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Reid Hoffman: Learning to think BIG

By April 12, 2021David Fein

One of the people who REALLY inspire me is Reid Hoffman. It’s not just the MASSIVE amount of success he has achieved, which is legendary, it’s how he thinks and how BIG he thinks.  Reid gives us all permission to think bigger (much bigger), believe in ourselves a little more and to take on things that really excite us.

For most entrepreneurs, starting just one billion Dollar tech giant would be a lifetime achievement. For Reid Hoffman, it’s all in a day’s work and why he is one of the members of the “PayPal Mafia”, a group of former PayPal (later sold to eBay) employees and founders who have since founded and developed additional technology companies such as Tesla, Inc., LinkedIn, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX, Affirm, Slide, Kiva, YouTube, Yelp and Yammer. He also started SoicalNet, a failed online dating website which is considered by some to the first social networking site. In 2016, Hoffman sold LinkedIn to Microsoft for $26.2 billion in cash and joined Microsoft’s board.

Being the co-founder of two major tech giants and an investor/role player in many more, is testament to Hoffman’s ability to think big, his entrepreneurial skills and his approach to scaling. We all don’t want to create billion-dollar businesses, but we all can learn a lot from and be inspired by Reid, so I highly recommend taking some time to learn from Reid Hoffman. One great way to learn from Reid is listening his podcast, Masters of Scale. In each episode, Reid shows how companies grow from zero to a gazillion, testing his theories with legendary company founders.

One of my all-time favorite episodes, is with Airbnb CEO, Brian Chesky. Click here to listen In the episode, Brian talks about how his thinking process to WOW customers, was the foundation for making Airbnb what it is. The process is powerful and transformational. It’s a process everyone one of could use to improve our businesses and practices. Make a commitment to listening to this episode and use Brian’s WOW your customers visioning process to break through whatever barriers you are facing.

The process proved Reid’s theory that if you want your company to truly scale, you must start by doing things that DON’T scale. This may seem counter intuitive but its exactly how Chesky built Airbnb. According to Chesky, no one has ever started with a perfectly scaled business. For Airbnb, it all started with the handcrafted phase. In this phase, you focus on hand serving your customers to win them over one-by-one and you don’t stop until you know exactly what they want. Do you know what your customers really want? Do you know what would really WOW them? Find out now!

In Airbnb’s case, home visits were the secret sauce because they enabled Brian to spend time getting to know his customers. By knocking on a host’s door to offer them something they could not refuse, in this case it was professional photographs, meant Brian could sit down with his customer.  Then using customer feedback, combined with the WOW visioning process, you can design the perfect product or service. Listen to the right customers and you will also have your product roadmap. This is designing with empathy, the key ingredient to a winning product.

How do you know when you are done? You know it’s time to move to phase 2 when you have done it until its painful. Now, you hire an intern to pick up where you leave off and start the next phase.

Since you will never be in the ‘handcrafted’ phase again, it’s the only time you will ever be small enough to interact with users. It’s how you get their feedback, good or bad, and how you develop your master plan for giving them exactly what they want.

Don’t let the size and scale of Reid, Brian or Airbnb make you think these ideas are only for tech companies that want to sale to the moon, these concepts and business building tools can (and should) be used by all of us!

About Reid Hoffman

Internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist and author, Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn, and is currently a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners. According to Forbes magazine, his net worth is US$2.2 billion. In October 2018, Hoffman co-authored his third book, titled “”Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies.