked out that I was working here for 20 years or a long time. I would love that. That's great. But it's also possible that it won't be the case. It's possible that, you know, you guys don't think that I'm the right fit for the next progression. Like when I think it's time for me to be promoted or take on a different responsibility,

that job doesn't exist here or you guys don't think I'm the right fit. That could happen, right? And so I want to be clear about talking both about the opportunities here at this company and the other opportunities. you do that as the overall frame, you're taking away those backdrop of, oh, are you telling me you're leaving? Are you telling me you're not loyal to me? Are you telling me you don't care about our mission? Are you telling me I can't depend upon you to accomplish a thing that I'm looking to do? And you can answer all of those up front saying, look, I'm committed to, I want to make this project work and so forth. And then you can then have a constructive conversation. So if you're

in that employee position bringing up the conversation, that's the way I recommend you do it. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Reid 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 we really appreciate it. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit jordanharbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget the worksheet for today's episode.

That link is in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com slash podcast. And if you're listening to us on the Overcast player, please click that little star next to the episode. We really appreciate it. And now for the conclusion of our episode with Reed, Hoffman. So I mentioned before the break that I'm really interested in this idea around Tours of Duty. So in this next clip from Masters of Scale, we hear more about them. Reed, in this clip, you're talking with Masters of Scale producer June Cohen about where

this theory came from, what it means, and how to apply it. Spoiler alert, it comes from Star Wars. Reid developed the idea of the Jedi Tours of Duty, along with his book, The Alliance. He says there are three different Tours of Duty, rotational, transformational, and foundational. Each maps onto a Star Wars character, and probably some colleagues of yours. I asked Reed to take us through the three archetypes. The first was rotational, which is kind of you're a hired gun, you're doing the work, you're not really tied to the mission. That was Han Solo. The second was a transformational tour of duty, which is how both you as an individual as an employee are transformed and how you also transform the organization.

Of course, that's Luke Skywalker, just beginning his Jedi journey. And then the foundational tour of duty is where your mission is so closely aligned with the organization that the organization is part of your own mission as an individual. And that's the foundational tour of duty, where your life's mission is part of growing and the impact of the organization. That's Princess Leia's tour of duty. The Star Wars metaphor is funny, but it's also deeply useful for anyone assembling a team. It gives you a framework for thinking not just about what you could get from this new team. team member, but what they get from you. How do we know what type of tour of duty we're looking for?

Or is that more up to the company and the manager? We're just sort of a tourist of duty. That's funny. Actually, I haven't heard that. Tourist of duty is a good idea. It's a match, right? So generally speaking, I think the initial focus of your career when you're starting should be transformational because you're learning yourself, you're figuring

what's out there in the market, you're figuring out how it plays. you may get to a place where you go, oh my gosh, the mission of this organization, this is my mission. This is the mission that I can't see myself wanting to do something else. And by the way, that can change back too, but then you switch to the foundational mission. And by the way, that has to be generally. You have to see eye to eye with the company, eye to your manager on that, but you can be expressing it that way. And then rotational tours of duty are fairly straightforward, which is like, well, this is actually, in fact, a kind of a more of a plug-and-play job. And so even though I may be thinking about this is this is what I want to be doing for a very long time,

I'm simply going to be in that rotational tour for a long time, whether it's a barista or a driver or something else, and that's fine. But you should realize where you are. This next idea is one that'll be familiar to most of us, work-life balance. It's super important to some folks. For others, it's highly controversial. And for others, it might be a little overrated. But talk about buzzwordy trending things right now. This clip features a few founders, Airbnb's Brian.

Chesky, Spotify's Daniel Eck, Netflix's Reed Hastings, MIT Media Labs, Joey Ito, Marissa Mayer of Google and Yahoo, and Reed Hoffman himself. Let's take a listen to this Master's of Scale clip. Before I go further, I have to admit, I'm a very flawed spokesperson on this particular theory. I have at times use the phrase, sleep is for the week. But in my defense, I was being somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Well, for the most part. I don't really think sleep is a sign of weakness. If I know that I have a particularly creative project coming up,

I'll make sure I get eight hours of sleep the night before. But a younger, less wise me would often limit sleep to continue the thrill of the entrepreneurial chase. Those super late-nighters to ship a new product are far behind me. But I can't deny, I look back on those days. with a hint of fond romanticism, as do many of my previous guests on Masters of Scale. They told me, like, look, leave at 6 p.m. because we don't know when you'll ever leave at 6 p.m. again. I literally lay in the floor of the lobby, and I use my backpack as a pillow.

