Reid Hoffman: Entrepreneurs Will Create the Future [Entire Talk]

So entrepreneurship has always been really important. It's how all of these institutions, you know, every company was started, every government was started, every nation was started. Entrepreneurship has always been important, but I think it's growing in importance in our time. And I think the reason is fairly simple, which is the future. We're kind of accelerating towards the future. The markets are changing more rapidly. You have the forces of globalization, you have technology change. And all of that means that how we both invent the future and adapt to it is becoming more and more important. And so how you create new things, how you make something, that's what the new institution, the new product, the new organization, that's what entrepreneurship is about. So one of the questions that I've been thinking about in the last year has been, can you teach entrepreneurship? And I realized that it's actually, there's a parallel, which is why it's so hard to actually teach it, to have it as a kind of form of education. And that's because entrepreneurs, in a sense, are the modern pioneers. You can teach a variety of skills in the business side. That's things like business models, competition, shipping, a product, hiring, organization, management, these sorts of things. Just as, for example, for a pioneer, you can teach, this is how you set up a camp, this is how you drag. I'll use we're here in California, wild, wild west, wagon train across the mountains, these sorts of things. But it doesn't teach you how to navigate the, the inevitably new circumstances that you get. Because when you actually have a new opportunity that comes about from entrepreneurship, because it has to be new, otherwise it would be occupied already. How do you make those critical decisions and judgments in this new circumstance? And that's part of what really distinguishes the ability to pull together an entrepreneurial venture, something new, something that starts on the back of a napkin, potentially. That's a metaphor we use here to building into a company or institution that's offering product and services, hiring thousands and tens of thousands of people, and having global impact. And so when I was thinking about this, it's one of the reasons why one of the talks that I gave earlier this year to south by Southwest and then published as a blog post, which is also an endeavor, was kind of, what are the rules of entrepreneurship? As I was trying to figure out, how do you convey what are the things to think about when you are essentially, how do you set your mind in order to be a more effective entrepreneur? And so I figured I'd go through a couple of the rules, not all of them here, and then talk A little bit about how it is that we improve our entrepreneurship as an arc. And I'm going to leave enough room for questions because in case you showed up thinking that you wanted to talk about something else, I'm perfectly happy. If it's of interest to the audience, I'm perfectly happy to talk about it. Because part of what we're about here, this is about entrepreneurship. It's about how we invent and create the future. So the first rule that I discussed was to look for disruptive change. And the reason that I said look for disruptive change is because it's what are the opportunities that come about that are really new opportunities that are something. Because the opportunity, generally speaking, has to be large. It can't be something that's like, well, boy, it's been sitting there for 10 or 20 years and no one's ever really thought about it. That's very rarely the right answer. And if it's not large enough to be something that you could make something significant out of, it's not really high impact. And the kind of pioneer parallel to this is that if you're going to actually kind of pack up your wagons and go somewhere, make sure that where you're going is potentially really good and that the algorithm by which you can think about that is all of a sudden there's a new opportunity. It's a change in technology, it's a change in competitive landscape, it's a change in kind of how the global ecosystem comes together. The second rule that I was kind of was aim high. And part of the, the kind of aiming, actually I aim big. Same thing was because it's the same amount of blood, sweat and tears when you start a company, whether or not it's kind of a fixed vertical market or whether or not it's something really, really large. And the difference is that you might as well shoot for something large because you can still end up with something smaller. But aiming for something large is really important. And part of the reason why this is kind of a rule of entrepreneurship and maybe this is the kind of thing that this room is like, yeah, yeah, we already know this, we're living it, I hope, is because if you don't start out aiming for the big game, you almost never can get there. It's gotta be the kind of the how do I have kind of global impact? Like I think all high impact companies are basically have to think globally in nature these days because of the way that the market ecosystem is going. And so you go, okay, how do I play onto that? Stage. And part of that in terms of a pioneer parallel is again, how do I go somewhere that is substantial and unique? The third, and this is one of the things we're going to come back to, is how do you build a network around your company? Because as much as we tend to glorify the entrepreneur as kind of a, you know, like, for example, LinkedIn is the product of Reid's brain. It's actually brought about by lots of different people. There's everything from your co founders, there's the early employees, there's investors, there's