Reid Hoffman | The Philosopher-Entrepreneur

Hello, it's Chris Yeh, the co author of Blitzscaling. And I'm here once again with my co author and old friend Reid Hoffman, the co founder of LinkedIn and investor at Greylock Partners. And we're going to talk about a topic today that is near and dear to both our hearts, which is the notion of how philosophy can actually help you as an entrepreneur. Now, when people think about the college majors of entrepreneurs, especially here in Silicon Valley, they're usually thinking, hey, how about computer science or electrical engineering? But on the life sciences side, you know, there are biology majors that are busy out there creating messenger RNA vaccines and things like that. And then of course, very famously, there's folks like Brian Chesky over at Airbnb who have a design degree. But people usually don't think, you know what philosophy, that's what you should take when you want to be an entrepreneur. But of course, you're the exception. Or are you? You're probably the most successful entrepreneur to come out of Oxford University's graduate school of Philosophy. Or are there other famous Silicon Valley moguls who graduated from that school?

Not that I'm aware of.

In fact, despite this seemingly strange degree, you've actually argued, you know what, you're not successful despite your philosophy degree, you're successful because of it. And so I want to spend today exploring that in greater detail, including understanding your key philosophical influences. Let's dive deep and really understand which philosophers have impacted you and how they've had an impact on your life. So let's dive into the philosophers. Who are the philosophers that have had the greatest impact on your life? Who are the ones that you've really gone back to over and over again?

Well, there are frankly a substantial number, because I actually in fact think that philosophy is something that's very important for understanding humanity, understanding of kind of what are the big ideas. How do we kind of evolve as individuals in a society? And when you look back, you say most people tend to be very blinded by the now. They tend to think everything has always been like the now, or maybe they were a little bit more barbaric. But they don't kind of really realize the evolution back when kings were thought to be gods and that the evolution of religious systems, the whole notion of human rights and kind of the, you weren't most focused on being part of a tribe, you know, but even the evolution of nation states and so all of this stuff, the evolution of that thinking, including like things like Birth of Science, all come and, and start in philosophy. I think we're going to talk about a few of these, but perhaps the very first one is Aristotle. For me, he isn't actually, in fact, the first philosopher, but Aristotle was perhaps for me, the first who really opened my eyes to how important philosophy is to thinking about human beings.

Aristotle, as you point out, is for many people and for millennia, somebody who is referred to as the philosopher. As you pointed out, his influence was so insanely huge that he was literally synonymous with philosophy. And I think it's important to note, as you did a little bit at the beginning, that when Aristotle was a philosopher, being a philosopher meant a lot of things, including things like natural philosophy. Aristotle is many ways the first sort of scientist as well as the first philosopher. So I think that people today may not appreciate just how important Aristotle was. And of course, the other thing that was interesting about Aristotle is that he was actually the tutor to Alexander the Great as well. So this is a philosopher who is not just sitting in an ivory tower, but somebody who is having an impact on world events.

There were multiple important students of Plato, who himself was a student of Socrates. And part of the classic ways that traditionalist philosophy was understood was this kind of contrast between Plato and Aristotle. Because Plato was very much classically the ideas and the pure mental landscape depicted in kind of the metaphor of the cave and thinking about what are the pure forms, the essence of things that actually, in fact, the world around you is kind of the projection from these pure essences. Whereas Aristotle, and this is part of the reason why, especially for entrepreneurship, but also for me personally, was actually, no, philosophy starts but by study of the world, by the fact that we're embedded in the world. So that's part of the reason why he came out with natural sciences like taxonomy and kind of trying to understand what's the world we find ourselves in. But also the similar approach to human beings. The classic transliteration in modern American English is that Aristotle said human beings are political animals. Now, we tend to think about politics and the action of people within the political sphere. But what he actually meant was that human beings were citizens of the polis, right? Polis being a Greek word for city. And so that's kind of tribal, because they were city states, tribal in this kind of political unit of the city. And that's kind of Athens versus Sparta, because the city state was so integral to the intensity of the kind of the Greek political and society and philosophical action. One of the things I've said about entrepreneurship is it embeds a theory of human nature. What's your theory about how human beings identify themselves, connect with others, view themselves to be part of a group, are motivated by ideologies, by emotions, by desires, by appetites. How are those things, you know, kind of put together? What are the questions when they're kind of pursuing a theory of the good? Because everyone's a hero of their own story. And, you know, one of the other areas that kind of, I think, owes its origins to Aristotle in my thinking is I have this favorite quotation that in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But of course, in practice there is. Well, that's also very, you know, when you kind of look back to the earliest records we have of philosophy, you know, Aristotelian, because that notion of revise your theory by engagement with the world, engage the world to generate the theory, have the theory apply it, and. And that loop between theory and practice, because actually, in fact, where I ultimately get to is it's the combination of theory and practice that is so impactful and important and is also, of course, part of the reason that theory generation, that generation of human nature, that having an investment thesis, a theory of the game in your entrepreneurship, all comes back to this very philosophy as a practice in the world, which is very Aristotelian and part of what makes Aristotle so central to how I think about philosophy's importance to entrepreneurship.