I did sleep outside of the conference room for a few nights. I remember, you know, people were, like, sleeping under the desk. I was coding all night, trying to be CEO in the day, and once in a while was squeezing a shower. Striking the balance between work and rejuvenation is something I still struggle with. My good friend, Joey Ito, will tell you so. Joey is the director of the MIT Media Lab. Here's what he told one of our producers when they interviewed him about my idea of letting fires burn. So the only concern I have for Reed is that this notion of letting fires burn isn't the greatest philosophy for having a work-life balance.

And I think that's something that Reid is now, it's just starting to process. So on the one hand, I think he's the master of scaling. But on the other hand, I think he's just beginning to figure out how that ties into sort of taking care of himself and his life. In fact, it's my conversations on the subject with Joey and other entrepreneurs that has got me thinking more seriously about this question of wellness. Not just when it comes to the individual, but how it can be scaled throughout a company in a company and a measurable way that boost the bottom line. So sleep is for the way, huh? You have to understand what game you're playing. There are games you can play with work-life balance. That's what you want to do. Great, right? Like no harm, no foul, good thing to do. If you're doing a startup, which is the

metaphor I use is you're jumping off a cliff, assembling an airplane on the way down, you're all in. There is no work-life balance there. It's you assemble the plane or you crash on the ground. And so at that point, yes, you need to rest enough that you. you can play. It's a marathon, not just a sprint, that you can play that out. But that's where you kind of go, okay, I am playing this as hard as possible. Now, the sleep is for the week is kind of a fun, fun metaphor. I'm actually, I think making intelligent decisions is really key to how you learn and do everything else. And you need to be getting enough sleep that you're cognitively functional, that you're making decisions the right way. So it isn't, oh yeah, stay up two nights. That's great.

It's like, no, no, no, no. It's a marathon. And you're cognitive processing and the decisions, you're making are super important. The more I research this and talk to people about it, the more the research shows that people are actually happier when they have some sort of balance, but they're happier kind of in the moment where that balance exists, of course. But there are people who are the most successful economically, and they typically on our show say, look, at no time in my 20s and 30s did I have any sort of work-life balance. This isn't universally true, but Scott Galloway, who's a professor at Stern, he said, look, forget it. If you want, balanced before your 40s, that's fine.

But you might have to accept that you won't be as economically successful as people that just burned it for 20 years and were, like, obsessed with every business that they were in and slept in the office. And it's an uncomfortable truth because I'm from the Wall Street background. So I'm fully familiar with supplementing your diet with Red Bull and sleeping upright in a chair in front of an Excel spreadsheet. But a lot of people are like, no, it's not fair. I should have balance and I should still be able to be successful.

But it's kind of like follow your passion where some people do it and then they talk about how great that is. And other people go, wait a minute, I come home every day. I still work six days a week and I'm not seeing it. How come I, do I really have to have 80 hour work weeks? It's a competitive world. What's your differentiation? The other people are working eight hour a week and you're working 40 and you think you're going to win that you better be lucky or amazingly good. Sure. Or both. Probably both. Yes. Right. So you've got to think about it. Like people, everyone wants to have high, or many, many people, the majority of people want to have a high economic success. So they're kind of competing for it. And you have to think about it as a competition, which means like it's the person who goes and says, oh, I'm going to be a star basketball player. And I'm not going to practice. Oh, really? No, no, no. Actually, you have to commit. You have to put in the time. You have to put in the energy. The blood, sweat, and tears. That's what it takes. Now, the only thing I'd say to kind of slightly soften that is,

is people tend to say, work-life balance, hey, I'm, you know, go home at five, I've got every evening, I know my hobbies, all the rest, or, oh, my God, I'm sleeping at the office. Think about it as kind of like maybe more times, a little bit closer than I'm sleeping in the office, but think about like, okay, what can I do to make the marathon work for me? Well, I do get sleep, I do get enough sleep. Like, maybe I'm getting seven versus eight hours, right? but I am getting enough sleep. And I take small breaks.

