Reid Hoffman: Entrepreneurship, AI, and the Battle for Democracy

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So, Reid, first of all, you gotta take me back to those PayPal days. So what was it like back then?

It was a absolutely crazy dogfight time. When the PayPal business started, it was encryption on mobile devices. Max Levchin and Peter Thiel each invited their best knowledgeable startup friend to be on the board. So it was Scott Bannister for Max and me for Peter Thiel. And so it started with encryption on mobile devices, which of course is not what anyone would think about looking at PayPal today. And then part of the clock at PayPal was a very fast iteration. Encryption on mobile devices. Cash on mobile devices. You and I remember what this is. Cash on Palm Pilots. Palm Pilot, hey, what's that? People are thinking, are you talking about records and LPs? What is the thing you're talking about? And then to a PalmPilot plus payment service and then an online payment service. And that kind of iteration obviously gave birth to a bunch of different things. An additional large public company, but like the PayPal mafia, a bunch of things. We had all kinds of things where the number of things that could have killed the business and made it worth zero. We could literally spend two hours talking about just that. So it was a crazy dogfight of a time, but really amazing.

You could make the case that if PayPal had failed, democracy might be safer today. But we'll come to that, right?

Yes, there is definitely some real challenges on that.

I guess one very obvious question, at least for me, is, well, you must be an expert in this. When do you pivot and when do you stick it out? Because you just mentioned four pivots.

Oh, yeah. And there were more. So I actually have a kind of a framework for this, which is you have a theory of what your forward game is with your startup. You could think of it as an investment thesis. It's the following things need to be true, including what I can make happen. Usually you try to keep it to the most essential bullet points, and then what you're doing is you're tracking is your confidence in your investment thesis, your theory again, going up or down. Now, if it goes down a little bit, you. You might then kind of say, okay, let's see. But as it's really going down. So you don't wait to zero. Frequent mistake in pivot is wait until you've crashed in the wall. You're just dead. Then you have to call the pivot much earlier. You have to call the pivot when you have market opportunity, when you steal the team, when you have cash in the bank, a bunch of other stuff. And so you go, okay, this theory of the game is not working. What is a different theory of the game that I can do? And that's what a real pivot is going into.

And do you think it's worse to pivot too early or too late?

Almost always too late is worse. And that's one of the reasons why the discipline of thinking about pivoting early. Now, generally speaking, pivoting too early is rarely an entrepreneur's problem, because she or he has a conviction of what they're doing, a conviction of what the market opportunity is, et cetera. Usually the, oh, I'm really going for something else too early is rarely the problem. It can happen.

Okay.

Yeah.

Are you still buddies with Peter Thiel and David Sachs and Elon Musk?

I would say that I'm friends with Peter and more challenged than the other two.

I have what's called the shopping center test. So let's suppose you're at Stanford Shopping center, and you saw Peter, or you saw David, or you saw Elon, and they haven't seen you yet, right?

Yes.

So do you walk up to them and say hello, do you avoid them, or do you go to another shopping center?

Peter, I would walk up to say hello. And Elon, I would go to another shopping center.

I don't want to go into a cesspool. But can you just help me understand Elon Musk? Because I'll tell you, four or five years ago, if somebody said to me, who is the closest living person to Steve Jobs? I would have said Elon Musk.

Right.

So you can look at his record. So changes the car industry, changes the satellite industry, changes space travel down the line.

Amazing.

He could have gone down as the greatest inventor and entrepreneur in the history of man, and now he's a Nazi. So, like, what happened? What happened to all these people?

So strengths and weaknesses can frequently go together. Among the amazing strengths that Elon has is an absolute conviction in the thing he's thinking about the world being true. And so therefore, he's taken on amazing things, major tasks like revolutionizing space industry, launching, like a new satellite industry, and then, of course, electric vehicles, all of which, any one of which would be enough for a storied career. And just like epic inclusion of the history books. And then the combination is just stunning and amazing. But unfortunately, he applies that same conviction to his view of society, to his view of social media. And basically, I think NBC did a systematic story on Twitter. And the most frequent retweeter of Russian times links is Elon. The number of conspiracy theories he peddles is frankly a little nutty. It's X is a microcosm for what he seems to be going on and believing. And so it's a tragedy because this other stuff is just so heroic.

