Reid Hoffman

And by the way, a team from scratch when the vast majority of human beings like more certainty in what their week looks like. Like, I'm going to come work at a place because I can continue to work at a place. And as long as I'm capable of what I'm doing, I keep my job, right, in terms of what I'm doing. And so I understand the certainty. So entrepreneurs have to do all that sort of thing.

So in addition to kind of risk-taking, you have to be good at bringing many resources from different vectors into your vision and working with you. So there's investors, there's employees, there's customers, there's advisors, there's partners. You have to bring the right set of those people along with you in this iterative process. This kind of iterative journey.

You have to be able to grow yourself and learn because the game changes. Like one of the metaphors I use to train and conceptualize young entrepreneurs is – and there's a bunch of different parallels between military strategy. It's part of like the board games thing and business strategy. But it's like Marines take the beach. Army takes the country. Police governs the country. Right.

Three very crude, broad generalizations about how you do it. So you go, what's your marine strategy? Because you must, as a SEED Series A, you must have a good strategy how you get on the beach, how you get initial product market fit, how you're heading towards scale product market fit. OK, you're there. How do you win the country? right? The market, right?

What, how do you get to scale product market fit? How is that going to work? How are you going to play against competition different in these two? How do you get up to scale? You have to learn this game is different than this game, right? And you're learning new things as you're doing it. So you have to have this kind of, um, what I refer to as being an infinite learner.

Like you're learning what the new game is. Because by the way, no entrepreneur shows up at door one, at day one going, well, I know how to do marketing. I know how to do sales. I know how to do product development. I know how to do engineering. I know how to do engineering operations. I know how, like, no, no, no. You have to bring all that in.

You'd be learning what you need to learn in order to do that through that. And that's part of how you grow into that. And then by the way, Once you've established a business, because another thing that brings in a lot of competition is people say, oh, that's a valuable business. I'd like to possibly have that. And then a new generation of heavy competitors come in.

So can you kind of keep your position and grow your position in a market? Which is the police part, right? The police part. Yes, exactly. And so you have to look. And each of these three is different games. And there's more games than that. But it's a way of kind of simply understanding it. always being learning, being an infant learner and changing your mindset. And so...

Frequently, like, for example, when I'm talking to an entrepreneur, especially the first few times, is I will push them on their vision to see if they're learners. Now, one, they should have persistence and grit because, like, no, I've thought about this. I've got a good plan. This is how I'm going to go to market. I understand what the competition looks like.

Because if they go, oh, you're right, I should totally change that, you're like, okay. You have to have some grit and persistence. But on the other hand, if they're not, like, going, oh, yeah, no, if we encounter that, Yeah, we'd have to do something about that. Like if our competitors started doing that, and maybe we'd do this, right? And so they also are learning. They have flexibility.

So you want that combination. Like one of the things about startups is... you have to bring kind of this dual-lensed focus of things that seemingly are a little contradictory. So like persistence, flexibility. Another one is right now, long-term, right? Now you have to do right now, but if you don't have a long-term of how you're building something that's insanely ambitious...

You're never going to get there. If you shoot for the hillside, you're never going to get to the moon. You have to shoot for the moon. So you're shooting for the moon, but it's me and my two friends in a garage right now. It's interesting because the middle bit, does that matter? It does, but it's a, remember like the Marines, Army, Police. Army, when you're doing the Marines, is the middle bit.

Right, okay.

So it does, but it's not – by the way, and one of, again, mistakes, and that's part of the reason why there's another chapter in Startup View is AVZ planning. The mistakes is, like, you have a plan and then you have a plan B. It's like, no, no, no, you have a plan, and then you have a lot of micro plan Bs, right? So you're kind of like, well, if that doesn't work, then let's try this.

If that doesn't work, then let's try this. You know, and you're iterating through them. And when you know to do a major pivot – because, by the way – Many successful businesses also do major pivots. PayPal started as encryption on cell phones, right? That's where it started, right? So you do major pivots.

It's when you go, oh, my current plan, which I've iterated for my first plan, is worse than my first plan. Like the market circumstances, its chance of succeeding, those are now worse.

That's when you think about, okay, let's do a major pivot.

Yeah. Yeah. There's, call it two kinds of ideas. And frankly, by the way, you think there's over 8 billion people in the world. The fact that you think you're the one person who's thought of this idea, you may not be doing math well, right? So thinking you're the one person who's thought of the idea, that's a mistake, right?

The question is, are you the person who can pull it together in the momentum

and and pull together and it's still by the way that may be well okay that gets down to 100 people okay well am i the one who's in motion right now am i the most person who's willing to take the risk quit my job and do it um and you never really get down to one right so so startups are risky businesses like one of the things let's get back to the entrepreneur is like