Reid Hoffman

This is one of the things I learned from SocialNet and brought into PayPal. Find great talent and start talking to them, right? Even if today you don't have the right position to hire them, right? Now, obviously, there's a whole bunch of great talent. You could waste a whole bunch of time. You want to be talking to people that

You either really would love them to join at some point, not too distant future, or they know other people who would be like that. Because, by the way, part of when you meet great talent, you realize how to – because you're always adding new great talent. You're like, oh, my God, we need people like this. How do we bring them in? So, for example –

one of the things I learned that was, you know, from SocialNet that I brought to PayPal was that SocialNet, I was trying to hire people who had 10 plus years experience doing the thing that we were hiring them to do before. Because the classic kind of wisdom that you get from business schools is make sure they have experience on their CV. Look, they have to be able to do the job, right?

No question. But if you said two years of experience and an insane learning curve, That's much better.

Yes.

And learning on the job and going and figuring it out. And so when I went to PayPal, and when the company was founded, I was on the board of directors. I was like, this is what you're looking for, not this.

Right? And so back to your PayPal mafia question, that's because we hired those kind of people.

There was a very limited set of people in the company who had had more than a couple years' experience working within payments, within banking, within, you know, because it was the, I don't know, learning curve.

Yes. A proxy for a founder, if you're not spending a third of your time hiring, you're very much under delivering. This is the thing. It's like, look, life is a team sport. Companies are team sports, right? If you could just do it yourself, you wouldn't hire anybody. No, you're hiring people. So like you say, well, I've got a really good, let's use a European football analogy.

I've got a really good striker. Great. Well, we don't need to worry about the halfbacks or defensive or goalkeeper. No, no. You have to hire all things. And you go, well, I'm a really good hat back.

Literally, I think Zuckerberg puts this in a very good way. He wants to hire people he would work for. And why? Why is that? Because that's a demonstration of high talent.

You want to hire the best people you can. And by the way, if you can hire people better than you, oh, my God, it makes you much more likely to be successful.

Yeah. Well, but your theory of management is, look, if you can hire someone where your only management technique needs to be let them loose, that's best. Yeah.

So culture can matter. I would say, look, in terms of, and hopefully it's not a cliche, but hopefully a heuristic principle, references are more important than interviews. We get a lot of repetitive experience at being compelling in an interview. And if you can't – and by the way, some great people aren't compelling in interviews. They're not really great at selling themselves.

But, oh, my God, are they amazing in the field. Like an engineer. Like an engineer might be like – and you're like, okay. But, oh, my God, can they do great things. In which case, like do whatever you can to hire that person. So if you ask me, you can only have references or only interview. 10 out of 10 times, I'll hire the person on the references.

Surely you're not talking about the types of references where they give you the references themselves. No, no, no, of course not. And this is one of the features of LinkedIn. You want to find references that will give you good perspective. Now, even if you can't go find someone that you know or you have a tie to or is what you refer to frequently as an off-balance reference sheet, e.g.

not the one they give you to be a reference, So even if they say, oh, here's, you know, I'm Reed and here's my reference, you know, Bob or Susan. You call Bob or Susan and you say, this is a standard question I will use all the time, but especially if I'm calling someone who's a given reference. Say, look, I believe every person is a combination of strengths and weaknesses.

And if you don't give me a weakness, I will believe that it's so bad that I should not hire this person. Right? So if you say there's no weakness, I'll just go, okay, I understand. I shouldn't hire this person. Thank you very much. Right? In that, they will always, almost always give you something. Right? And you can think of it because we are all combinations of strengths and weaknesses.

Like I'm one of the best people to have on your side for creative strategic problem solving. Like one of my employees once told me, he's like, I would never hire you to run a McDonald's. I'm like, I wouldn't hire me to run a McDonald's either. I'd be terrible at it, right? So that's combinations of strengths and weaknesses, right? And so everyone has them. There is no one who has all strengths.

I mean, people tell themselves that, but that's self-delusion, right? And so you have that conversation with a reference and the reference will tell you something because they're not used to saying it. So they might say, oh... You know, Susan or Bob, they're a perfectionist.