As I discussed last week in the Greymatter podcast with my friend and Blitzscaling co-author Chris Yeh, I believe that a knowledge of philosophy is actually a great asset for entrepreneurs. During that conversation, we talked about some of my favorite philosophers and how I’ve applied their ideas to my own career.

This week, we discuss how a philosophy degree compares to a much more conventional business background: the masters in business administration or MBA.

I have a standard aphorism I share when I speak with a group of MBA students:

“There are two things that need to be explained away in order for me to invest in your startup: An MBA or a background in management consulting.”

Notice that I didn’t say I wouldn’t invest in a founder with an MBA; there are many amazing entrepreneurs and investors with MBAs, such as my friend Aneel Bhusri of Workday.

To say categorically that MBA equals “not entrepreneur” is a foolish assumption, just like saying Masters in Philosophy equals “not entrepreneur.” Success or failure comes down to the individuals and their dispositions.

But if you ask me whether I’d rather invest in the entire class of Computer Science graduates from Stanford, MIT, Georgia Tech, and CMU, or the entire class of MBA graduates from Harvard Business School, Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Wharton, and Kellogg, I’ll take the CS graduates.

In fact, I generally view pursuing an MBA as an adverse signal for entrepreneurship.

In the essay below, I (Read more...)

When people think about the backgrounds of successful entrepreneurs, philosophy rarely comes to mind. Computer science, biology, and design seem immediately applicable to starting a business, but philosophy conjures up images of bespectacled academics sitting in an armchair with a book and pipe.

I believe, however, that a fundamental understanding of philosophy can be a powerful tool for entrepreneurship.

In the following essay, based on the latest episode of the Greymatter podcast, I explain how the principles of philosophy can help entrepreneurs succeed by using examples from my own career.

We’ll also discuss three of the philosophers that have influenced me the most — Aristotle, Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein — and the lessons I’ve learned from studying their work.

You can listen to the podcast here.

WHY PHILOSOPHY MATTERS

Philosophy isn’t just an abstract intellectual exercise. At its core, it focuses on improving our understanding of humanity, of how we evolve as individuals in a society.

Most people tend to be blinded by the now; they tend to think that the past isn’t that different from the present. They don’t realize the profound shifts in thinking that have occurred with the passage of time. We’ve evolved from living in tribes and thinking of kings as gods to valuing human rights as part of a nation-state. All these changes, including the birth of science itself, started with philosophy.

The other common misconception about philosophy is that it’s about providing the (Read more...)

Learning from mistakes is one of the most important skills that humans possess. Ideally, this knowledge evolves over time — to the point where we can prevent or mitigate future mistakes from even occurring.

But computers evolve far faster than the human brain. In recent years, artificially intelligent systems have progressed at a breakneck speed to serve critical data insights. But it is much harder to program the nuances of emotion, societal context and overall ethical considerations that humans learn from their biggest mistakes. Too often, the unintended negative impacts of AI – such as racial, gender or socioeconomic bias in AI tools for hiring, housing, or legal assistance – aren’t understood until after its implementation.

If AI is to serve the collective needs of humanity, how should machine intelligence be built and designed so that it can understand human language, feelings, intentions and behaviors, and interact with nuance and in multiple dimensions?

It starts before the technology development even gets underway, says Stanford University computer science professor Dr. Fei-Fei Li, who is the co-founder and co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI.  The organization works to advance AI research, education, policy and practice to improve the human condition. In June, HAI launched the Ethics and Society Review Board. The program, which was piloted over the last year, requires AI researchers to consider the ethics of their projects before they can receive funding from HAI.

“Fundamentally, how we create this technology, how we use this technology, how (Read more...)

When COVID-19 upended the travel industry last year, Airbnb was among its earliest victims, losing 80% of their business in the first two months of the pandemic. Such a blow would leave any CEO reeling, if not prove fatal to the company as a whole.

While many travel industry leaders chose to “go dark,” as Airbnb CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky put it,  while they decided how to navigate next steps, Chesky took a different approach: He got candid.

“The biggest risk [for] the company is your stakeholders don’t trust you — not that you’ll say the wrong thing or get sued, but [that] people don’t trust you,” Chesky says. “[In a crisis], it’s really about being totally as transparent as you can be, trying to be incredibly compassionate, speaking from the heart.”

