Reid Hoffman

And within those, what can your aspirations be? And there's a whole chapter on that in that book because that's, by the way, similar to how you plot out if you're founding a company. If you're founding a company, you have to think the same way about this, but think about it as an individual. So if you're in Cape Town – There are many great things you could do.

Now, if you say, what I'm going to do is create a search company to compete with Google, don't do that. I mean, unless you really have some real unique thing. Because remember, you're competing with this intensely powerful, not just the company, but the network of Silicon Valley, which attracts millions.

amazing talent from around the world, capital, knowledge, and they're all sharing it with each other at a very fast clock speed. And so wherever you are, that doesn't work. Now, you do think about, okay, what can the thing I do? So, for example, you know, I love podcasts, as you know. I, you know, master scale, possible, et cetera.

And so I had the delight of doing interviews with Toby Lutka or Daniel Ek. And what you do is you look at part of their success, Shopify, Spotify, is how do I run my strategy from here? Like how is it that I'm competitive and can win a global field marketplace that Silicon Valley doesn't do?

And so, for example, one of the things that – they're different in the cases because like, for example, in Spotify, that was, hey, I can get the record labels – to give me a chance to start doing the business by doing just Scandinavia, prove it, and then expand it. Whereas those record labels, the capital to do it in the US would never happen. And hence, you have Spotify.

And in Shopify, it's, hey, the Silicon Valley tends to go, oh, e-commerce is over its own by Amazon. We're not going to do any of that as a platform. Maybe this thing or that thing, but we're not going to do it as a platform. Well, but they're wrong and I can do a long place.

And then once I get to this network effect of a whole bunch of, you know, small and medium businesses doing their own, you know, kind of websites and e-commerce, then I am the platform for that. So it's kind of a long under the radar approach. strategy where you're not directly competing with Silicon Valley companies.

And by the time the Silicon Valley companies go, oh, there's a managerial opportunity, you've got it. So those are plays that you can do if you're smart and strategic. But you have to know, like, Toby Lutka, like, is deeply informed about what's going on in Silicon Valley. Like when he's charting a strategy, he's aware of that. He's got connections. He visits. I mean, I'm a friend of his.

And that's part of, like, if you're doing a global software play, you have to be aware that your competition is global.

So I think self-awareness is generally a very good thing for all human beings. And you still have to be irrationally ambitious, which is, I think, very important. And so sometimes self-awareness and just immense ambition sometimes don't go together. It's better when they do, but that's fine. What you do have to do is be very aware of what your competitive space looks like.

So just about everybody who succeeds in a substantial way is good at being competitive. And if you're blind to your competition, you're kind of hosed. If you're successful, it's just because you're lucky. And that's part of what I was referring to earlier in luck. If you start a business where you have the luck where –

competitors haven't identified it and you get a long head start on it, that's an instance of luck. Not all the successful companies are that way, but that can be very good and very useful on that. But you have to be very aware of what the competitive landscape looks like. Now, that's also true of individuals, right? Because it's like, well, who am I competing against is a relevant question.

But you can be kind of competitively blind as an individual. And still be very successful because of the way it works. But if you're competitively blind leading a business, leading a startup, almost always that's hosed, right? That's one of the reasons why, like, you know, all investors in Silicon Valley always ask about your competition.

And if you say, I don't have any competition, you're like, well, if they disagree with you, they're not going to invest because they go, you're competitively blind. Right.

Yeah, I'll run through a framework to help the folks. The short answer is no, not everyone should be an entrepreneur, just like not everyone should try to be a professional musician. Not everyone should try to be an athlete. Not everyone should be – you have to look at what your competitive advantages are and does your –

Dispositions, skill sets, path give you a competitive edge, in this case of being an entrepreneur, right? Because any game that's competitive, right? And entrepreneurship is a highly competitive game. That's part of the, you know, it's as competitive as trying to become, you know, a globally renowned actor. It's as competitive as trying to become the CEO of a major bank or anything else.

So it's a competitive game. So for an entrepreneur, what you have to do is you have to say, okay, well, I have to be able, one of the classic ones, to take substantial risks. Now, it's not being risk blind. Entrepreneurs are actually not risk blind. Or occasionally they are, and occasionally they're lucky and it works. But almost all the successful ones realize that.

that when you start a company, you're default dead, right? By default, the company is out of business, right? And so you're trying to get to a point where it's default alive versus default dead. Then there's a whole bunch of different things that go into that game. So one is, well, can you go get the capital? Are you in a market that allow you to get the capital?

Can you move to a market that allows you to get the capital? How do you pitch the capital? How does pitching capital go? And then you get this kind of flywheel going between capital, talent, business realization, capital, talent, right? And you're doing that. And the business realization obviously includes customers, includes go-to-market, includes building products and services, et cetera.

And by the way, it's dynamic. So you say, well, I went and worked at a large company and I learned a bunch of things. Like, well, yeah, but you didn't learn how you're default dead. You didn't learn how to launch a new product. You didn't learn how do you start with a small product and grow to a larger product. You didn't learn how do you set up a team from scratch.