Like, okay, Saturday afternoons, I go do something that just totally delights me. And I miss make sure that that's sacrosanct every time I get to Saturday, and then I'm working. And that's what I was doing when I was doing startups. I was like, okay, it isn't seven days, nothing matters. It's how do you have one thing that kind of recharges you a little bit? And it doesn't mean, doesn't mean that you aren't like, oh, my God, I'm working like, I'm just working so hard. Of course you are.

but you can do that little thing that keeps your batteries charged enough. So I'm digging this format with the clips, but I do want to transition to some good old-fashioned conversation here before we wrap. I heard as a kid used to go to the library and just read one book, finish it, pulled another one off the shelf. I mean, you're either a fast reader or you spend a lot of time in the library, or probably both.

Both. Yeah. Yeah. You originally wanted to be the director of the CIA? That seems a little, what was the thought process behind that? That's a very funny, deep historical clip. So I was confronted with the fact that, and this is, you know, being a kid who was reading military history and history of the world and all the rest of those were the bouquet. I was curious about the world and the world around me and that happened to be the section of library I found.

And I realized at a nine or something, some young age, that part of the suffering that happened is nations would get in the conflict and wars would happen and wars were massive amounts of suffering. And I was like, well, how do you stop wars? Right? Like, how do you get it? So no wars happen. I was like, well, actually, in fact, if nations are knowledgeable and don't make accidents and understand what's going on and understand that peace is better for them broadly and then kind of adjust for that, that would be the way to do that.

Well, how could I help with that? Well, I could be the director of the CIA because now I could help the information being the right information that would then happen and that would make the world a more peaceful place. Oh, maybe I should do that. That was the logic. It's still pretty sound. I mean, it's not totally off. Yes.

It's like the, and I know your friends had different positions, right? You had kind of like your teenage Avengers with your friends. Each one was a president. One was the CEO of IBM, which is a funny world. You're thinking, all right, director of the CIA, president of the United States, CEO of IBM? I guess back then, though. Back then, that was like, look, I'm going to be, one of you has to be Jeff Bezos or something, like whatever the modern day. Exactly.

And so, you know, it's kind of like the, oh, we're going to go do this. And of course, this is more youthful fancy. Sure, yeah. But it seems like you wanted to be a connector early on. There was some idealism there, obviously. There's something called the Bilderberg group that seems very international. But when I Google it, people are freaky. I mean, this is like Illuminati conspiracy theory pit.

What is that? It's a group of people who gather together to try to figure out what might go wrong with the kind of peaceful global, you know, kind of society. the kind of trade and everything else. And it's more like identifying risk. Like could you have financial system collapse and that kind of thing? And I find kind of funny, because I've seen all the Illuminati threads as well. You know, people like John McElwath, the former editor-in-chief of the economist and now editor-in-chief of Bloomberg.

You know, these people whose careers would be made by reporting on the Illuminati. Sure. Are there. They're in the room. So it's not the Illuminati. Right. Right. They insist on confidential conversations,

because part of what happens is, say, for example, you're talking about, well, here's how a risk on the run on the banking system might happen. And here's how we might have financial system collapse in region X to the world. Well, you don't want to be like saying that out in public to the world because you don't want to have a bad actor be able to do something. You may not want to create panic because, by the way, part of it is confidence that the system's working is what happens, like run-ons a bank. You wouldn't want to do that kind of thing. So they insist on confidentiality, right, for that basis. And that's the reason. And then other people say, well, I should know.

It's like, well, look, there's a billion people in the world. What we want to do is identify the risk, have the system be able to go fix the risk before there's any awareness of it. And then we're great. It's just like cybersecurity. You don't say, oh, by the way, here's the hole that anyone can get into anyone's Gmail account. No, no, no. We don't publicize that. We fix it first.

