‘15 minutes between exultation and terror’: The fascinating journey of Reid Hoffman

21:07 -As an investor, what makes you different now?

“If you’re not paying attention to changing market conditions and changing capital conditions, you’re not navigating intelligently.

“At Greylock, we always try to be fairly disciplined and professional, so the seeds and Series As, we’re still investing in at the same rate. On the other hand, because of changing circumstances, the questions are: what do future financings look like? What will we need to do in order to prove it? What capital do we need to make the next financing? What’s the speed at which the competition is running?

“One of the things about Blitzscaling, if you’re competitor is Blitzscaling and you’re not, they’ll win or lose, but if they lose, you’ll probably lose too.”

25:10 – Where does the dry powder go? How do you decide where to look?

“The focus has to be ‘what industry transformations are five to ten years out?’.

“We’ve been doing a bunch of stuff in AI, and we’ve also been doing a lot with Web3 as there are fundamental platform changes that will alter the way the internet works, those shifts in platform really matter, you’re looking at this as a ten-year journey.”

28:20 – Do you see any opportunities right now that can reach the size of PayPal?

“One of the phrases I use to describe what we are is the ‘network age’, and the world is getting more and more networked. That is continuing through communication, through transport and logistics, across markets, across commerce, all of these things, the network age means you get more largescale opportunities.

“I think there are many PayPal-size opportunities. That discerning question is figuring out which are the ones that the current market and tech trends will enable.

“As an investor, I always look at networks. Part of what I’ve been doing for the last five years is transport networks, and how networks can be redefined by autonomy. I’m always interested in new network definitions, that’s part of the reason I’ve been looking at Web3.”

35:50 – If you were going to do it again now with what you know, what would you do differently with LinkedIn?

“When we started LinkedIn we got a bunch of our theories right, which was that individuals own their own network, whereas a lot of our competitors thought companies owned the network for individuals.

“One of the mistakes we made, one thing our competitors pushed was a focus on groups – professional associations or conferences versus individuals. We hedged our convictions and built some group products.

“What we should have done was bet on one or bet on the other. We ended up with a decade-long anaemic groups product that we never really invested in, which distracted us from other things we could have done on our individual product. The principle that I would apply, is to focus on your bet, even when it makes you nervous, have the conviction and continue.

39:17 – What advice would you give to entrepreneurs in Europe?

“One of the things entrepreneurship requires is an ability to take risky gambles with hiring people, refactoring and being able to close your shop down if it’s not working. I frequently give advice to European governments to try and enable this more.

“Often what a lot of tech entrepreneurs do is hire tech teams in places like Berlin where it’s cheap enough to allow experimentation.

“The things to look at when you’re European is to say ‘where do I have a really good competitive edge for a global fight?’. I think there’s a lot of really interesting opportunities. When you have these regulation challenges, ask are there any ways to turn those into advantages?”