Reid Hoffman | Conversation with Harry Stebbings of The 20 Minute VC

Welcome to Grey Matter. I'm your guest host, Harry Stebbing. So for folks in the VC world, you might recognize this terrible British accent from the 20 minute VC. If you're a regular listener, you'll know that Greylock general partner Reid Hoffman joined me on my show in November and we talked about some of the key lessons Reid has learned over the course of his career. Before that podcast, though, we asked Twitter for some amazing suggestions for questions for Reid, and we got some fantastic material that we couldn't cover in that episode. So we really wanted to do a deep dive. And so, Reid, thank you so much for agreeing to do the deep dive with me on Gray Matter.

I had so much fun the first time that I have been looking forward to this all throughout the holidays.

Well, that is very, very kind of you. So have I. But I do want to start the discussion today with let's start on the theme of investing. And we got a bunch of questions on investing and the first was from Dylan Field from Figma, and he said, outside of investing in companies with proven network effects, what are some of your recent investment theses?

Well, one of the things, of course, is very entertaining about you channeling. A question from Dylan is Dylan, Figma is a Greylock investment. And Dylan and I talk to each other every so often. And Dylan is obviously a superstar entrepreneur, generally speaking, obviously, I tend to orient towards things with network effects. It's the background, it's social at PayPal, LinkedIn, it's the way I think about things. Obviously, it's one of the reasons I did Airbnb and a number of my other investments, Coda, Neva, et cetera. Now, in thinking about it, there's probably areas where you say, well, maybe there's network effects, but you don't know because I actually tend to do so much oriented towards network effects. One might be autonomous vehicles, which are clearly a transformative technology. So investments that we've made at Greylock and I've sponsored Aurora and Neuroanato, they're kind of questions about like, redefining the brain of the car. Now, that may end up being a logistics network, that may end up being a kind of transport network in a way that they operate, but it also could be just the next evolution of these kinds of vehicles. And then also another investment that I've made through Greylock is Entrepreneurs first, which is a incubator. Now, part of the thing about being contrarian and. Right. It's actually, by the way, based in London with also offices in Berlin and Paris and Singapore and Bangalore Part of the thing is Silicon Valley thinks that incubator networks, incubators which have been tried, not accelerators, accelerators y combinator are different, but incubators which have been tried over the decades in Silicon Valley have all failed. So when I came to my partners and I said, hey, I think we should try this thing entrepreneur first. And they're like, well wait, all of these history of incubators have all failed. Why would we pick up the 70th one? And I said, well, actually, in fact, because I think that our whole business is things that fail a lot. And then suddenly you have the right idea and the right thing for these markets and the right way of pulling together and the way that the entrepreneurs first is actually in fact finding founders, bringing them together, matching them together and having that sponsor B2B business ideas. Again. Maybe it'll end up being an entrepreneurial network perhaps, but at the moment what it is is a really great way of matching entrepreneurial talent to launching interesting companies in a number of very tech talented areas of the world that don't yet are perhaps underrepresented in their tech unicorns.

Yeah, no, I totally get you. In terms of especially kind of the delayed network effects that kind of come and transpire over time. If we think like network effects as one. You've said something before and this is from Raja Shim, and I love this one because you said you invest in seven deadly sins. I love this as a statement, but when describing the type of companies and products you invest in, can you explain that thinking around seven deadly sins to me and how it factors into your evaluation?