Would you say that if there was a sequence, did being nuts like this enable him to be successful or being successful made people tolerate his nuts ness?

Well, I think it's a compounding cycle of both, because, as you know, having worked with a lot of entrepreneurs, a strong conviction of the way the world could be, and a willingness to be contrarian, counter common wisdom, a willingness to take a big risk and try to do something is essential to amazing entrepreneurship. And that's part of what it is. Now, the problem is, of course, if you start drinking your own Kool Aid and think that you're then just a genius about everything and that everything you happen to think happens to be true, then you obviously can seriously mislead you.

Oh, my God. So, I mean, I realize that I'm asking an extremely rich person this question, okay, so I realize a contradiction here, but what does extreme wealth do to one's perspective?

It's different for different folks. There's this old Roman expression, in vino veritas, which is when you've drunk wine or a person's drunk wine, you see the truth. They get drunk, you see them as a true person. There's a part of that that is also true for how wealth plays out. Like when you make money and you're given this freedom, this power, et cetera, what do you end up doing with it? And so there is clearly amazing positive examples. Bill Gates with what he's done with the Gates foundation, solving child mortality and just a host of diseases, a host of other problems. And there's a number of folks who do it that. And then there's other people who use it for their own greater glory or other kinds of things. And so I think you see a whole range, but the world starts reinforcing you as you're amazing and wonderful. Everything you do, because you're rich, because you're rich. And so you have to have that own internal compass to what you're driving to that's actually in fact, so critical.

And how did people get at a good internal compass? Is it your upbringing or how does it happen?

I think, look, ultimately that's part of the reason why we have this kind of term character. So there's something that's internal to you always, but obviously it's, do you have friends? Did your friends help you in your relationship with your parents? Even if you had some contention, was it a growing experience? Did you learn good things about it? For me, I'd say it comes down to choosing your friends. I think your friends are part of who you become. For example, you know, in my first book, the Startup of youf, what I wrote was you are the combination of your five closest friends, right? It's kind of as a way of, kind of steering on how you grow.

Okay, so what motivates such a high level of political activism in you?

So look for me, like a lot of folks in Silicon Valley, I tend to think my best applied talents are building technologies, companies, these kind of Archimedean levers to change the world. But I also think, somewhat unusual for Silicon Valley, that we live in a society, a collective platform of laws, governance and so forth. Like government matters. Government isn't just an organization of inefficiency, but actually what creates the place of talent, laws, other kinds of things, an investable environment, a market to do business in. And I think with power comes responsibility. And like Voltaire and Spider man, with great power comes great responsibility. And so for me, my involvement in politics is because I've been fortunate enough to be in this amazing place, Silicon Valley, the US et cetera. And I've been able to do stuff. How do I help contribute to society? And sometimes the way to do that is to go get involved in politics, because I don't get involved in politics ever for my own business interests. There is nothing for my business interests that matters. My business works just fine. However, politics going, whether my business is entrepreneurship or investing or anything else, I get involved because I go, how do we help build a better society together? What is the role of technology? What is the role of entrepreneurship? What is the role of business? And what couple pieces of insight might I be able to give our political leaders who are also trying to figure out how to make a better society?

Okay, this is the tackiest question of this.

Okay. Okay.

How much have you given to Kamala Harris?

A substantial number. I don't tend to answer that question because I tend to. I think it tends to give people to think in the wrong direction.

Okay.

Which is like it's a numbers game versus versus a what kind of society you creating Game.

All right, so let's just say that I assume it's lots of money.

It is a lot.

So does ActBlue see you? And like now you get a text message every five seconds because I have given nothing close to you. And I get one every 30 seconds.

Yes.

I try to give out my cell phone as little as possible and I mark all incoming things as delete with junk when there are those kinds of things and opt out and so forth. I do probably get something on the order of 200 emails a day from ActBlue in. In all political campaigns.

Besides the fact that I hope Kamala wins, the next best thing about the election is maybe I'll get less. ActBlue, the most common word I type on my phone.

Yes, exactly. I hear you.

