Reid Hoffman: Work on Teams Instead of Consulting

So the question is, if you're thinking about starting a company, should you be doing consulting as a way of evolving your career, getting skills, building a brand since you're not necessarily doing a long-term relationship with the company? Well, I think the short thing is I think that almost every realistic company understands implicitly, if not explicitly, this tour of duty notion. So I don't think that the vast majority of modern good companies to work at have this notion if you go and really do some great things for a couple of years there that they then kind of beat on their chest and say, what, you're leaving to start a company now? How could you possibly do that? Given of course here, us being here, we all do that to some degree, that's what happens. And one of the reasons I would actually tend to encourage people to go work on teams rather than as a consultant is because the relationships that you form are really important, the ability to actually see how the team works and if you yourself are going to start a company and say how does this group dynamic work in terms of everyone. So I generally speaking don't think that consulting is a particularly good path for doing the actual entrepreneur starting company as a path. And really what you just have to do is settle between being a good employee where you have a tour of duty, e.g., you're there for a while, you do some stuff, but with a— look, you achieve some things and then people are happy with you. I mean, like if— I think if you go back, it would be an interesting question. If you go back to most of my employers, I think they were happy that I worked there, right, and not now like, oh yeah, good thing we got rid of that guy Hoffman.