Part of what I was trying to do is that typically when people approach investing, they think I approach it from like what? I've been trained as an MBA or at Wharton and I have profit loss statements and cost of customer acquisition and long term value and cohort analysis and all these things, all of which of course super important for understanding and valuing businesses appropriately now and what they're growing to and with the growth cagr and so forth into the future. However, the thing that's frequently lost, especially in the earliest stage of these things is, well, what is the thing? Why does it really appeal to a mass of humanity and so forth? I started saying the sentence when I gave lectures at MBA schools as I was trying to shake them up to think about this in different ways. And I was like, okay, why are they called the seven deadly sins? They're called the seven deadly sins because they are actually emotional appetites and reflexes that are very widespread across humanity, across human beings. And so actually, in fact, when you look at it, you say, okay, well, what are the early stage consumer Internet investments, generally media, what I'm investing in? Well, it tends to be one or more of the seven deadly sins. Now, by the way, I'll do an asterisk. I have been thinking about doing an update to this thesis in a moment. But let me say what I was saying then is I was like, well, I'd say, okay, you've got Zynga, which is sloth, because I'm playing games, because I'm taking a break, I'm being lazy. I got Facebook because it's vanity. Or Twitter, as I was arguing, because it's vanity. What is LinkedIn? LinkedIn's greed. You know, it's like each of these are kind of seven deadly sins. One of the things that I realized after several years, after I started advancing this as kind of a lens to kind of shake up and how people think about these things, I realized I had misqualified Twitter. Because Twitter wasn't vanity, Twitter was wrath. Right? And so. And we could see a bunch of that, you know, in obviously a bunch of the election chaos that has been part of the Trump regime and everything else. And so that's one part. And that leads to the thing that I've been thinking about writing another essay on, which is say, look, I am absolutely still right about trying to get people to think about the broad engagement with humanity. But I didn't mean glorify the seven deadly sins. I meant sublimate them, appeal to them in an appetite, appeal to them in a connectivity, but transform them. So, for example, take LinkedIn. Of course, people said, look, I may be participating in this because what I really care about is how much do I increase my salary and all the rest, and what is the opportunity flow. But even participating in this, I then suddenly am facilitating a network of knowledge. I'm creating alliances such that I realize that work is a team sport, not an individual sport. And I'm working with people and developing lifetime relationships as we're collaborating, as we're going through and transforming the work world. These are all good transformation. So it's the seven deadly sin as a hook. But then the transformation, which I think is the thing that I think is important for people to think about.

Can I ask if you're mentally plastic, as you are, and as I hope I am, that you could almost fit any company into one of the seven deadly skins if you squint hard enough, how do you think about the ability to Kind of do that and kind of manipulate your own evaluation to fit the model and actually not just be pure in thinking.

So again, it's not really a formula. The question was just to say, look, if you're going to create a consumer Internet media property that you think is a broad swath of humanities say that you could say, hey, we should have a billion human beings that are active members of this maybe 200 million or 500 million, very large number. Well, the question is, are you hooking in not just to a value proposition because usually the ways that technology designers and inventors are used to thinking about things as scenarios and use cases and that kind of stuff which is very important, like what is the use case? What can you do, what can you now do now that you have this piece of technology, but also thinking about in terms of emotional attachment, of reflex, of hunger, of want. And that's part of what the seven deadly sins is about. Like to some degree, if you're bringing a sophisticated sense of human nature, of how human beings actually work at scale and so forth. Look, it doesn't have to be exactly the seven deadly sins. Like for example, one of the things that I think is an unfortunate side effect of what happens in all media, including social media, is confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is a well known psychological phenomena and most people fall into it. It actually takes a lot of work to get out of it now. So if you say, hey, I've got this really interesting idea that will connect on a confirmation bias basis, will get to scale because of it and hopefully it'll help transform people into being active truth seekers or something that's better than simply catering to confirmation bias then that could be an interesting thing. That isn't a seven deadly sin, but it is. You can say, oh, it's vanity because you're certain of yourself and it's like, well yeah, but vanity has a lot to do with how it appeared to other people, et cetera, not just confirmation bias. But you could say it's that kind of human nature, broad psychological reflex and appetite that is connecting to what you're doing.

Yeah, no, I totally get you in terms of that appetite. I mean you said there about kind of the seven deadly sins and kind of forcing it as a, a slight kind of bone of contention with the NBA class sort of prick. There is, so to speak, Daniel Lee asked in particular across startups investing career, in terms of like partnerships, what's something that you maybe don't agree with your partners on at Greylock? That's a tough one.