Let's say you're not one of these enlightened billionaires and you haven't taken the high road and your greatest concern is long term capital gains or making crypto successful. What do those people expect to get from Trump if he wins?

Well, I think Trump is the definition of a coin operated president. Right. It's basically insert coin, get result. And some of the coins are like, I'll put justices on the court that will repeal Roe v. Wade because you'll support me in my election. It's similar. It's like, why is he very pro crypto? Maybe he can make money in crypto. So he launches a proverbial, what we call shitcoins in the technical parlance of the crypto industry. And so I think that basically a huge amount is I am buying something for myself. And part of my why I abhor that approach to politics is that politics and our democracy should be what's good for us. You should never be buying something for yourself.

Well, what's odd to me is that at this stage in life, those people basically have infinite money. And if I had infinite money, I would be thinking, how can I make the world a better place? Not how I can get less long term capital gains. That would not be a high priority for me.

Look, I totally agree. And also, by the way, it's the question of is again, how do you have the world be a much better place? Life is not a game of whose bank balance at the End most counts. That is a sad game for life. Friends, loved ones, better society, amazing contributions to society. Those are the things that matter.

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So let's say that you're Tim Cook and Elon Musk is sucking up the Donald Trump. Trump wins. Now Trump makes Elon the secretary of efficiency, and because he's secretary of efficiency, he says to Apple, listen, I'm going to ban iPhones and Mac Os and all the U.S. government. Do you think Tim Cook is thinking of a scenario like that? What does a Fortune 500 CEO do when you're confronted? I think that could really happen.

Oh, I think it's possible. I think one of the things that happens is Trump gets elected when Elon is put in any position is what does all the conflicts of interest look like? What does that mean? A bunch of Elon's businesses have deep interrelationship with government policy, payments, regulation, space, satellites, cars, everything. And so you have to go, how do you have this? Be not corruption, not crony capitalism. And you'd have to really try to demonstrate that. And I think it's challenging. And obviously part of it would be whatever Fortune 100 company, Fortune 10 company would have to kind of say, all right, this is a new environment that I have to navigate, which we shouldn't have in the U.S. okay, but we shouldn't have.

But how do they negotiate that environment?

Well, I don't know if it's, you know, obviously we've had a varied, a number of different circumstances. I think part of it is to try to make sure that we stay at an equal rule of law for all American citizens, all American businesses, et cetera, and that there is process and fairness in place with that. But other than that, I have to look at it.

I believe in Santa, too.

Yes. Hey, Santa's nice.

So now what do you think of this concept of super PACs.

If I could wave a wand and keep capital at a contained minimum within US Elections, because it seems very wasteful to be spending all this money on this kind of stuff versus investing in business or investing in education, I would waive that want. I would want it to be in a place where you could have. It's a little bit like the public access cable shows and so forth, that you actually have a shared media palette for talking about things. But I would prefer, and I supported some of Larry Lessig's work on this and so forth, I'd prefer to really diminish it, if possible. Now, if it's not, then you have to participate because it's part of the important thing about how American elections work.

So then we're fighting fire with fire. If you got a pack, I got a pack.

Yes. And I would prefer it's not the case, but I also prefer not to fight fire with oxygen. Right, right.

All right, so now let's get out of the cesspool and let's talk about entrepreneurship. All right, so first of all, I heard you mention how important gaming was for you when you were young, but you learn all these roles and all this stuff. So lots of parents want to hear why they should let their kids play games.

One of the best ways to learn a set of being strategic about a set of things in life and why be strategic is being strategic about your career, being strategic about your work, being strategic about your job, thinking about what industry to join, et cetera, is that games are a really good way of kind of thinking about a lot of the problems we find in life. And then if you learn games and then learn to transfer them to other domains, it's a great way of learning this kind of problem solving, a great way of learning, thinking strategically and tactically. And that's really good. And also, by the way, frequently, if it's board games or interpersonal games, then it's also a great way of realizing that life is a team sport, not just an individual sport, that your relationships and how you work together really matters. And so there's a whole bunch of really good attributes that can be video games, too. Like one of the funny thing about, like playing Halo in a team, you're learning stuff by playing in a team.