Yeah, And I see a straight line between the study you've made of Aristotle and many of the various things you've said. For example, the famous saying, if you're not embarrassed by your first product launch, you've launched too late, is all about making sure that you're balancing theory and practice, that you have the theory, but then you also put it into practice. You can rapidly iterate and feed things back.

Exactly. And by the way, a lot of things that the general business world should learn from entrepreneurship, you know, a theory of experimentation, you know, like our friend Eric Ries in the Lean Startup, also, you know, of course, what we did with the episode with him on Masters of Scale, you know, but that say, look, it doesn't mean doesn't have a theory, doesn't mean don't have something that may take, you know, may take you through some negative data. You may say, well, I hear that negative data, but I still have a theory that I think is potentially right. And let me try to get there, but always be refining it with engagement. And part of the engagement, everyone always thinks experimentation is only like I run the experiment, like an a B test on a consumer and a website. Actually, in fact, part of getting data is go talk to your smart friends and say, what do you think is wrong with this? And try to distill it, because they may have some things that are wrong. Like, for example, in the early days of LinkedIn, a bunch of my smart friends all thought LinkedIn wouldn't go anywhere because they said, well, your whole value proposition is a network. The value proposition doesn't kick in until you get to a million people. You're never going to get to a million people because you have a chicken and egg problem. And it's like, ah. But actually, in fact, enough people believing it, enough people seeing it, plus the techniques of growth hacking all lead to, I think I can get to a million people and then the value proposition can kick in and actually be mainstream and be very valuable. And that kind of, you know, being in the world is part of what I think starts with the Aristotelian. The reason why I've always been more Aristotle than Plato, although obviously I have great respect for Plato. Although let me make one more just because so the people understand that actually, in fact, I really am ensconced in philosophy. Here's something that will probably for most people go, what the heck is that? I actually think Xenophon was a more accurate student of Socrates than Plato. And then everyone's go, okay, we have no idea what you're talking about, but a Xenophon was someone who was out in the world and was actually leading an army and applying these principles. And so. But the notion of the intellectual curiosity and that learning starts with questions, which is kind of to some degree the central Socratic method. And it's part of the reason why, you know, when you teach entrepreneurship or how to be an entrepreneur, it's always be asking the questions as a way of, of motivating that. And so Plato is not the only student of Socrates.

Absolutely. And for those who have not followed or read any of Xenophon's work, the situation that he found himself in when he was leading this army, he was not originally the leader of the army. The leaders of the army were ambushed and killed in a parley. He actually had to lead an army deep in enemy territory all the way back to Greece. And the fact that he was able to do so remains one of the most amazing military feats of all time.

The parallel is like Shackleton and endurance. Right. But as opposed to Shackleton, who was the frozen tundra of Antarctica. And how do we keep our shit together when it's dark all the time and cold and we're hungry and we have no civilization to support us. This was how do I take an army that I was not the original leader of and how do I retreat from Persia? Keeping the army together and keeping the morale together is another kind of amazing leadership story where the adversity of course was enemy territory.