customers. Some businesses have distribution channels. Investor, you know, there's a whole set of. There's a network around it. And that's even true, for example, when, you know, pioneers, you know, very rarely did one person get a wagon and head west. That was usually a recipe for failure, really. One of the things that's really important to make these things more likely to succeed is to assemble a network around them where that network helps you get intelligence, helps you get the right resources and drives forward. And so thinking about it as, what kind of network are you assembling around your company? So, for example, the practical advice is when you're looking at financing, it's what additional strength of network can I bring to my company when I'm doing the financing? Because it's a very good opportunity to get people to have their interest align with yours. The fourth, and this is actually a tricky one to explain, is to plan for both good and bad luck. And part of what it is, is people say, what do you mean plan for good luck? You know, I have this idea, you know, it works out and then I. And then things keep going. Well, good luck actually comes in opportunities that you don't, you don't normally see. So, for example, PayPal started as a encryption on mobile phones company because it was. Two close friends of mine, I joined the board when they founded it, even though I thought encryption technology in mobile phones back in December 98 was not a good idea, which I told them. But it was kind of like you also back people. And then they were like, well, okay, not encryption on mobile phones. Maybe cache on mobile phones. Or maybe not just cache on mobile phones, maybe cache on Palm Pilots, maybe cash on Palm Pilots and payment service to the web. And then they launched with that. And for the first week they said, well, all this growth is coming through ebay. But that's not really what we planned. We planned on people bringing their Palm Pilot around with them, exchanging money. These aren't our customers. We should figure out how to get them off. And then, of course, part of PayPal's great strength was being able to pivot fast. And they went, oh, no, these are our customers. All the rest of that stuff doesn't work. This is the thing that we need to go to. And that's an instance of what I think of as planning for good luck, which is you basically, you go, okay, Sometimes what happens when you start the journey of going down to companies, you're looking for an opportunity that you may not have thought of it when you started it, but then suddenly you kind of, you know, like the pioneering parallel. You come around the corner and all of a sudden there's new opportunities available to you and that you head very strongly to that. And so good luck is not just, oh, look, my plan worked. It's, you will encounter opportunities that you will need to move quickly and grow into an exploit by having been on the journey. Now, planning for bad luck is unfortunately a little bit more straightforward, which is sometimes you find yourself, you know, pioneering, going, you can't find a way through the mountains. What's your plan B? Right. And one of the ways that I frequently think about this is I kind of have a plan A, a plan B and a plan Z. The plan A is, okay, this is what we're thinking of doing. Plan B is, well, if that's not working, what are my parameters of flexibility? I'm still trying to get to that. The same, you know, build the same product, the same product market fit. I'm still trying to get there, but maybe if I try this rather than that. And so, for example, when we launched LinkedIn, you know, our hope was that people would just invite each other and the invitations would work and it would grow into a big network. And, you know, that would be all we need to do in order to grow the network. Well, as it turned out, we launched the network and, you know, and a couple weeks later, we're growing at 2,000 people a week. And I was like, well, that's not fast enough. So what were the other ideas we had in mind, the kind of plan B? And the plan B was, well, actually, if we. One of the questions that people most have when they come to LinkedIn is, who else do I know who's here? So why don't we build an address book utility that allows people to say, okay, how do I quickly find out who else do I know who's here? I upload my address book, I see who's here. We invented that whole pattern, and that caused our growth rate to go from like 2,000 a week to like, I think it was about like 20,000 a week. Right? So, and that's, you know, without that, I don't know if we would have succeeded. Maybe other plan B's would have worked. And then plan Z is what happens when it's just not working at all. Right. It's kind of the lifeboat plan. And that's part of the how you plan for both good and bad luck. The last. Well, no, there's two more rules I'm going to go through. One of them is, and it's funny, there's only a partial pioneering parallel to this, but it's so important for entrepreneurs to understand this, which is maintain flexible persistence. And entrepreneurs are giving two pieces of advice with equal vigor. If you look at them, they're in contradiction. One is, have a vision. Plow through the wall. Keep your vision. Don't allow yourself to be defocused from that. Keep going. The other one is listen to your customers. Listen to market feedback. Listen to your network. Be really adaptive. You're like, well, okay, how do you put those two things together? And that's part of, again, where it's a very difficult thing to teach other than by doing, other than by the. The activity of going out and being an entrepreneur and making those decisions. And so the reason that the rule is maintain flexible