There was A classic one that I think is worth repeating because it's really important for people to know. That started because my partner, David Z, had wanted to bring it up, which is Airbnb was the very first investment that I brought into Greylock to lead as a general partner. Here I am as a baby vc, and I'm like, I think I got one. This is really great. I come in and David Z, who is the most valuable board member at LinkedIn, the reason I'm at Greylock, a simply superstar investor. Facebook, LinkedIn, Pandora, et cetera. Amazing. We do the Airbnb presentation, and David says to me, well, every VC has to have a deal that they're going to fail on. Airbnb can be yours. And I was like, well, okay, you're super smart. Why do you think it's going to fail? Right? And so we went through some of the reasons, and he said, but look, you've heard me. And what my reasons are, which are government regulatory issues, the kind of weirdness about, like, people renting out their own space to other strangers they don't know, and da, da, da. And you kind of go through those set of issues that it'll never really get any traction, never really get scale. And I said, well, okay, I actually disagree, but it has a real chance of it, so I'd like to do it. So we would do it. Obviously, the story has been written. This is a very convenient story for me to be telling Now. The only reason I'm mentioning this is because David is the person who started telling the story. And to David's credit, one of the things that happened is six months after we did the investment, he came to me and said, you were absolutely right, I was wrong. And there were no numbers changing. There wasn't like an IPO, this amazing IPO that just happened. This was like, literally six months after the investment 11 years ago. And he came to me and said, what did you see? I didn't see it. And I said, look, you are absolutely right about the risks and the challenges, because that's part of what you're balancing as they. The belief in the future and the things that could blow it up, make it not work. That's part of what makes the investing game so interesting. And you are right about your list. And it was a long list and it was kind of scary, but if they could figure out how to get around it, and there were some ideas about how to get around those and ideas on how to get it going once it starts going, it's huge. It's Literally a new marketplace that has not existed anywhere in the world before that can suddenly be there and is transformative to human beings. Both hosts who can pay for things that, you know, like the mortgage or rent or other kinds of things, and the guests who get to not just kind of go rent a hotel room, but get culture and connection. And of course, in a time of pandemic, you know, one of the weird things about having a network being transformative is the network can transform to, say, it's much easier to make individual apartments and houses like Covid safe and bio bubbles. So we'll transform to that because a network is adaptable. Anyway, so that was part of the thing, and that's part of what makes a partnership so great because we had a really robust conversation. David is super smart, and it's one more of the times where you look for the kind of contrarian, but. Right.

Can I ask, is there anything that you can do or that one can do to encourage dissent or discussion in a partnership rather than crowd mentality and kind of follow the sheep thinking?

So we try. And part of what we do, for example, at Greylock, is every partner has to vote on every deal. And the votes are basically 1, 2, 3, and 4. So there's no middle vote. There's the 3 and 4 is, I want to do the deal. And 1 and 2 is, I don't want to do the deal. And one is I really don't want to do the deal. Two is like, I don't think it should be part of the portfolio. But look, if the rest of you think it's kind of a good idea, fine, Right. Like, I think, you know, maybe I'm wrong. And three is, look, I think it should be in the portfolio. And four is if you don't want to do the deal, I want to do the deal. Now, part of the reason we do this is because you have to have an active stance. Now, part of what we then also do, because it then becomes natural and easy to cluster in twos and threes, is someone who's making a two or a three vote has to articulate what are the things that would move them from a three to a two or two to the three so that we're approaching it with a very active mind, because that's part of what you're trying to get to is to say, hey, let's really think this through. Now, part of that's being good investors, but part of that's also being good partners with entrepreneurs. Because part of what that then does is you Take a collective room of very smart people who've been involved in a number of investments in a number of industries and also say, look, here is what our radar sense, our spidey sense, tells us about the possibilities and the threats here and then condenses it to okay, this is what the path looks like. So for example, when we did the Airbnb debrief, all of the things that David mentioned, I went back to Brian, who is one of the people, the entrepreneurs that I think of as an infinite learner and I think I'm right about that. And I said, look, here's the set of things that we thought were concerns that we should watch out for and be ready for when we need to respond to. And that was one of the things that helps the company go, oh, we're having a crisis right now in trust because a criminal has stolen a credit card and trashed an apartment and now we're going to fix all the systems. Well, that's partially because we've thought about those risks in advance and we've done something. And that's part of how you stayed nimble as a partnership.

I love that in terms of the nimble and flexible kind of discussions within the partnership. I do want to ask kind of outside of the partnership, Jamie McGurk asked this one and so credit to him for this, but he said, what's the strategy for re invent and long term view of SPACs in the technology ecosystem? What do you think?

