Meet: Reid Hoffman

Context

LinkedIn is a business and career-oriented social networking platform:

• Launched May 5, 2003

• Acquired by Microsoft in 2016

• Has over 1B accounts, with over 300M monthly active users

Reid Hoffman’s story

Reid got his first job as an editor at a game company, Chaosium. At the age of 12, he came to their offices, showed an article they had published and his proposal for edits, and got a job there.

He went to Stanford to study science and then to Oxford to study philosophy. After graduating, he noticed the world of software and thought "this is a new medium for interacting with each other" - which led him to apply and work at Apple.

In 1997, he founded his first company, SocialNet, with the idea of ​​connecting people based on a common interest, from sports to dating. But it was very early for the market, and after three years, he decided to close it.

A friend called him and said they were working on a mobile encryption solution. Reid said it sounded like a terrible idea, but he told him "you're my friend, and I'll come to help you". This is the company that later became PayPal.

In PayPal, all of a sudden, eBay sellers started using PayPal's payment solution. Ried saw this and suggested focusing on them as primary customers. eBay had its own payment system that competed with PayPal, while PayPal was more popular until eBay had no choice but to buy them.

All of this taught Reid how to create consumer Internet companies. He took six weeks off and then started LinkedIn. Ried had been thinking about this idea for a long time: resumes and connections are hard to see, while a digital platform can connect people and unlock that power.

With a mission to help people navigate their work and careers, Reid led LinkedIn until it was acquired by Microsoft in 2016.

Career advice

Find your competitive edge. You don't need to be better than everyone. If you try to be the best at everything, you'll be good at lots of things but the best at nothing. So aim for the top in a niche.

Your competitive edge has 3 components: 1. Your assets (soft assets like knowledge, skills and connections, and hard assets, like money). 2. Your aspirations & values (whether that's power, autonomy, impact, or balanced work and family life, your aspirations shape what you do). 3. Market realities (meeting the needs of a paying market).

Readjust and sharpen your assets, aspirations, and the market realities until you see compounding potential in one of the combinations. Find the sweet spot of what you do well, what you value, and what the market wants.

Watch Reid Hoffman meets his AI twin here.

Have a productive month,

– Steve