Yes. And the other thing that I think is really interesting and important to underline, we talked before briefly about how influential Aristotle was. The funny thing about being an influencer is you don't always control how your influence works. So Aristotle very much took the point of view of the world is something that we're going to inquire and we're going to learn from and we're going to experiment. We're going to do all these things. And Aristotle did them so well that for centuries afterwards people just said, well, Aristotle said this, therefore it must be correct. So they learned exactly the wrong lesson from Aristotle.

Yes, exactly. And you know, because Aristotle was like many of these thinkers was always, look, I think I've discovered some truths, but it's a dynamic process, just like entrepreneurship is the dynamic process. It's okay. This, having gotten a partial answer to this question now allows me to ask a much better question.

Absolutely. Well, Aristotle of course is the philosopher, but there are other philosophers that have been very influential on you. I know for a fact that you recently wrote a forward for a book on one such philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. How did you end up writing the foreword for a book on philosophy and what are some of the things that you learned from Nietzsche?

Well, it actually wasn't a book on philosophy. Our friend David Joel and Brad Feld were writing a book, the Daily Practice for Entrepreneurs in Nietzsche and known Brad for a long time. And so they reached out and said, hey, we're doing this thing. I think it's an excellent thing actually. In fact, I coined a phrase that I'd never used before, which is patron philosopher for entrepreneurs, which I thought Nietzsche was an extremely good candidate for which we'll go into in a minute. Like I think a number of first year college students, especially in the U.S. nietzsche was a revelation when I read him. And there's so many people who claim Nietzsche as a patron philosopher that are highly questionable. People always go, oh, Nietzsche, isn't he the Nazi philosopher? Because the Nazis claimed him as a patron philosopher. I'll say a little bit about that. That was all wrong. Although oriented by his sister who was trying to get, you know, economic and political and social position within Nazi Germany. For example, the one Nietzsche aphorism is an anti Semite is the worst of all people. Right. Well, given that Nazis were anti Semites, that is not compatible. So just to give you a sense that Nietzsche basically would have despised the Nazis who were holding up his philosophy as an ideal. Similarly, there's various white supremacists who, because of the Nazi thing, claim Nietzsche, again, wrong. Now, the reason why it's easy. There's an attraction Nietzsche and easy to misinterpret. So the attraction in Nietzsche is that Nietzsche was one of the youngest ever professors at his time. And so as a classicist, his intense study was all the past. But the organization then of academia was we are just mere shadows of these great philosophers of the past. Aristotle being one of the, you know, know, frequently referred to as the philosopher, but, you know, like the Greeks and so forth. And so we're just trying to sing their praises. And what Nietzsche was saying, actually, in fact, look, that's great. And Aristotle was great and Plato was great. And so. But it's the creation of the new. It's the creation of the future human being. You know, frequently described as the Ubermensch, which is the overman. But what he was really oriented was the who we're becoming. That act of creation of we are making better human beings. We are being the better versions of ourselves. We're going there as opposed to trying to become like machines or simply the ritualistic copies of earlier human beings, we should be creating ourselves. And so there was a huge focus on individuals. That was also part of the reason why Nietzsche was so opposed to religion. He was very pro Jesus and anti Christianity because it was like Jesus was defining a hey, I've got a new idea of who we could be and how we could be amazingly creative as a human being. And yet, like, oh, now we're gonna all try to be stamped into a mold and to follow a system of rules only because it's a system of rules, not because it's engendering this creativity. And so that's the thing that he had wanted to do. And now the parallels obviously between this and entrepreneurship was that emphasis the importance of the individual, the individual being creative, engaging in creative destruction, which is, how do I invent something which is attacking the current idols, perhaps the current industry, perhaps current market condition, perhaps the current leading products or services, by creating something new, by being disruptive. And to do that and you, in this, the kind of King Lear in Shakespeare is creating something from nothing. And that was something that is actually, in fact, what is part of the difficulties and the heroism and the fear of the entrepreneurial journey. And so that Nietzsche is a very good patron philosopher. That and part of it is Nietzsche said, hey, I despise systematizers and the will to assist them as a lack of integrity. Because part of it is that creation of the new is the. Not the old system, not the old system, but the new system or the new build towards the thing that isn't yet invented. And so that's why I think it's very important. And that's why I thought Brad and Dave's book was a good practice for entrepreneurs and why Nietzsche is actually in fact a good philosopher. Now that doesn't mean I, by the way, agree with everything Nietzsche said. Nietzsche generally speaking was a destroyer of idols, is a tear down the old system and you know, occasionally would say dumbass things about women or other things, you know, because by the way, all philosophers have said dumbass things. 2 this is the canonization of any of these individuals as heroes is always fools. But also by the way, attacking them because they said one dumbass thing is equally dumbass. My favorite of all things was actually Freud in his book Civilization and its Discontents where he has a footnote where he describes men as more adept at technology than women because men had better control of fires in the early days because they could use their penis to pee on fire and control it. And you're like, oh my God, what degree of dumbness do you have to say? I get it that you're trying to kind of grapple with technology and all the rest. And the social pattern might be that at the moment men seem to be grappling with technology more, but would you think it'd have anything to do with the fact that your society was organized, that all the men were in charge and all the men were going to university and all the rest of the stuff would have anything to do with that dumbass as a comment. And yet Freud super important for understanding that there are hidden forces of psychology at work and understanding that we aren't just all rational beings and there's subconscious things that you have to work through and open the doors to all of that, to thinking about how we evolve as human beings. All that stuff super important that Freud oben. But yet dumb comments. So did Nietzsche make dumb comments? Yes, Nietzsche made dumb comments. That still doesn't mean when the, the interesting things, the things that they contributed that we should build on and learn from are still very key. And a lot of the Nietzschean kind of philosophizing with a hammer and aphorisms as a way to kind of generate catalysts for Thinking is a great patron philosopher for entrepreneurship.