I'm doing some SPACs with a venture firm called Reinvent Capital. And so the theory basically is that there's a story that founders like myself and tell about technology companies. So you have this initial idea, LinkedIn, you know, you write it on the back of an applicant and then you execute really, really fast. And it's the same idea the whole way through that you just add ons and things to. And actually that's almost never the case. And so for example, Google was initially enterprise search. We're going to sell search to the enterprises. It was the website was the exemplar case to show people the technology while they were doing it. That's an example of, well, we, what we started with isn't where we ended up and in any sense of the world. And so what you do is you go through these constant cycles of invention and reinvention in the technology space and it doesn't end with going public, which is kind of like the hey, look, we're just, we are what we are and we're just going to keep doing that for the next decades. And so you have to do these cycles of invention and reinvention. And what I think is interesting, and we're seeing some very good possibilities with SPACs is that how do you essentially create new innovation in the IPO process, where you say, let's set this up for the new cycles of invention and reinvention when you go past the IPO process. And to do that, we think that you need to set it up with essentially a similar kind of venture capital position, because the things that help the companies, the things we do at Greylock and the series A's and the seeds and the series B's is a 10 year journey of these cycles of invention and reinvention. And part of what happens, you've done the 10 years and you need to distribute to your LPs and you need to go back to doing more series as well. What's the next 10 years these companies look like? And I think SPAC's given interesting innovation IPOs for setting it up that way.

And this is off schedule, but it was, I think. Kyle Voight on Twitter today asked the question of how should founders feel when their competitors are spacing prolifically? I think there's now five plus autonomous vehicle companies that have gone through the SPAC process. And Bill Gurley responded, you've got to play the game on the field. I'm intrigued. How do you advise founders who are saying, hey, my competitors are spiking. How should I respond? React? Think about this.

Well, it's a complicated subject and will be very specific depending upon the specific company specific issue. But people are usually pretty familiar with a lot of the dynamics in which startup companies compete with each other. You compete for customers, channels and partnerships. You compete for two talent. You compete for what quality of technology, platform you build. You compete for quality of investors and the network that they bring to help you build the company. But another really important one is access and deployment of capital along with all those others in strategy. And so part of what you have to be thinking about is, okay, if my competitors are getting this form of public market capital and that way of deploying, is that an essential tool by which they are going to essentially gain ground on me in some way, do I need that tool too? That doesn't mean everyone should do it, because sometimes you go, no, actually, in fact, I don't need that tool. My capital market works just fine. And what's more, they're not really ready to go public, say, and the X years that demonstrates it'll be a little bit more painful for me, but it's not really the right thing to match in kind. So that's what you have to kind of look at now. Sometimes the pluses in the public market and this is just like similarly going public, getting public capital, being able to deploy public capital helps with acquisitions, new kinds of talent, some other things those can be, you know, it could be a large pool of capital, those things can really matter. On the other hand, it could be the I'm doing just fine in the private market and what's more, I'm not yet ready for the ups and downs of the public market. And so the longer term plus 10 year position is to steady on as you go. Now all of that fits within Gurley's tweet of play the field. You have to be play the field across all these variables and competition. And that's part of what makes these things unique and hard and why this is a difficult journey that people should do because it creates the future, but is also the reason why most startup people are working 100, 100 plus hour weeks totally.

And this is why I look about 84 years old despite being considerably younger. Reid, I do have to ask pre the SPAC or the IPO that happened, there's the scaling process and you've spoken obviously prolifically written about it, incredibly the blitzscaling process. And so it was a good question here from Abhinav Singh who said does blitzscaling still hold today? And given Covid and the high uncertainties.

Do you still believe in blitzscaling very much? Kind of. Not a surprise, probably. But the first thing to understand is that blitzscaling is a relative speed metric. So the crisp estimation of blitzscaling is prioritizing speed over efficiency in an environment of uncertainty. And what that means is the speed, the first to market is what really matters. You're going to be inefficient, spending, capital, hiring, operational efficiency, other kinds of things in order to get to that scale to market. Because the first matter is like a network effects business or other scale effect businesses or other things like that. And environment uncertainty is, look, you haven't worked out all the variables. It isn't just like oh we worked it all out, now scale it up. You might be still working out what your go to market strategy is, maybe even what your business model is in its mature large form. And you're doing all that. And that all still applies because in this increasingly hyper connected world where all companies are in process of becoming technology companies, this is the process by which the next generation of Technology companies will mostly be built by essentially blitzscaling, by moving very fast to establish the scale market, because that's what matters in a. In this, you know, hyper competitive, in this hyper network world. But the specifics of the playbook change, right? So you go, okay, you know, before I was hiring people, you know, by like saying, okay, let's try to hire people. Like we hire someone and say, okay, let's send job offers, the three best people that every person we hire comes in and we're just going to do that. Well, maybe we don't do that during the COVID because we go, look, we don't know how to onboard them effectively. And so the relative speed of doing that kind of hiring doesn't actually, in fact work now. But maybe there's a different way because it's a relative foot race. And so I suspect that part of what's been happening over the last year in the pandemic is people have been working out alternative of how do I have differential speed? And then the second variable, of course, is during times of high volatility, capital uncertainty, everything else there's a little bit more of, don't spend all your reserves. Preserve some of your reserves for uncertainty and flexibility. And so there's some of that too.