persistence is because it's both keep a vision and be flexible. So, for example, if you think about the kind of the ABZ planning framework, it's like, look, I've got a plan. I want to try to get there. This is my main plan. If that's hitting problems like I'm not growing fast enough or I'm stalling out, okay, here are some things I can try to keep trying to do that. And if that doesn't work, how do I shift to a different destination, a different location? That's part of the plan Z. So the last rule that I'll go through for today before we get back to kind of entrepreneurs as pioneers in education, is that these rules are not rules of physics. They're not natural gravity. You know, gravity, not just an idea. It's the law. They are kind of rules of thumb by which you navigate. And that's part of what makes entrepreneurship so interesting, because usually almost every company has something of a unique pattern to how it operates. Now, sometimes a unique pattern is where it's operating in the world. Sometimes it's a question of which distribution channels it has. But one of the things I love about the consumer Internet, which is What I focus on with the vast majority of my time is that each thing to elevation kind of defines its own unique space and that what you're really looking for is a unique pattern of getting there. And so the problems that are in front of a company, even though there's family resemblance to them, like, well, okay, how do I scale a sales force, or what do I do in terms of financing, or how do I work with potential financiers and all the rest of this? How do I make all that happen? And there is a skill set there, the combination and how you pull it together and which is your strategy that pulls it off. That's how new strategies are created. And entrepreneurial companies are usually the ones that create the new strategies. And so usually when I'm telling someone that I think something isn't going to work, I never say, well, that'll never work. Well, actually, sometimes I say that, but usually it's like, well, that's going to be really hard. And you're really betting the farm on that one idea, which doesn't strike me as it's potentially going to work. And so these are the kinds of rules that are the kind of things you have to learn in the journey that you take when you. The metaphor that I use for entrepreneurship frequently is you jump off a cliff and you assemble an airplane on the way down. And the reason I use this metaphor is because it's kind of get you really focused because the ground's coming, financing isn't success. It's a thermal draft, just makes the ground a little further away. You have to get the plane working. And of course, if you get the plane working, maybe it goes up and off to the right, and that's good. And so the question is, how do you learn this? And the funny thing is I get a fair number of governments and other institutions coming to me saying, so how do we set up entrepreneurial education? And maybe we do an entrepreneurship center. And those are not bad ideas, because I think anything that supports entrepreneurship is generally speaking better than not having. But the real way that actually this education happens is through networks. And it's networks like this is part of the reason why when Linda was saying, well, what do you think about endeavor? I said, well, it's really important. She said, well, when are you going to join? And I said, well, it's when, not if. It's because pulling networks of the shared information and the shared contacts and the shared ability to find the right resources in order to create these massive institutions from nothing. The education that you get from your network is actually what's critically important. And so like, for example, one of the things that I frequently tell entrepreneurs, like when I has an idea and they come and they say, well, who should I talk to about it? And it's like anyone who can possibly give you good feedback now, you don't publish it to the web, maybe because you don't necessarily get good feedback there. But anyone who can give you good feedback, you go and tell them your idea and you talk to them about it. Because the way that you have a competitive advantage is not because, oh, I have this idea and other people don't have it, and the moment they have it, I'm going to lose a competitive advantage. It's because you're in motion. You're assembling the network around your idea. You're getting the co founders, the employees, the potential customers. You're moving and you're adjusting by talking to a number of people to getting to the right target. And so just someone else having the idea, that's not the impact. And so it's the network that essentially provides the education. And that's one of the reasons why I think that the thing that endeavor does, both in terms of its global network and in terms of events like this, are so critical for what entrepreneurial education really means. And it's of course, extremely important because if you look at, I think, the ability to have high impact products, services and companies, I think that they're all global. And so a global focus is, I think, extremely important. Now it's interesting when it gets to thinking about entrepreneurial companies and venture, because part of the thing is it has to start local and rooted. You have to get a team together. They have to have an idea, they have to have an aperture that they're trying to drive their strategy through. You don't start with thinking about how do I take over the whole globe with my new product, my new idea. You start thinking about how do I establish this as a strongly growing, you know, an ongoing concern that can fund its own expansion all the way to being a global entity ultimately. But all