Reid Hoffman

No. My investments are at seven to 10 years out. And so it's a belief in what seven to 10 years looks like. And almost everything I invest in is unprofitable when I invest in it. Have I invested in a business that's profitable? I can't remember.

Well, what I would love to have, and look, I understand the economics. I myself follow the economics of going into software. A broader range of things, and I've tried to do some of that myself, so I don't just preach it, you know, a nuclear fission and fusion, a Joby and flying cars, because the world is not just digital, it's also real and physical. And so a broader range would be a good thing.

What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months? Interesting. I guess what is the right way for governments to interface productively with cryptocurrency? And there's micro things. I'm a believer in cryptocurrency. I bought Bitcoin back in 2013. I've invested in cryptocurrency companies.

I think it can be very good for society, but the ways that it can integrate well in society, there's evolving beliefs there. What should happen, what should not happen, but they're all micro things, not macro things. Maybe the most macro thing might be It's not a change of my belief as much as it's kind of like an open question.

I watched some congressional testimony from people from the national security establishment that were claims that government labs were studying material from extraterrestrial spacecraft. And this was congressional testimony. And so it was like... huh? Is it an asteroid or is it a robot ship or is there nothing? Is it just craziness?

But before I'd watched that testimony, if you had said, what do I think about UAPs? The answer is conspiracy theory. And maybe that's still the right answer. But I just watched that recently and I'm now got to go scratch at that a little bit and say, okay, what is this UAP thing and try to understand it.

By the way, I never do that again, seven to 10 year horizon. So I bought a bunch of Bitcoin. I've just hold, I just hold it like I've never sold it. And I then haven't bought new Bitcoin. I would say end of 25. So I'm, I'd guess approaching 200,000. That's it.

Well, actually, the interesting thing about this is people tend to think the worst thing you did was you invested in something and it went to zero. Actually, in fact, the worst thing is saying no to the things that went to the moon. Well, it's not doing the B of Airbnb and the C. Yes, exactly. Like those kinds of things. What one comes to mind with that? Well, Airbnb was one.

I mean, where I have key lessons is where I have key lessons of missing an opportunity I should have said yes to. And I should have said, okay, not, look, I led the A, I don't need to go lead the B or the C. I should have gone, I'll lead the B or the C. I'll double down on the risk coefficient because I had the conviction. I just had the, oh, look, I'm already in it.

I already led the series A. And so, that's clearly one. I think there's I got pitched early in Stripe and Square, and I didn't do the investments because I knew how hard payments was from PayPal. It's one of the things when you know too much and you know the risks too well, and those were terrible mistakes. I mean, there's just the list of things you miss that you regret is substantial.

Lots. We could have a whole show on advice, but I'll say with one of the things my dad said to me when I was a kid, which is, he said, the difficulty of making decisions is that in the short term, it reduces your opportunity set because you've made a decision, but it's the only way you have long-term opportunity.

A pleasure as always. I look forward to the next in my next trip to London.

President Trump was threatening personal and political retaliation because I tried to help Harris get elected.

One is you have to understand that you don't get to an optimistic future by trying to avoid failure. When we started LinkedIn, everyone said, this won't work. But just because you don't have 100% chances of succeeding doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it. But there's also a set of skills that are rare that you can actually teach to entrepreneurs that makes you much more likely to be successful.

One is, Reid, what is your take on AI? It gives us superpowers. Now, there will be costs to it, but like electricity, it does electrocute people, but it's essential for human society.

That's interesting. I've never been asked that question before. Probably it's a combination of of the fact that my passion is who are we as human beings and where are we going? So like, that's from, from a very young age, like I've been like, and I think I got it by reading science fiction, right? It was kind of like, what is the scope of humanity?

Like, you know, Isaac Asimov's foundation and, you know, this kind of stuff. And then, um, I ended up growing up – I was born in the Stanford Hospital. I ended up growing up in Silicon Valley. And so I got the exposure to technology can change the world. And so focusing on thinking about kind of this intersection of humanity and technology and, of course, obviously science fiction has some –

play to that too although most of the technology in science fiction is just fiction right it's just like we have wormholes and we do intergalactic travel it's like as far as we know there is no such thing as wormholes for intergalactic travel right i mean all current contemporary theory of physics would suggest that there isn't i mean there may be wormholes but they're not for you know put your star trek spaceship in it and go somewhere and then probably the other part of it is

I played a lot of board games when I was a kid, and so it gave me a very deep sense of strategy. And so approaching life, yeah, Zach, wow.

When I started playing RuneQuest, probably 10.