Yeah, no, I totally get you. Can I ask you, you said that before, when money's on the table, take it. A lot of people, when Covid hit said to their companies, hey, pull back. Cash preservation is key. I'm really intrigued. How did you advise founders, given that when money's on the table, raise it. And also kind of with COVID hitting house, how did you advise Amazon Capital Deployment with the uncertainty of the pandemic ahead?

So there's a kind of typical thing to go, oh, my God, we should preserve everything, the world's coming to an end, and so forth. And what you want to do is you want to say, look, let's presume if the world's coming to an end that either the world comes to an end or we all sort it out together. So don't plan on the world coming to an end unless, you know, in your specific industry, the world's coming to an end, right? So it's like the, hey, I'm in the commercial planes business, right? And you know, like, like I'm flying consumers around or, you know, like people in like, you know, United Airlines or et cetera, et cetera. It's like, well, okay, that world's coming to an end for a while. You need as much help as you can. Get that is the sky is falling. However, in the other cases, you say, well, look, we have a lot of uncertainty. We have uncertainty about our supply chain. We don't quite know what our. Even though we're not catering to restaurants or hotels or other people who are, you know, clearly going to be massively hit by the pandemic, we don't really know what it looks like. Then the answer was, look, presume turbulence in the business and presume uncertainty, but don't presume that it's all going to zero. So what that means is you buffer in some reserves. You still plan on the fact that your customers are going to still be customers and still be operational, but you monitor on a weekly and a monthly basis to make sure that your theory of this. So you get as early a signal as possible of, oh, wait, whoa, whoa, whoa. Maybe this part is catastrophic or this part's really working. Probably the surprise to most people in the technology industry was how much of the technology industry got accelerated because everyone needed to depend on the new things that were coming out of technology. Everything from zoom or virtual conferencing, but also, of course, deliveries and home entertainment and home productivity software and all the rest of that. And so a bunch of our portfolio greylock actually, in fact, got accelerated because what was actually, in fact happening was we were already viewing it. This is going to be something that's essential to 10 years out. And what happened is the pandemic and the whole market accelerated it.

Yeah, totally with you. In terms of that acceleration. My subsequent question, the last one on the pandemic, is simply the big question. Obviously, investing now is, is, is the acceleration sustainable and enduring, or is it purely caused by the pandemic? And we'll see consumer shifts in terms of behavior back. How do you think about this when investing and working with founders today in an entertaining way?

Comes back to the human nature question, the seven deadly sins question from earlier, which is you got to presume that human beings are still the same. So part of some of the accelerations that happened, we'll maintain, is once people had resistance, for example, doing telemedicine, because they were like, well, I'm really familiar with, and I trust the fact that I go into my doctor and all the rest, and all of a sudden it's like, well, look, this televised thing works pretty well. I get it very quickly. I can hold up my, you know, my hand and say, hey, this skin lesion, you know, what's that? You know, et cetera, and a bunch of other things. I think those things will then go. They will play in human nature because they'll go. Now I'm familiar with it, now that I trust it, it's much more convenient. It's easy. It's an important part of kind of world change. And so I think that will happen and include, by the way, I think sometimes it'll be, hey, we'll have a work from home day and other kinds of things as part of doing it. Now that flips to the other side, which people say, wow, we're now all. A bunch of us are really used to working remotely and distributed and everything else. Actually, in fact, we're social animals. We're as Aristotle said, we're citizens of the polis. And so actually, oh, people aren't going to come back to the office. And so no, actually I think people are going to come back to the office with a fair, intense ferocity. And similarly, just as you see people making unwise decisions about going to restaurants today because they are so desperate for getting out and getting social and so forth, we say, no, no, no, wait another few months. The vaccines are just about here, right? Like, wait a little bit longer before breaking quarantine. I think you'll see similarly a lot of demand for getting back together, you know, in person, including demand for like, I'd like to go and experience other new things. Now. It doesn't mean that it jumps back immediately to pre Covid levels, but I think people will be surprised because it still goes down to what those fundamental human nature, human desires, human appetites play into. And I think that's the guide as to which things that were accelerated by Covid stay accelerated and which things go. Okay, that's nice. And now it's another nice thing in the mix. But the acceleration backs way off and which things dropped off come back with a big roar.