of the stuff starts locally. It starts with, you know, a region, Silicon Valley, you know, Chile, Argentina, Jordan. Local entrepreneurs with. And I could go through the whole list. But then you don't, you don't want doing that. So I don't mean to leave anyone out. And then how does that grow and then how does that get onto the global stage? And so that's one of the reasons I think putting time into this is extremely important. But here's the thing I think is particularly interesting when it gets to entrepreneurial education, which is, I think it's the importance of these memes and of this learning is going beyond just founding companies. Because if you look at it with the trends going on in terms of globalization, accelerating change in markets, all of the institutions, not just the new companies building new products and services, have to adapt, which means every individual now needs to act more entrepreneurially. It doesn't mean that every individual is going to found a company. Actually, I think relatively few folks go through all of the different complexity in assembling all the different problems you need to solve to found companies. But that I think every career is now entrepreneurial because I think it's both entrepreneurial, by which the way that you operate within an organization, within a company is the market's changing and you need to help the company adapt. And then because the market's changing, what is like a career path is no longer straightforward. It used to be like kind of post World War II. It's like, well, you join a big company, you work your way up the ranks, then it kind of got modified a little bit while you jump between companies while still working on a career ladder, I don't think there is any such thing as a care ladder anymore. And I think that the pattern by which you develop a skill set and a set of work, a set of ability, a network skills and all the rest, I think actually much more mirrors how entrepreneurs live and work than anything else. And I think that's part of the reason why what we're doing is important, is I think it has that kind of global impact. So I'm going to make one last comment about global, and then I'm going to open up for questions. One of the things that I think is kind of most interesting and the challenges is how do you both build something really strong with kind of a local focus, and then also how do you participate on the global stage? Now, I have done that with kind of two very easy things, which I kind of say, okay, well, I focus on the consumer Internet, so you can have your servers there. And then that can very quickly scale globally. So, for example, we launched LinkedIn with 13 countries in the list. And I think it got to the full country list within about four months, because as each person complained that their country wasn't in the list, we added it in as a way of doing it. And then the second is because one of the benefits that we have, starting with kind of a local market in Silicon Valley and going out to the US is the US gives you a very strong basis for doing that aperture. But I think that's a skill that everyone needs to learn in terms of how you play out on the global stage. And I think the sharings of information through these networks of entrepreneurs between Silicon Valley and other places in the US and other places in the world, and other places in the world and other place in the world. I think the skill set's going to be evolving at a very fast rate. And that's part of the reason we do things like this. So with that, I think I will take questions. If there are any. If there are any. I don't know if you have microphones. It looks like there is a microphone. Raise your hand. There seems to be someone over here. Sorry, I have a little bit of a kind of a. I'm in this interrogation spotlight light, so it's hard for me to see people. Thank you. Thank you very much for the chat. What, what are the entrepreneurial tools that can leverage users at the bottom of the pyramid? Say three more sentences on your question. Entrepreneurship. We usually are a little bit better educated. You have access to the network you speak of, but then you have developing countries that are by nature very entrepreneurial. They have three or four different jobs, live on very little money. What do you think are the practical tools that can leverage all of these communities, these millions of people in the developing world, to social, economic well being? Good question. Well, I suspect that tool set will be evolving at a fast rate, but generally speaking, you know, frequently, of course, what happens is people say, okay, how do you, how do you create educational institutions which educate a higher skill set and then make that skill set more employable and deployable across the world? As a common answer to that question, one of the things that I've been thinking a lot about is can you create kind of networks of how people educate each other? Now, that doesn't work if it's a raw skill set like you need to code. Right. And obviously part of what happens is usually early in a region's economic development, you do things like assembling natural resources, converting them into something and that sort of thing. I'm not sure that's a good answer, but I guess it's kind of a question of you have to look at, is there a way that you can get the growth of how the work comes together and what the skill sets are to meet to what our regional or market needs? And you know, I don't think mobile phones will provide you education, but they may provide you ways that you can assemble people such that they can teach and learn from each other as an instance. But anyway, I think of you probably could talk for an hour on that question. Hey, Reid, one of