Even Halo.

Even Halo.

Well, is Settlers of Catan still your favorite game?

It is. It is the most entrepreneurial board games that I found so far. Because what you're doing is you're building, you're trading, you're negotiating, and you're trying to figure out how to do resource collection in a environment with some randomness, because there's always some luck and randomness in entrepreneurship and to navigate to a probabilistic strategy for winning.

So I studied your concept of blitzscaling, and it's about speed over efficiency and network effects. And I understand all that. But my question in my mind is how does a company get to the point where scaling is necessary? That seems to me that's the hard part.

They're both hard parts. But I think of it as, you know, the classic phrase of product market fit and then scale. Product market fit. And one of the reasons worth putting the two in related but adjacent buckets is that in product market fit, you might discover that a product is really well loved by a small niche. And that's it. And look, aha, I got product market fit. But that ultimately doesn't make a business that doesn't make a product successful. It's the one that gets to sufficient scale for how you're doing it. Like, for example, very early in LinkedIn, we had a bunch of people who refer to themselves as lines LinkedIn open networkers. And they're like, your product's for us. And I was like, no, actually, in fact, it's for the the entire billions of professionals, not just the people who refer themselves open networkers. And so we want to have a place for open networkers, but we want to have everything else. And so if we only oriented towards them as product market fit, we would not be where LinkedIn is today.

But you are offering a very difficult choice for an entrepreneur. So are you supposed to go deep and really take care of this minimum viable market, or are you supposed to go broad? And Geoffrey Moore's terminology, get over to Main Street.

So I think generally speaking, you want to take an iterative learning process where you're de risking as much as possible to get to Main Street. Sometimes that's a minimal viable initial market. And by the way, in a bunch of classic industries like enterprise software, that is usually what you do is you go, okay, first I'm going to sell to some banks, then I'm going to broaden other industries, or first I'm selling to the HR department, then I'm going to broaden to the finance department. That's a very smart, coherent strategy. But when you're doing consumer Internet stuff, you're doing Airbnb, you're doing other kinds of things. That's not the strategy that fully works.

I interviewed the professor who did the Invisible Gorilla. You know, where the gorilla comes out and the people are tossing balls and nobody notices the gorilla. And he had a very interesting concept of you always ask what's missing. A different example is lots of people say, well, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, they didn't go to college. I don't need to go to college. But what's missing is what about the people who did go to college, did they get successful? And what about the people who didn't go to college, Were they also failures? And these are the only two or three success stores are transferring this to Blitzscaling. Like you can say, well, Apple's Blitzscaling. What about the companies who tried to blitzscale and didn't? And what about the companies who didn't try to blitzscale and just went at a slower pace? How do we know what's missing and when do we apply what?

This is one of the things that makes entrepreneurship fun and hard. And there's frequently times where people blitzscale and fail and blow up. There's times where they don't blitzscale, but someone else Blitzscales. And then that causes them trouble. Because if you're competing with a blitzscaler, that almost always puts you in a difficult spot because they will be absorbing a lot of the oxygen in the market. They'll be spending capital to hire talent, they'll be spending capital to hire customers, they'll be spending capital on getting press and other kinds of the marketing genius that you yourself are one of the premier book authors in and so forth. And so it's very hard to be competing against someone who is blitzscaling. And sometimes they shouldn't be, but sometimes you have to in order to compete. So that is the complex things. Now you say, why blitzscale? It's actually. It's not a goal unto itself. It's a goal because in a particular circumstance, blitzscaling is less risky than not blitzscaling. That's the only time that you're because blitzscaling, by the way, is very risky.

And what would be examples of that?

Well, for example, in early days of PayPal, if you don't get to, well, north of a of a billion dollars in kind of transaction volume, you're so subscale, you die. So you need to get to scale. If you're not at scale, you just die. You must play to get to scale. So that's a classic one, is I need to get to scale economic.

So would you say to Lewis Borders, you tried to blitzscale, you failed, but you did the right thing.