Absolutely. I totally will be doing many things for the first time and appreciating the new experiences for sure. Amachel Garg on Twitter asked with the future and with that in mind, what is one company that you wish existed that doesn't currently today?

Classically great question from Avhical. I do think about companies because as both an entrepreneur and investor, I think about like, okay, investing in companies now. I'm not quite sure that gray matter is the right place to say this because sometimes I go find the entrepreneur and I invest in them and that's kind of the, you know, you don't want to be exciting competition for it. You know, one of the things we do at Greylock is we actually incubate Ideas, you know, so like Palo Alto Networks was incubated with us. You know, Workday was incubated with us. It happens a little bit more on the enterprise side, but, you know, those kinds of of things. And so I think the answer is I have some things that I think should be companies, but I don't think I should say them even on the Great Matter podcast. But I will say that the kinds of things that I would like to see more of, and I've been thinking about, and this is kind of more probably philanthropic than Greylock is, how do we reinvent the truth function of media? So we used to have the truth function, you know, with newspapers, we used to have the truth function with broadcast television. But how do we get that? Because I think one of the problems that we have is I think a society, to be coherent, needs to have media by which we all get to collectively more truth. Shared knowledge, you know, justified true belief is what philosophers call knowledge. And I think we need to have more of that. And so how do we get there?

You know, we have these centralized news organizations, these monoliths that now we distrust so much. Do you think the future is like decentralization of news outlets and content creation to its kind of purest form? Do you think that's the future of kind of the truth of media?

So decentralization is not necessarily a function of truth, right? So a mob is decentralized, and a mob is usually a very bad function for a truth function. So what you're looking for is where do you get the mechanisms that bring kind of truth together? Now let's take one out there that I think is really great, but is limited. Only one thing is Wikipedia, right? So Wikipedia in some sense is decentralized. It's kind of run by a culture that has a central group of editors who are the sysadmins, but they kind of do it as a collective function. Now one of the things you end up with is you end up with a encyclopedia that's essentially kind of generated by kind of a set of well meaning, you know, quasi journalists or amateur journalists in terms of what they're doing. And they rely a lot on journalistic media and other kinds of stuff that's out there to source and to determine what's actually truth or not truth in it. And on a wide variety of topics is very good. Now, on some topics, say political topics, it tends to be very bad because when the truth gets in the contention, they're not really well done at getting the contention because they try to go neutral. Point of view and facts and all the rest of the stuff. So they've had to do specific inventions like essentially freezing a page because they don't want to have the Donald Trump page be replaced by a big picture of Satan or something else or a clown as a way of saying, hey, this is the political commentary. And so it's an example of where you actually have a network that generates. Because not all truth functions perfect. No truth function is good for everything, but it generates a truth function. Question is, how do we get more of those kinds of things where you say, okay, we have some kind of truth function here that doesn't mean you can absolutely believe no matter what. But you go, okay, that's a credible source. It's run because usually with truth is, you've run a good process. So for example, like journalists are, you've made a bunch of calls, including to the people who disagree with this and to people who are experts. And then you integrate that all and you go through an editorial board and that editorial board makes sure that that process has happened and so forth. And that's part of historically why journalists and other incentive environments have been an important carrier of truth function. But, and I don't, I think it by the way, started breaking well before the Internet. The Internet, you know, may have amplified it in some ways as it got to scale, but you know, like there's talk radio, there's cable news, there's a bunch of other stuff that has, you know, been challenging to this. And so the question is like, how do we get more of those kind of truth functions? And here's, I think one of the essential rubs which is the world and media is essentially accelerating and truth is essentially slow because even in a decentralized way, how do we get that consideration and that slow as something that is an important part of how do we get to understanding things? And you also, generally speaking, don't want to overly empower censors. This is one of the reasons why the freedom of speech mantra is so large. Because censors historically are the way that autocratic governments or institutions try to enforce their power. I am always entertained when I think of this by the historical Soviet Union's Pravda, its magazine and newspaper, which is literally the Russian word for truth, is like this is entirely the state run apparatus. You're like, well that's not untruth perhaps would have been a better term. And so anyway, that's the problem that's in front of us. I think it's going to need a set of new entities, not just one, but a set of new entities in order to kind of get us to. And that may be a little bit of your distribution question. That may get us to something where we are getting to more coherent understandings of truth, where most people, as per the earlier confirmation bias, don't really understand how to really dig to get to a point of truth for themselves. As much as I hope that everyone can and will get there in terms.