the issues that entrepreneurs at an early stage often have to deal with, and you mentioned flexible persistence, is a point in time where the prospects of their startup does not look so good and the need to pivot. I was just wondering if you could share, maybe you've never had that experience, but I wonder if you could share with Your experience at PayPal and LinkedIn what that moment felt like and what the hindsight was. Well, so every startup has. Well, yeah, although almost every startup has what I call a valley of the shadow moment, which is there's some moment by which the founders and the early team are sitting around looking at each other, going, why did we think this was a good idea? Right? And so the PayPal moment of that was all August 2000, where the company spent $12 million in one month. We didn't have a dime of revenue and the burn rate was accelerating. So we could tell you the hour at which we would run out of the hundred million dollars that we'd raised a couple months earlier. And we're like, okay, well, that was the definite valley of the shadow moment. And we basically decided that we had one. We had a chance to do one thing that would fix the course of the business. Peter, Max, Luke and I did an off site where we talked about it. We came up with, said, look, we have to do master merchant business because we have to have. The real exponentially cost line was credit cards, free credit card processing. So we have to have a revenue model that matches that. We got to try it. A lot of people thought we were going to die because people had tried to do master merchant on ebay before and it hadn't worked. And so we generated every idea to make it work and we tried it and that's what we ended up being successful rather than a smoke cloud. And then at LinkedIn, it actually started from a fairly early day because one of the things that was interesting is, as I recommended to people, that you go out to your network and you get intelligence from them. I was taking the LinkedIn idea around, so of my smartest friends, and all of them were saying, well, not all, two thirds of them were saying, you're out of your mind, this is a dumb idea. And I was like, well, why do you think it's a dumb idea? And they said, well, the whole value is people in a network. So first person on the network, no Value, second person on the network, no value, third person network, no value. Until you get to some size of the network, there's no value for anybody in the network. So how are you going to. This will never go anywhere, it'll never launch. And I said, well, I've got some ideas for how virality and other things may be able to pull us together. And even though a small percentage of people go, ooh, I want to try this, this is interesting, I think I can grow to the right size. If I wasn't right about that. My plan Z was basically to shut the company down or try to sell it and then be done. And that's the reason why we launched as early as we could and we were focusing on the network growth as a part of it, as a way of making it happen. And the months between, between we launched 5-5-2003 and then to December was all pretty white knuckled because until we actually got the growth and network going the right way, we basically knew the alternative was a fairly immediate and messy death. Whatever. Thank you. Hi Reed. We were talking with these guys from Singularity University and we realized that in 20 years many jobs will be lost, will be lost because of technology and because of the things that are going all around. What do you think? We as entrepreneurs we have to invest in our companies. I know you will say technology and also you will say people and we've been hearing this about human resources and talent, but what do you think probably can help us, all entrepreneurs to doing what? To invest in the future. Thanks. So the question is what to invest in other than the obvious easy answers. So now I guess there's two categories of answer to that question. One is of course, what's specific to the company and strategy. The other one is I tend to feel that like one of the things that works really well while you're an entrepreneurial and private company and one of the things I'm working really hard to maintain a LinkedIn past going public is to make sure that you're actually both, you're investing in the long term and taking risks. So what that means is doing projects that don't have an immediate like one to three month payoff in the data that are part of the general positioning of how you think the world is changing. So for example, part of the theory initially behind LinkedIn was that every individual is going to have a professional identity online that they will transact with as the business of themselves, both for their company and outside of that. And that that's how the future of the world's going to evolve. And even though there was no particular way of proving that theory back in 2002 and 2003, that that was a theory and that's what you kind of built into the future on and keeping those kind of future visions of this is what I think the world's going to be. And I'm going to take a risk that I think that my theory is right and I'm going to invest in it, even though I'm not going to be immediately rewarded within one to three months. And doing that selectively and taking those risks, I think is the key form of doing investments. And it's one of the reasons why in technology companies you frequently see the company continuing to do well when it has still founder roles in it, eg, the founders usually, but other people who are, who are willing to take that kind of three to five year risk in what they're doing. And I think that's really critical. There seems to be one back there. Hello, you always.