And I do think that this also reflects something important about philosophy, which is the purpose of philosophy is not to convey the literal truth in the beliefs of the philosophers and their words, but rather for those philosophers and their thoughts to provoke your own thoughts.

Right, yeah.

The understanding you develop is not based on memorizing what they said and adhering to it with 100% fidelity. It's in the way that interacts with the things that are in your own mind and the way that it causes you to have new frameworks for grappling with the truth, rather than just saying.

Oh, yeah, I got it, yes, exactly. And so how to ask really good questions. And then, and this is actually, I think part of what's important about understanding other people, other ideas, other ideologies, other theses, is to ask yourself both what's right and wrong about it, even if your inclination is it's all wrong. Okay, what's right about it? Right. Important to learn. Your inclination is it's right. Okay, what's wrong about it? What do we need to collectively build upon it and learn from. And that's part of the fundamental kind of question, first orientation, because philosophy at its root is asking questions about, okay, so why is the world the way it is? And if I think that I have a moral right to something, do I have a moral right to that? Why is that? What gives that basis? And that search for truth begins with questions.

Now, the final philosopher we're going to talk about today is Ludwig Wittgenstein. And I have to admit, I. I hadn't done a lot of reading of Wittgenstein in the past, but when I began investigating his story, it was just absolutely astonishing, the kind of life he lived. Just a couple of the cool details I can't resist. He was cousins with Friedrich Hayek. Klimt painted his sister's wedding portrait. His father was the patron of Rodin and Brahms. And Mahler performed at the Wittgenstein Residences when Ludwig was a child. And just in terms of his towering genius, here are the reactions of two other pretty famous guys. Bertrand Russell said that Wittgenstein was perhaps the most perfect example I've ever known of genius as traditionally conceived. Passionate, profound, intense and dominating. He also said, when Wittgenstein criticized his work, though I didn't think you realized at the time this was an event of first rate importance in my life and affected everything I've done since. I saw that he was right and I saw that I could not hope ever again to do fundamental work in philosophy. Now that's pretty incredible when you have an all time philosopher say after Wittgenstein told him something, you know what? I give up. And then John Maynard Keynes, of course, a very famous economist, put it even more succinctly. He just said, well, God has arrived. I met him on the 515 train. So tell us about Wittgenstein. What kind of things did you learn from this towering figure?