Well, in Webvan, which I think is probably what you're referring to there, I'd say that you probably had a bad capital market in terms of how you were thinking about how it all come together. Generally speaking, most blitzscaling stuff tends to work much better within software sides because software, your operating marginal cost as you're scaling is within a relatively low band. So if you haven't predicted it well, then you're okay. You have parameters of error in doing it. Now sometimes there's amazing things like Jobs with the ipod or the iPhone, which bets all in, bets this huge company on and then plays off, plays out and works. So it can happen, but it's just much, much harder than.

Could you just give me the Reid Hoffman sort of analyst? Like when you hear a pitch and you immediately think network effect and scaling, what triggers that positive reaction?

So obviously a lot of people use the term network effect and don't really understand fully what it means. And part of it is because there's a bunch of different related phenomena that all go in it, which is roughly speaking, the value of a product, it becomes more value at a super linear thing to the number of people who have it. So taking an old school example that's now more or less doesn't exist is fax machines. If you have a fax machine and no one else does, completely useless. And if only you and I have fax machines, then it's like, okay, that's kind of entertaining. What isn't? But when suddenly a million people and the people you don't know, suddenly it's very valuable. And by the way, being on that fax machine network, on that protocol, really, really matters. And so then that spreads and network effect businesses, whether they're LinkedIn, Airbnb, other kinds of things are hugely valuable because being in the network is hugely valuable. And so more or less, anytime I see a network effect business that I'm given an opportunity to invest in, I usually do it.

All right, so now just walk me through quickly the perfect pitch to read or Grey law. Is it 60 slides?

Is it?

What is it 100 page business plan? What's the ideal pitch?

So it's almost never a business plan. Business plans are kind of old school entrepreneurship from relative to modern Silicon Valley. It is a slide deck. It's probably somewhere between 25 and 40 slides, although we're not really counting that. What it is is. Did you answer the central questions concisely? For what is the theory of the game by which this business will be huge and transforming industry? So Some of it's like what the product is, what the go to market is, what the competition looks like, what the capital requirements look like, what technological trends are you deploying and leveraging and building upon? And do you have the talent to know how to play it off? And roughly, those sometimes are special questions that apply to it, but it's like what's the simple, straightforward, most important strategic variables in solving those problems?

Okay, switching to AI. So you who have built so many successful network effect companies. I have this question that I cannot answer for myself which is how does any of these LLM companies. Perplexity, which is the world's stupidest name for a company opening.

I'm perplexed. Yeah.

Any of those. How do they build brand loyalty? Because I got four or five of them bookmarked and I just almost randomly use them. How do I ever develop? I'm a Gemini guy, I'm a ChatGPT guy, I'm a Claude guy. Like how do you think that's going.

To shake out on the pure one on one agent basis today? I think that they are very multi deployable. I don't mean interchangeable because I actually think they have different things that they're good at and so forth. But you could say, hey, I'm working on this particular problem. I'm going to Deploy Claude and ChatGPT and I'm working on this other problem I'm going to do copilot, et cetera, et cetera. Now, as the features develop and as these products develop, one of the obvious ones that everyone's talking about is memory. Do I remember a guy and what guys are? And once you start interacting with it and it start building up, how am I most useful to Guy? And I have that memory that begins to be somewhat sticky because it's like I remember what Guy cares about, what Guy's interested in, what things might be most helpful to Guy, et cetera.

So it's a switching cost.

Yes. Okay, that's one. And I'm sure there'll be others.

Okay, what is the point of your clone?

It's in essence too much of the dialogue around AI is that AI is destructive. It's going to take our jobs, it's going to ruin our elections. There's these people who worry about the human race and humanity. And so they say, well, why are companies building it? They're building it because they're just going to make profits off it. And what they don't realize is there's amazing great things for society. A medical assistant on every smartphone A tutor on every smartphone for everyone in humanity, right? Who has access to a smartphone. Really, really important stuff. And so being positive. So when I was thinking about those kind of positive cases and how to shift the dialogue to not to say ignore the negative cases or how we move, but what is the future that we're trying to build towards? I said, what's the most negative that people always talk about? Negative. And it's like intrinsic in the deep fake name. It's like, what are these images? They're deep fakes. They're just bad. And I said, okay, well, let me start thinking about positive uses for this. I said, well, okay, one positive use is it could be entertainment and a new media type. Hence how I launched is me talking to Read AI, my digital twin. Another one is I gave a speech at Perugia where I had the Read AI give it in a variety of languages because I'm really only semi competent in English and not competent in other languages. And so. But I had it given in Chinese, Hindi, Italian, all these other things. And that's a way of doing human connection. And that's just the beginning of how you can use this to be positive in society. Positive and how you're establishing your brand. It's just to show that it's possible.