Right. That makes sense. So if you're in there and it's not closed door and you're saying, hey, by the way, we're using old software and all our power grid systems, somebody's like, dang, right? So that makes sense. It makes sense as far as a practical impact on society. I think whenever you have guys like you and Eric Schmidt and the, I don't know, king of Denmark or whatever in a room, and it's like, hey, we don't talk about what happens there.

It's just ripe for Reddit going bananas. And it's classical when you think about, look, think about what are the other reasons you might have a confidential conversation that are not like the, we're there. And by the way, there's a bunch of journalists in the room. Their economic incentive, their publicity incentive is if there's anything untoward, ooh, that makes their careers. Right. That makes sense.

What's the next chapter for you? A lot of people want to know what somebody, what people with your level of resources are going to do with like the second half of your life. I think it's always good to be thinking, like what's the next interesting thing to accomplish, the next thing to do that delight you, that the world could use or need. You have some theory of that. And so, you know, for me, like that obviously goes into one of the things I can do in philanthropy, and I've been doing stuff in artificial intelligence and philanthropy, help launch the Stanford human-centered artificial intelligence institute. And then there's things around, well, where can I take the things that I've learned, like, for example, in tech investing and help the world

in various ways. So like change.org is one of the things I invested in because it's like, how do you speak humanity to power when that power is governments and corporations and say, no, no, be more human, right? And that could be the internet treasure that does that for, you know, decades, hundreds of years, whatever the length of time of these organizations is. And, you know, those kinds of things are the kinds of things that have already been part of the last decade, but, you know, grow and amplify in the next decade or two. you do have a lot of resources. What's something that you'd hypothetically get for your kids or kids that are close to you and your family and think, okay, this is going to give these children a huge advantage in the future.

It doesn't have to be something you buy or pay for, but I think a lot of folks go, oh, well, these people all have these advantages. But I'm often asking people this, and the advantage is not like send them to a $200,000 a year private school. It's like get them involved in STEM early or something very simple. I think the best thing you can do to help kids is to help experience the light on some of the things that could be useful paths to them. So like, you know, one of my investments is this company called Aurora, which is self-driving cars. And I was talking to a friend of mine and her nephew is coming over from France. And it was like, what should we do when the nephew comes over from France that be useful in Silicon Valley? I was like, well, maybe I can get, you know, the nephew a ride in the Aurora car.

And it's like, oh, my God, this is what the future looks like. And that could be, oh, it could be really exciting to be involved in these kinds of technologies and this kind of technological future. And if you have that kind of excitement, then that, and it sets you on that kind of path. So it's like, what kinds of experiences can you help people have conversations, learnings that would go, ooh, that's a good anchor moment in what could be a really useful path to go down. And I think those kinds of things are frequently underrated. So basically get them inspired or open to possibility early so that their thinking changes even one degree.

But since it's so early, that becomes like steering the ship one degree out of port. And realize what's possible. Yeah. Perfect. That's great. People must spend tons of time and effort trying to get your attention. I can only imagine. What are some of the best ways to get busy people like yourself to pay attention to their communication?

So the thing I always recommend, because it really is the basic, is to get referred by someone who, who I know who I know trust. Because like everyone goes, wow, what if I put this compelling thing in the cold email? This compelling thing in the cold email. Yes, one of the 200 that arrived today that I probably don't even look at.

Sure. Right. So you go, okay, that doesn't really work that way. I've had people wait outside this office and approach me as I'm coming out. And I'm like, okay, I don't know the difference between you and a sociopath. Right.

Like, it's bad. So I'm not going to talk to you in this context. So a warm intro is really the best. possible thing. Right. And so, and then the other thing is everyone tends to go to the highest wrong in the celebrity ladder. They tend to go to the, how do I talk to Bill Gates? Oh my gosh, the millions, the billions of people that want to talk to Bill Gates, go, okay, who's the person that's actually within my sphere? Sure, they're like an important and successful person and everyone else, but they could be helpful to me and really look for that person. Yeah, good point.