And now you just said that companies.

Has to think global when we start the businesses.

But we see that most of the overseas investments are done to clone type of businesses.

Sorry, which kind of business? Clone business clone.

Okay, so that gives us emerging market entrepreneurs an idea that clone business models in global markets are more appreciated than original models. So why don't we see companies dig more deep into these emerging market startups and pursue investment opportunities into original ideas other than clones.

Well, I think you will for sure see more original. I think that the issue is that people get confidence in pursuing their theory and their vision, that you will see more original ideas coming out. And I do think that that'll happen. Now part of it is also people look for, how do I use a baseball metaphor? Sorry, it's the U.S. how do I get on base?

Right.

And I frequently see entrepreneurs in some markets going, look, we haven't seen the ebay of Country X yet or the Dropbox of Company y or the LinkedIn of Country Z. Right. And I think that it's like, ok, well I know there's something there and I just need to work fast and I can build out to something that works is the normal impulse. And sometimes that's not a bad idea for getting a quick hit. But I tend to think that if you're going to jump off the cliff and you're going to take that ride, generally speaking, the biggest idea you can think of is the one you should target. For some of those folks it may be a clone and for other folks it'll Be original and I have confidence we'll see more and more original ideas. I don't know if that was an exact answer. Yeah, My question is about what to expect, I'm sorry, in the future from LinkedIn as users. I worked for 12 years in the executive search business and LinkedIn is pretty much transforming that industry. However, it's just a network. It doesn't allow third parties to build on the experience, just adding new features to it. What can we expect in the future of LinkedIn as users? One of the unfortunate parts of being public is I'm not allowed to make future predictions anymore. It's part of the regulation. So there is an experience about. There are a lot of tools now by which you could build LinkedIn either on the server itself or into your website@developer.LinkedIn.com and I'm sorry for such a weak answer, but it's public markets.

Hi, going back to someone that mentioned that the easy answer of where to invest is technology and human resources. When you come to San Francisco by car in 101, you see this huge sign of Groupon advertising, not their business, but positions for developers. And when you talk to entrepreneurs worldwide getting that talent early on, it's becoming harder and harder. And Groupon, a few months, about to go to ipo, it's also struggling. So you're in a business that is trying to solve that problem. But I also think that at the same time, you're empowering each of us to create this personal identity that we can transact on, and it's disrupting the same businesses that are trying to leverage that. So I really love LinkedIn. I think that it's going to be a huge disruption in that business as well. I know that you can't comment in the future, but from a standpoint of the industry, where do you think it's going in terms of how people, individual people, will be positioning themselves in the Future, like the LinkedIn 2.0.0 or 4.0?

