Reid Hoffman

I think the greatest chance, and even when I was starting LinkedIn, after having started SocialLand, after having co-founded PayPal as a board member, even when I was starting LinkedIn, what I would tell the people was like, look, we have about a maximum of 20%, 25% chance of being successful. just to be clear.

We're going to try to grow that to 100%, but we're a couple people in a garage right now. There's all kinds of things that can go wrong. Anyone who's telling you it's 100% now, they're lying to themselves or they're lying to you. I'm very realist and ambitious in my strategy. You should never think you're starting something 100%. Now,

Within the ideas, you go, there's roughly speaking two kinds of ideas. One kind of idea is People generally think that's a good idea. They think it's a good idea because you go to customers and customers say, yeah, I'd like that. Right? They go, oh, well, hey, AI is going to create a whole bunch of new SaaS businesses. Right? Oh, yeah, that makes sense. They have new technology transformation.

Or people in e-commerce, they're going to want to buy this kind of stuff. Okay. You know, it makes sense. So there's a stack of things where... They're pretty measurable as ideas. You can measure them with customers. You can do feedback and polling and other kinds of things. Now, there's good news, bad news on this category. The good news is you can de-risk is there a market for your idea mostly.

Not entirely, but mostly. The bad news is so can a lot of other people.

Right? And so in this category, there always tends to be competition. And your competitive strategy, generally speaking, needs to be why against – like in this category, you should be expecting competition. Why am I going to win out sufficiently against this competition in a global arena? Yeah. I have invested in those businesses.

Greylock invests in a bunch of those businesses because we're one of the best VCs at Enterprise and the planet, blah, blah, blah. Then the other kind of thing, which is the one I tend to start and the one I tend to most invest in is – People think that you're crazy when you're starting your business. And by the way, that can be a – by the way, and frequently you are, right? Yeah.

But people think you're crazy, which means most people think you're crazy, which means your competitive field is a lot less, right? So, for example, I'll give LinkedIn – as an example, and I'll give Airbnb as an example.

So LinkedIn, I go and I say, hey, individuals will join this network and bring in their, and establish a public identity and profile and bring in their network and use that even as the vast majority of the billion people registered for LinkedIn are, you know, basically working companies, right? They're not starting companies. Like it's a great platform for entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs get it right away. But I'm like, well, I'm working in a company. Am I going to seem disloyal to my company if I establish a profile here? Interesting. Because back when we started it, no one's going to use that. Why?

Well, because they're worried about will their company fire them or not give them a bonus or something else because they have a LinkedIn profile because they're saying they're disloyal.

Literally, everyone said to me, this won't work because you're individual focused. You need to be selling products to companies. Okay. Right? Right. And so I was like, no, no. I think I'm right about the way the world can and should be. Right? And so I'm going to take that risk. And that's the contrarian risk. I'm going to take that risk, and I'm going to play it forward.

And if I'm right, I will create something that will transform the industry, that will be amazing for individuals, amazing for companies, et cetera. And we can go, obviously, whatever length you want to go through the LinkedIn journey, we can do that. Now, Airbnb is an investor example. So Airbnb was my first investment at Greylock.

And I was at Greylock because David Z, who was the Greylock partner, who was my most valuable board member at LinkedIn, convinced me that I should do venture at Greylock. And I'm very close to David. And so I bring in Airbnb as an investment. And David looks across the table from me and says, look, every VC has to have a deal they're going to fail on. Airbnb can be yours.

Yes. Because Airbnb at the time had so little volume in its transactions that the founders could have called everyone who used Airbnb that week if what they did is dedicated making phone calls, like five minutes of phone call through the week. That was how small it was. And David's argument at the Greylock Roundtable was – Look, this is very strange.

Staying in other people's houses, you know, like the danger of something going wrong. Cities are going to hate it. Hotel lobbies are going to try to outlaw it within cities. You know, like this is just going to be a train wreck all over the place. And I was like, no, but I want to take the bet. And he's like, great. Like, we hired you as a partner. We think you're smart. Go ahead. Right.

Now, to David's credit, six months later, the transaction volume at Airbnb is like this classic hockey stick. It was years of very small. And then it grew to being very big.

So that hockey stick hadn't started yet. And David came to me and said, okay, because like the always be learning is also useful in venture capital. He came and said, okay, you were totally right about Airbnb. And I was totally wrong. What did you see that I didn't see?

Like how did you know when I was sitting there blowing smoke at you saying this is going to be a total failure, you said, nope, I want to do this. I said, well, look, you were right about all of the risks, right? about that could happen with Airbnb. You are absolutely right. Any of those things could have made the business worth zero. But this is the reason as investors, we do a portfolio.

Because yes, Airbnb could be zero, but if it worked, it was going to be huge, right? It was going to transform an industry. This is the kind of investment I like doing as an entrepreneur or as an investor. And I said, look, we had a plan for each of those risks. We had a plan A, we had plans B, we're going to try to navigate.