Wittgenstein grew up in a very prominent Viennese Austrian family and was very, very driven and kind of did various things like kind of live in a cabin by himself for a while. Worked as a medic during World War I, did a bunch of different things and was obviously super smart and somewhat obsessive. Obsessive compulsive disorder would almost remind us.

Of any entrepreneurs, you know.

Yes, exactly. The philosophy at the time, partially with Bertrand Russell, who is perhaps one of the most leading philosophers of his time. Hence it was so amazing what his reaction to Wittgenstein was. And leading intellectuals for society and you know, kind of an advocate for peace and other kinds of things. And philosophy is going through what was has been described as the linguistic turn, which is maybe these philosophical problems are actually problems of language. So yes, we ask these questions, but maybe the questions are not necessarily well formed because the challenges, like for example, a classic one that is used to describe is philosophers and theologians during the Christian Middle Ages would ask such questions as how many angels fit on the pinhead of a needle? Now a linguistic turn of philosophy would say, well, look, it sounds like a well formulated question, but actually in fact it's the illusions of language and the fact that we could put these syntax together with these nouns and these verbs and so forth, make us think there's a very important question there, when actually in fact what we're asking is nonsense. So that language can actually in fact have sense and nonsense together with it. And that the fact that language itself is where we need to examine our search for the truth to getting much better with language and understanding of language. Because like, is there a there there to use Derrida, which is the continental extension of this, when I ask a question or I think that something has a truth proposition. And Wittgenstein in part was so amazing because the first thing he did is he took the logical attack on language, which is a language is good when it is formulated in clear logical expression. And his first great work, the Tractatus, was taking that to its extreme. And this is part of what made Wittgenstein such A amazing philosopher. He said, okay, fine, I hear the. The Russell and Whitehead school of philosophy. I get this. I am going to draw it out in a really intense version. And it's much more sophisticated than most people read it because a lot of it's talking about the possibility of the world, not just the fact of where the world is, but what is the landscape of possibilities comes now. And then he went. He thought he saw philosophy. He said, okay, and now I'm going to go do other things. I'm going to go teach, I'm going to be an elementary school teacher, et cetera. Like, you know, like, this is the stuff we can talk about sensibly, and the rest of stuff you should never talk about. And then he started realizing that he had gotten language wrong, that this underlying language principle for thinking about how is it that we communicate successfully was based on this mirror copy of logic and possibilities of the world, wasn't actually, in fact, describing what happened. And actually, in fact, this is later Wittgenstein, it was following a rule, namely, we're the kind of life that engages in. Think of it, language as a dance, but it's not just a dance where it's kind of like the dance actually, in fact communicates. But how is that communication work? Because the communication is a description of future possibilities, that we both grasp that future possibility, that we understand what it's doing. And how do we then pursue that language? And I think that the thing that was really, really key was saying, okay, well, let's try to be clear about language. Let's try to be clear about. We're asking the questions about what can we understand about the world that we're in? And then how do we understand that in a form of language, that we can communicate it with each other and use that to base out our theories of the world, our theories of humanity, our theories about what's possible. Right? So, like, for example, a classic Wittgenstein, you know, kind of. It's like a set of aphorisms, like he wrote all this stuff in a set of aphorisms. Again, aphorisms, you know, somewhat of a parallel between. With Nietzsche, although not all of Nietzsche's writings were aphorisms with if a lion could speak, we couldn't understand him. Now, I actually don't know if that's true or not. It's partially Wittgenstein trying to understand us to say, well, it could be that a lion is such a form, a different form of life, that even if it had English or German or something else, the Communication wouldn't really be fully possible. Now that's an interesting question because we do have elementary communication with gorillas and chimpanzees, with sign language that can indicate some things. But also like, while there may be an overlap of it and an overlap of the form of life there, how deep is that communication is an interesting question. So that kind of focus on language, what that means for identities, how we communicate, how we collaborate, all of that was some of the things that I kind of brought from Wittgenstein. And you know, this could actually even lead to some investments that I've made. So, for example, you know, one of the companies I'm sitting on the board of right now is Coda. And Coda's thing is to design an Internet first kind of work platform to work the way you want to have the rituals. Because to some degree work is the way that we work together collaboratively is a ritual practice, like following a rule in Wittgenstein. And that ritual practice of getting a high performing team. How do you do meetings? Do you take notes? Do you have an agenda? How do you get the feedback in? How do you record those information for future activity? How do you coordinate all your work? All of that stuff is Coda is the platform for in the modern Internet age? Well, to some degree you can look at that as all kind of Wittgensteinian practice. And so that kind of notion of language games as part of how you think about entrepreneurship and part of how you come to understand your thesis and understand humanity are all part of how Wittgenstein has informed my entrepreneurship and my, and some of my investing.

