10 Skills That Will Make You Rich in 2026 : Learn Reid Hoffman's Untold Secrets for Success

You know, you might as well shoot for something large, 'cause you can still end up with something smaller, but aiming for something large is really important.

When I went to all my smart friends and asked them, they basically, two-thirds of them said I was an idiot. Entrepreneurship is a team sport more than it is an individual sport.

That if you're gonna actually kind of pack up your wagons and go somewhere, make sure that where you're going is potentially really good.

The number of companies that really matter every year is probably between 0 and 5. Frequently entrepreneurs say, "Oh, it's a secret, my, I have a hidden idea." Go and talk to people about it.

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.

Every valuable startup has weeks and months of valley of the shadow, which is, why did I ever think this was a good idea? We have this expression in the valley called fail fast.

Sometimes you find yourself pioneering, you can't find a way through the mountains, He's an American internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author.

He's the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn. He has an estimated net worth of $4.6 billion. He's Reid Hoffman, and here are his top 10 rules for success.

It's the same amount of blood, sweat, and tears when you start a company, whether or not it's kind of a, you know, kind of a fixed vertical market, or whether or not it's something really, really large. And the difference is that, you know, 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 to this room is like, yeah, yeah, we all 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 got to 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 that is substantial and unique.

For example, when I started LinkedIn and I went to all my— because you should go to all your smart friends and ask them— when I went to all my smart friends and asked them, they basically, two-thirds of them said I was an idiot for starting LinkedIn. It was like, this is a crazy idea. That's a good signal, right? And the reason it's a good signal is because if 100% of people think it's good, there's almost always problems that you're not seeing, and that enough other people think it's good too, that the competition pile around it is serious. So I like the fact that you say, why would smart people think this is not a good idea? But actually, in fact, there's something that makes it a good idea even despite that. Entrepreneurship is a team sport more than it is an individual sport. People obviously celebrate the individual heroic entrepreneur, and the, the stories tend to be told in retrospect, but most successful entrepreneurship projects actually have 2 to 3 founders, sometimes even 5, although 2 to 3 is standard. So make sure that you have that solid initial founders, that your co-founders and the team around you. And your journey is almost certainly going to lead you through what I call the valley of the shadow. So that means that you should have a strong enough relationship with your founders that it will pressure test in difficult times.

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— and 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, right? 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 number of companies that really matter every year is probably between 0 and 5, right, in terms of like the industry changing. So if you look at an audience like this, which is what, 1,400 people, 1,700 people, you say it's an average of 2 founders per company, presume everyone's doing that, you got 850 in the room, right? And so then that's only the people who are here, let alone everything else. And so the question is, is how do you break through the noise is a really, really key thing, whether it's financing pricing, talent aggregation, go-to-market, etc. So that then becomes a central problem. So one of them is to say, well, do something very contrarian. Do something that is kind of like not like where people say, well, you know, it's Airbnb but for dogs, right? You know, or that kind of thing is not the kind of thing to do generally, right? It's very rare that those ever become the big companies. Yes, extremely rare. The second thing would be is to look where, really look where, and this is one of the reasons why both you and I are fans of Peter's question of, you know, what do you believe that other people don't? But look where other people really aren't, right? Like whether it's, you know, hard science or if it was 2.5 years ago, Bitcoin, you know, et cetera, you know, those sorts of things where like, oh, actually something could be really big here because by the way, if you end up being right, you end up having, access the talent that's really, uh, that's really focused on that. You have a ramp to actually get a whole bunch of stuff and get a big head start from other possible competitive efforts and these sorts of things. You want to get a good sense of whether or not you're on track or on target to where you're moving. And so one of the things that Chris, Ben, and I write about in the Alliance is called network intelligence, which is to get as much intelligence about your project as possible. So Frequently entrepreneurs say, oh, it's a secret. I have a hidden idea. Go and talk to people about it. Get their feedback on it. Don't necessarily publish it to the web, but to go get that feedback in order to know how to adjust your plan, how to know what the market is, how to know what the weather looks like, these sorts of things in order to be successful. And do that— literally anyone who's smart who will talk to you, talk to them, get that feedback.

Maintain flexible persistence. And entrepreneurs are given two pieces of advice with equal vigor. You look at them, they're in contradiction. One is have a vision, you know, plow through the wall, keep your vision, you know, 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, you know, be really adaptive. And you're like, well, okay, right? You know, 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. Right, other than by 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 ABC 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, OK, 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.

One of the paradoxes of entrepreneurship is you do these kind of two things that are in contradiction, in balance. So one of them is you actually want to have some self-delusion of like, yes, I'm sure I can make it work. On the other hand, you want to be asking yourself every day and every, every week, is my confidence in this going up or down? And if it's not going up, what do I need to do and learn and pivot in order to get— in order to have it? And it doesn't have to be that goes up every week. I mean, PayPal, LinkedIn. We've had weeks— every valuable startup has weeks and months of valley of the shadow, which is, why did I ever think this was a good idea? And so that happens. So the confidence can go down. That's fine. But part of the reason you're asking this question is in order to know what problem do I need to tackle aggressively to think that I'm on the right path. We have this expression in the Valley called fail fast. Really what that is is be measuring the confidence interval, the confidence in your investment thesis and what you're doing, and be measuring that in a way that when you, when it begins decreasing and decreases substantially, like again and again over time, to pivot, to change. And you want to be getting as much early data, as much early feedback, it isn't even also data, it could be perspective, to know whether or not your plan is gonna work or not so that you can adjust early. Because if you stay, oh, I just have my vision, and I'm going to work on this for 7 years, you could frequently be nowhere. Whereas if you had taken network intelligence and you had adjusted your plan as you were going, you could end up being very successful.

[Speaker:EVAN CARMICHAEL] A plan for both good and bad luck. And part of what it is is people say, what do you mean plan for good luck? I have this idea. It works out, and then things keep going. Well, good luck actually comes in opportunities that you don't normally see. So for example, PayPal started as an 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 a 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 cash on mobile phones, or maybe not just cash on mobile phones, maybe cash 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 PalmPilot 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 a company is 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 and 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 pioneering, going that you can't find a way through the mountains. What's your plan B? 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. Z. The Plan A is, OK, 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 same— 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, our hope was that people would just invite each other and the invitations would work and it would grow into a big network and that would be all we need to do in order to grow the network. Well, as it turned out, we launched the network 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, 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 the people to say, OK, how do I quickly find out who else do I know is 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 Bs would have worked. And then plan Z is what happens when 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.

Thank you so much for watching. I made this video because Adam Jun asked me to. So if there's a famous entrepreneur that you want me to profile next, leave it in the comments below and I'll see what I can do. I'd also love to know which of Reid's top 10 rules hit you the hardest. Leave it in the comments and I'm gonna join in the discussion. Thank you so much for watching. Continue to believe, and I'll see you soon.