Well, the high line is I actually think that one of the lessons that we have from capitalism is that you get massive growths in productivity from market efficiency. And part of what LinkedIn is trying to do is create better market efficiency for talent and jobs, for people finding information about what they need to do in order to do their job, for finding resources in order to make your work go better, whether it's for a company or as an entrepreneur and whatnot. And so creating transparency and efficiency and liquidity in those markets creates more competition, makes it more challenging in certain ways. But should result in substantially more productivity. And that's what the theory is. And so, you know, so for example, it's easy to recruit talent. Well, that should make companies that are doing better things in terms of creating a good work environment, providing better products and services should make them easier to recruit talent. And that creates efficiency in the whole system. And that's the high line kind of response to that. Now this is blinking zero at me. I'm happy to take a few more questions, but I also want to be respectful to. Okay. To the people running this, direct me as necessary. Thank you. Reed. A couple of weeks, a couple of months ago, I got an email perhaps from you, LinkedIn. I was one of the, I don't know, a million customers users from LinkedIn. The question, I thought that was a great idea. I loved it and I showed to my partners. It was a funny moment for us. But the question is how do you shape and how do you care about your customer experience on such a massive scale? What should we be thinking about our customers experience and learning from guys like you? Well, that could be an hour answering that question. So the question is how to think about how to engage your customers the right way. And, and the short answer is you have a set of ideas by which you think things could be very valuable to them and so you're building to those. Those are the value propositions. But then people are diverse. You have a wide range of, you have a wide range of possible reactions to things. And so you have to kind of test them. So for example, on that specific email, we thought that people would like getting both. Thank you. And also essentially the number of what number they were when they signed up. And we thought that people would like getting that, but we weren't sure. So we said, okay, let's send it for the first hundred thousand and see how the response to that goes. And we were looking at Twitter and a bunch of other things as a way of finding out, like, were people going, you know, damn it, this guy reads, putting an email in my box that I don't like. Or they're going, oh, that was kind of cool, right? And kind of getting real time sentiment analysis. And it was clear within a couple hours that the vast majority of people who were getting that were going, oh, this is kind of cool. I both like being appreciated for being an early adopter and for, you know, part of our theory is the members make the network and so it's all about the individual members and everything else is secondary. And then also what my number was. And so we then set the second batch, which was up to the first million, because the thought is to confirm it to early adopters. And so that was kind of an instance of thinking this through. And the last piece I'd say on this is when you're a company, you're building all kinds of things where you don't really. You want to kind of pull off the, you know, open up the curtains and say, ta da. You want to make sure that everything that you do, because your members only see a small portion of what you do. The rule that we follow in the company is if everything that we would do were printed on the front page of the New York Times, everyone would be happy with us, or at least neutral, but preferably happy. And no one would go, what? What are you doing? Right. And so. And that's part of the trust that you have when you say it's a network of over 100 million people and growing. How do you preserve that trust? And how do you have them go? Yes, I think that you've never acted badly. You've acted frequently. Well, and the times where I don't agree with you, I at least kind of get it. And I think it's neutral as kind of a compass for how you drive it forward.

And, Reid, we can take two more questions if you'd like to.

Okay, perfect. That's fine. Do we have. Okay, great.

Hi, I'm from South Africa. I just wanted to actually. Thank you. We. I've always been told as an entrepreneur that if you want to speak to any someone, everyone is equal in the real world, just pick up the phone and phone and get an appointment. And recently launch launched a new business, and that just didn't hold true. I couldn't get through to any important person. Everyone just put the phone down in my face. So strategy two was going to LinkedIn, invite them all to be a member. Anyone that had anything in common with what we were looking for and amazingly got appointments with all the top people thanks to them then joining on LinkedIn. So the credibility is really amazing. Thank you for that.

You're welcome. Thank you.

What actually made you think of taking your company public? And the timing of choosing to take LinkedIn public specifically.

I mean, with the rumors about Facebook.

Going public and being put aside. As an entrepreneur, when do you decide to take your company public?

So the question is, when do you decide to take the company public? So at some point, when you have a group of employees and investors, everyone has invested in the company with the idea that they will have some liquidity in the stock. And so it's a when rather than an if. Well, hopefully, if you're being successful enough. The question that you. When you're a successful company, the question you're addressing is when. And so what you want to do is you want to build as much into the company culture, the momentum, kind of a solid team culture, business model, and all the rest of the stuff. And you want to get all that really established. You want to make it reliable enough that because one of the requirements from the public market investors is that they understand it with a fairly high degree of precision on a quarterly basis. You make it reliable enough that people go, okay, I can understand how this goes. And then you choose a time that's on, based. Based on when it's good for your employees, when you may need to have liquidity for doing acquisitions or expanding the business. And that's kind of the logic which it goes. One of the things that's been happening more in Silicon Valley in the last 10 years is it used to be that the marketing event of going public was really critical. And so you got there as soon as you could because it was the way of kind of being presented on the stage. And probably there's a certain class of companies, but that's still true for, for the consumer Internet companies, because they already touch usually hundreds of millions of people. They don't use it for that as much for that kind of marketing vehicle by which they suddenly kind of get a spotlight on the stage as much as it's the natural timing in the progression of how you're building out the company. Anyway, I hope that was useful rather than horribly generic. Are we all right? Thank you.