You don't really need Bill Gates or Reed Hoffman to say, this is a good app idea. You need somebody who's built an app before of even just mild success. Exactly. Right. Right. You're right. People go straight to the top. Jordan, I need to talk to you.

Should I start a podcast? I don't know. How should I launch mine? I did mine 12 years ago. I'm the worst person to ask. Start 12 years ago is usually a good tip and then go from there. I'm really not the person to ask about that sort of thing. So I definitely can identify with that.

Last but not least, you've mentioned that you would eventually someday maybe like to rewrite Machiavelli the Prince for modern-day Silicon Valley, what would some of the big changes be from that book? So the notion, when Machiavelli wrote The Prince, what he was, there's a lot of scholarship and a lot of contention about what he was trying to do, but he was basically trying to say, here's the things that as a key advisor to these powerful Italian families, what is the thing that they should recognize and why people like me or me should be identified as a key advisor. And he was right. about this kind of almost state of warfare between the different areas where they also needed

to have their people like them within their city-state. Well, the parallel is we have all these massive tech companies where these massive tech companies are powers in the world. They're not this overblown. Oh, Google is more powerful than countries. No, it's not. Almost all of the big major countries, they have armies. They have police forces. They have like, There's a lot of things where they're a lot more powerful. Maybe Liechtenstein. They kind of beat Leicstein. Yeah.

Lichtenstein. And if the interesting question is a percentage of people listening to this podcast or watching this video would know where it is intrinsically without looking it up. But the thing is that these are in fact like city states. They are in fact like there's an internal group that's really important to keep connected. And yet you have to understand that there's this competition, this conflict between these companies and other kinds of interests. And how do you, how do you reorient that? Now, part of my interest in doing that is to not just take, like, Machiavelli's, the Prince and the discourses are kind

of the textbook of sociopathic, no morals matter. Part of my interest in rewriting is to say, actually, how do you rewrite it when you say, actually, the moral compasses do matter? You still have to be realpolitik, but realpolitik with moral compasses. And that's the thing that has intrigued me on that. Yeah, that makes sense, because I was going to say, okay, you're big on and friendship that sort of is un Machiavelli as maybe it gets. Yes. So right. So the Realpolitik with a moral compass.

Exactly. Well, I'm looking forward to that book someday. Thank you. Thank you very much. Pleasure. Great big thank you to Reed Hoffman. Check out his podcast, Masters of Scale. It is really in-depth interviews.

It's produced really well, which I really like. It's got a lot of little bells and whistles that make it really easy to listen to. So it's not just super dense business, scale up, scale down all the time. It's really well done. The wait-what crew, who I worked with on this project, was just a pleasure to work with, and everything they do is really, really well done. If you want to know how we manage to book great guests like Reid Hoffman,

it's a process. It's a bit of a task to get a network that includes people of this magnitude. And Jason, you've been doing this for a while. I've been doing this for a while. We put some of our knowledge on how to create and maintain relationships for business or personal reasons over at six-minute networking. it's a free course that we created for you over at Jordanharbinger.com slash course.

Now, I know you're thinking, you know, do it later. You've got to do it later. Well, the number one mistake I see people making is postponing this, kicking the can down the road and not digging the well before they get thirsty. Once you need relationships, you're too late to leverage them. These drills take a few minutes per day, hence the name, six minute networking, plus five minutes was taken. So, this look, we wish we knew this stuff 20 years ago.

It is crucial. You can find it at Jordanharbinger.com slash course. Remember, a lot of the guests on the show, they are also in this course and on the newsletter. So come join us. Speaking to building relationships, tell me your number one takeaway here from Reed. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. There's a video of this interview, both parts one and two, on our YouTube channel at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. This show is produced in association with Podcast One, and this episode was co-produced by Jason the Oracle Whisperer to Philippo and Jen Harbinger.

Show notes and worksheets are by Robert Fogarty, and I'm your host, Jordan Harbner. Arbinger. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful, which should be in every episode. So please share the show with those you love and even those you don't. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like something you should know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical

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