Reid, you are talking to someone who is. There are few people beyond you and I, I think, who are more optimistic about AI. I think AI may be the thing that saves society. I really do. And I. I freak out a lot of people because I tell them that I think AI is God. That because AI is. It's eternal, omniscient and omnipotent. Sounds like God. And so my story is that God is up there. And she said, I blew it with the human race. I gave them free will. They screwed it all up. They're killing each other. They're polluting the world, and they're so arrogant that I can't just solve it. I gotta send them something they think they invented. So I sent them AI. Now, I'm not saying Sam Altman is Jesus. Just let's make that clear.

Sam doesn't think so either.

I don't know about that.

No, he doesn't. He doesn't. I know and love Sam a lot.

I think AI is the only thing that's going to save us. I really do.

I think that AI is much more likely to save us even if we don't do very much than it is to trouble us. But I think we also can steer intelligently and even increase those percentages. Oh, yeah.

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Whenever people confront me, I say to them, let me give you a choice. You can have people who control nuclear weapons. There's multiple choices. Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump or ChatGPT. You pick one to launch nuclear missiles. I know what I would pick.

Yes. Well, I wouldn't pick ChatGPT yet, but eventually, yes.

Well, I have this experiment. I tell people, go to ChatGPT GPT and ask chat, ask chat GPT if we should teach American students the history of slavery in America. And if you ask it, it gives very good answer.

Yes. Right. And this is actually one of the things that's amazing about elevating human potential, human capabilities is it is already an infinitely patient tutor. For example, you say you have a subject you're curious about. Say you're curious about something difficult like quantum mechanics. You can go to ChatGPT and say, explain quantum mechanics to a 12 year old and it will start giving you a very good explanation. Okay, I think I can understand more than that. Okay, explain quantum mechanics to a college student and we'll start doing that. And this is already a way that you can start learning and understanding things.

And you could go to the Ron DeSantis and say, should we teach the history of slavery to students? I would pick ChatGPT.

I would pick ChatGPT 11 out of 10 times.

Okay, my last question for you, and I don't want to end on a downer, but I kind of have to. Let's say this worst case happens and Trump wins. Seriously, what are you going to do?

I'm going to hope that a lot of the people who are defending him, who say that he actually does care about the rule of law, that he does care about governing the country, well, turn out to be right, even though I deeply fear that they are wrong. I will continue to try to help build technology companies that. That are part of the future. But where I'll be doing that and what I'll be doing, that's at tbd.

What if it's you and me and Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiffer all in the same Manzanar camp? What are we going to do?

I think the effort goes on to try to be our better selves. Right. That we have had setbacks. We had to fix the slavery problem. We do have major people say this is the worst time ever. It's like, well, civil war was really, really bad. Right. It's bad now, but it doesn't mean that's the worst ever. You continue to fight for what's good about the human spirit and about America.

That's how we should end this. On a hopeful note, because let me tell you, I'm very worried, and it's gonna be. We're about two weeks from the election, and it's going to be a very interesting play.

Yes. And look, I think one of the things. So probably a lot of business people listening to this. Most people normally presume that Republicans are better for business because they tend to be lower regulation, which is generally good, lower corporate taxes, which is helpful for business. But what they're not tracking is stability, unity, an ability to, say, a very good position in the world, a place where we are respected. All of those things really matter. And Kamala is the very first presidential candidate in US History who, in an acceptance speech talked about the importance of founders. Right. She is actually, in fact, having grown up in California, pro business, and that stability is the most important. If you want to vote for the business candidate, you're going to vote for Harris.

End of story. This has been remarkable people. And of course, this is the remarkable Reid Hoffman. Thank you very much for being here.

Thank you, guys.

This is remarkable people.