Of inserting truth function into news media content, it does make me think of the political landscape. We have a brilliant question here from Katie Stanton. The incoming Biden administration will inherit this ton of problems from raging pandemics, economy struggling, overheating planets, fragile democracy, all these different very, very big, challenging problems. What can the tech community do to help? And I know you spent a ton of time on this, Rita. How do you think about that?

Well, as has Katie herself, who has been an awesome volunteer across a wide variety of fronts of trying to do public service. And so she is one of the people who has definitely personally earned the right to ask that question. We, generally speaking, tech is more and more the leverage scale point of the future. And so all of us as technologists have to think not just how do I build my own company jobs, new products, new services as a way to contribute to the future, but also how do I take my understanding of technology and how do I help society with that. And that can range across a wide variety of things. We should really try to get these 501C3s, you know, whether it's Code for America, you know, or Kiva or, you know, other kinds of things kind of going in strong ways. Those are just happen to be ones that I'm involved with, so they come immediately to mind. Or the U.S. digital Service serving in government to help government with technology. Or it can also be questions around what are the ways that we can take all aspects of human life and help technology get there better. Like for example, one of the reasons I was mentioning Code for America is like, okay, well why don't we help people do things like process food stamps when they need food. Let's make that easy to do. Let's have technology be enabling of that as an instance. But I think that goes the whole way up to that was part of the reason why I've been thinking about truth in Media. And obviously technology is a huge part of that. But it could also be like, for example, one other thing that I did was serve on the Department of Defense Innovation board, you know, to try to figure out like, okay, what Innovations, because the Department of Defense mission is actually, in fact, to prevent war, to keep peace. Like that's actually a good thing. Right. So how do you help with that as part of what you're doing? And so those are the kinds of things that I think that technologists should broadly do and inclusive of. That is, even though politics can be to some degree, democracies are always a bit of a mudslinging exercise, but you have to take your responsibilities as citizens seriously, and so you have to step in even though some mud will be thrown at you. And for example, my own efforts in the last few years, because I basically viewed Trump to be a terrible catastrophe, which I think in the last few days is even being exemplified and called out by a bunch of Republicans. I think that the question is to say, step forward, get into it. Because I probably had more mud thrown at me for the last four years for doing that by trying to be a responsible citizen, but it's still worth doing.

So step forward, get into it. And then we have a lot of other people who are very kind of pronounced in saying that companies actually they're not democracy. And you have some leaders coming out and saying, actually, you know what, political views have their place and it's not in the company. How do you feel about. And this one's from Katherine Harrison. Should startups leave room for political views in their culture? And how embracing should they be or not embracing?

Well, so generally speaking, the goal of your company should be truly diversity and inclusion, and that's not just gender, that's not just race, which of course, super important and usually lacking in the tech industry, but a little bit more broadly. So you generally don't want to have a narrow view where you say we're just Democrats or we're all just Republicans, because that's in the 40% here, 40% there. You want to be probably a little bit broader than that. Now, you could say, look, we're a progressive company. Our company really believes in climate change and climate science, and that's going to be really important to us. Maybe that's all Democrat. That would be a sad thing if true. Right. But, you know, that kind of thing I think can be important. But I think what it is important is to inculcate. We are citizens, we have political responsibility. And part of our political responsibility is to act up in, call it society, cases. So, like, for example, part of what I've been encouraging a bunch of business leaders to do is say, look, it's okay to speak up on rule of law. It's okay, to speak up and say, hey, we've got election integrity. We are following the Constitution and that we want a peaceful society for that. And that the forces that want to provoke a cultural civil war by disinformation and lying and everything else around saying, hey, the election didn't have integrity, we should speak up against that as business people. So that's kind of the line. So some specific missions which may be. May look a little bit more Democrat, a little bit more Republican. That's okay. Lines with the mission of the business should be. And then some things that should be the we are all citizens together and that everyone should be on this board. This shouldn't actually, in fact, be a partisan issue. This should actually, in fact, be a stability of society, a we go into the future together issue. And that those issues are things that business leaders should speak up on. And when other people say, hey, you shouldn't be talking politics, they say, look, I'm talking rule of law. You shouldn't be talking anarchy and destruction of society.