And when you think about it, this really ties in, well with one of the things we've talked about in the past, which is being an explicit learner, which is to say your ability to actually express in language what you've learned, truths, beliefs, etc. And to be able to convey them to the rest of your organization is one of the most important things than an entrepreneur can do. You can have the greatest ideas in the world, but if you can't convey them to others, if you can't convey the same context and sense, then you're not going to get very far. Because entrepreneurship is a team sport, as you often say.

Well, I think life generally is a team sport and entrepreneurship as well. One of the things that you know, and this could be a little bit where Nietzsche can be misleading, is it tends to be the cult of the founder. And it's actually, in fact, all of this stuff is to be developing it in a way that is. No, no, it's how we do this stuff together. And so yes, your co founder is important, but then your founding team's important and then the culture and that part of focus on culture is your culture as an organization following a mission is important. And all of that leads to the importance of the team sport part of this. Philosophers don't tend to be particularly good at team sports because most of them. I think you're probably smiling because you're thinking of the Monty Python philosopher's football game. Yep. We know each other well enough that we had the same thought on that comment. And if any of the listeners haven't do it, go to YouTube, Google Monty Python philosopher football game, which is soccer, and you'll see something that was pretty funny. Classic good intellectual humor. But the notion of most philosophers are so much trying to get off the beaten path and explore the blind spots and the angles of like, well, we all use language, but how do we use it? And how do we actually communicate with each other? You know, these kinds of questions. Or what is truth? Is there such a thing? Why is truth so important? Or for example, why is scientific inquiry, which gets all the way down to an electron, which you can't really see, or germ theory, which you can't really see, but it's so important to actually, in fact, understanding how the world works. All of that comes from this kind of inquiry and usually requires fairly esoteric individuals.

Well, let's say that somebody's been listening to this discussion. They've got the bug for philosophy. Or as Plato put it in one of his Socratic dialogues, it's sharper than a serpent's tooth. The pangs of philosophy. If they've got the pangs of philosophy, but they don't have time to go to Oxford and do a graduate degree or even take structured liberal education at Stanford like we did as freshmen. What are some good ways for them to get to know philosophy better and come up to speed?

A simple one is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy actually is a very good online resource on this. And I think a set of different philosophical questions, I think also a good approach because, you know, too often the academic thing is just read the original text or read the detailed things. Is some of the biographies kind of lead to very good understandings of the philosophers. So like, for example, take Wittgenstein. Read Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein is a very good way of kind of interleaving, kind of the narrative story of his life together with the kind of intellectual ideas and gives you some of the cultural ethos of the times as to what was happening. And those are all good ways. And look, I think philosophy all the way back to Socrates, part of philosophy is discussion. And so other people to discuss this with is I think, very key.

Well, those are some fantastic suggestions. I'll also plump for one thing, which is just to mention of the philosophers that we discussed. I really do feel like Nietzsche is extremely readable. It's actually interesting to read. Unlike a lot of other philosophers. It's full of energy, it's full of emotion. And I think that you could definitely do well by reading the original text for Nietzsche as well.

Yep, completely agree.

Well, this is going to be the first of a multi part series. In the next part of this series we're actually going to get into the question of philosophies and and philosophers versus MBAs in business school. So certainly looking forward to that discussion as well. That concludes this episode of Gray Matter. You can subscribe to gray matter on soundcloud.com greylock partners. You can also find new episodes and blog posts on greylock.com and you can follow Greylock on Twitter at greylockvc. I'm Chris Yeh. On behalf of Reid Hoffman, thank you for listening.