I totally agree with you on that statement. I do have to ask you, we mentioned you spending a lot of time on the political landscape. Nikhil Basu Trivedy asked this question, and it's one that I'm just fascinated by reading. It's like, how do you prioritize your time? Given obviously the relationship with Greylock, the relationship with Re and Ben, the political efforts, how do you spend the time today?

Reid I basically work through great entrepreneurs, great CEOs, great organizations. So part of what allows me to do a lot of the different things is that I'm working with great organizations. This is my partners at Greylock for tech and series A and series B, et cetera, investing. But when I'm working on political issues, I stood up a new political org for this. When I'm working on philanthropic issues, I might be on the board of Kiva or on the board of Endeavor. And so those are essentially the ways that I make all this happen. And that's part of the reason why, for example, when I write books, I write it with co authors because it's like a little mini organization working on the book. And of course, Masters of Scale is brought to you through an entire startup production company.

Sure. Absolutely. We can look at a lot of things. And I've seen a lot of tweets today that says December 37, 2020. And my question to you is, when you look forward, what are you most optimistic about? And what gives you a source of hope, joy, inspiration, looking forward instead of maybe a more Pessimistic look back over.

2020, I mean, we're going to still be feeling the pain of a catastrophic mismanage of this, certainly within the US probably also other countries. Hundred thousands of life losses, deaths, millions of job losses, trillions of debt that ultimately, of course, need to be repaid, all because of catastrophic mismanagement, primarily on the federal level. And the suffering was going to be millions of people suffering. And we're all going to have to try to help each other get out of this mess together. Now, on the optimistic side, I continue to think that it's better to be optimistic, it's better to be hopeful, because we can actually, in fact, build our way out. We can build new companies, we can build new technologies, we can build new economies. There isn't anything, you know, kind of so disastrous that we can't find our way out of. And for example, the story of how we've invented previously, invention of vaccines, was years. This invention of vaccines went down to months. And that's part of the story of what we can do when we work together as part of a globalized world. These are vaccines from around the world. These are efforts that combine teams and testing and data from lots of different areas of the world. And that kind of thing, like, when we work together, we can accomplish amazing futures. And it's obviously one of the reasons why many of us get into entrepreneurship and building new companies and building technology is because that building of the future can be so much better than we are now. And I think that's just as possible today, even with all of the train wrecks of 2020 as it was before. And even, by the way, when you have market dislocations for entrepreneurs, sometimes that almost certainly means much more interesting opportunity.

For sure it does. Final question, and I do have to ask this one is an element of hindsight. When you think about the opportunities ahead. If you were to give your much younger self starting out in a career advice, with all the experience lessons that you have, what advice would you give yourself?

Well, the fortunate thing for anyone who's still listening to this podcast is actually that was my first book, the Startup of youf. And the precise reason I wrote that book, because I gave the commencement speech to my high school, the Putney School, and I was like, what do I have to say to a bunch of now high school graduates? Like, what? In my own weird career, what would I have to say to them? And the short answer is, is to think about yourself as the entrepreneur of yourself, to think about it as. And there's a set of specific tools that are within the book. Life is a team sport, not an individual sport. How do you help build the team around you? What are the ways that you choose an industry? Don't just kind of choose a local job listing or job thing and which industry is going and then be in the network to get into that industry. Be willing to spend years doing the work that builds your network because the network is what enables you. I mean not surprising from a person who is one of the co founders of LinkedIn is kind of how to think about that and all of that stuff is the thing that is the positive the things that it's smart. So it's like do more of those when I stumbled my way into them post graduating from college is the advice that I would give my younger self.

No, I absolutely love that and the startup review was one of my favorites. Reid, this has been so much fun to do on Gray Matter, so thank you so much for a letting me host it and b for being such a fantastic participant. So real pleasure.

A pleasure as always.