Chesky joined Greylock partner Reid Hoffman (who recently reflected on Airbnb’s 2010 Series A) for our Iconversations speaker series to talk about how he guided Airbnb from an 80% loss to a record-breaking IPO by the end of 2020, why Silicon Valley needs to redefine how it measures growth, how Chesky’s design background informs Airbnb’s business strategy and, ultimately, the importance of putting people first.

“Conventional wisdom says, ‘Don’t get too close, don’t get emotionally attached.’ Because if you do, it’s going to skew your decision making,” says Chesky. “I always saw it as the opposite.”

You can listen to the conversation on the Greymatter podcast here.

EPISODE (Read more...)

In discussions with founders and investors, as well as interviews, I describe the role that games have played in my career. It’s become a somewhat quirky facet of my public persona: Reid Hoffman, game geek. I love games, and I love talking about them. But none of these profiles has ever focused on the games themselves. They might (at best) mention one or two games and muse.

So, for the latest episode of Greymatter, I sat down with my friend, Blitzscaling co-author, and fellow game geek Chris Yeh to take a deep dive into the details of how games have shaped my personality and career. Not only do we discuss why I think games are so valuable for entrepreneurs, we take an in-depth, geeky look at the specific games that impacted my life.

You can listen to our discussion on the Greymatter podcast here.

WHY GAMES ARE SERIOUS STRATEGY

In my experience, games are one of the best ways to understand the important field of strategy. Strategy arose from the life-and-death stakes of warfare. Choose a good strategy, and your tribe or nation would win the battle or the war. Choose poorly, and you might be driven out of existence. To help develop winning strategies, militaries developed wargames as a way to explore various strategies and analyze specific scenarios. And while most of the important games in my life are not wargames, they share with wargames the ability to ask and answer key questions:

• How do you coherently (Read more...)

Making decisions is one of the core competencies of entrepreneurship. When you’re in the thick of things, you may be making multiple decisions per hour. And even when they don’t seem like big decisions, the impact of each decision – however small – compounds rapidly. Let’s say that improving your decision making allows you to increase the utility function of each decision by 0.5%. But after 1,000 such good decisions, that same function will have increased 147X.

Despite this large impact, the techniques of decision-making are often overlooked.

I sat down with my Blitzscaling co-author Chris Yeh to discuss this in depth on the most recent Greymatter podcast, which you can listen to here:

WHAT IS GOOD DECISION-MAKING?

Entrepreneurs and executives will do all sorts of things to improve themselves, from taking a class on a particular technology, to reading a book about venture deals, to practicing intermittent fasting. Yet very few of them stop to ask the simple yet powerful question, “How can I make my decision-making better?”

And by the way, “better” doesn’t just mean “more accurate.” It also means “faster.” Many of the decisions facing entrepreneurs seem to have high stakes; they can literally mean the difference between the life or death of the company. When faced with such weighty decisions, the normal human instinct is to slow down, collect all the available information, and get emotionally comfortable with the possibilities before making a decision. That instinct is almost 100% wrong for entrepreneurial decision-making.

I describe entrepreneurial-decision (Read more...)

Making decisions is one of the core competencies of entrepreneurship. When you’re in the thick of things, you may be making multiple decisions per hour. And even when they don’t seem like big decisions, the impact of each decision – however small – compounds rapidly. Let’s say that improving your decision making allows you to increase the utility function of each decision by 0.5%. But after 1,000 such good decisions, that same function will have increased 147X.

Despite this large impact, the techniques of decision-making are often overlooked.

I sat down with my Blitzscaling co-author Chris Yeh to discuss this in depth on the most recent Greymatter podcast, which you can listen to here:

WHAT IS GOOD DECISION-MAKING?

Entrepreneurs and executives will do all sorts of things to improve themselves, from taking a class on a particular technology, to reading a book about venture deals, to practicing intermittent fasting. Yet very few of them stop to ask the simple yet powerful question, “How can I make my decision-making better?”

And by the way, “better” doesn’t just mean “more accurate.” It also means “faster.” Many of the decisions facing entrepreneurs seem to have high stakes; they can literally mean the difference between the life or death of the company. When faced with such weighty decisions, the normal human instinct is to slow down, collect all the available information, and get emotionally comfortable with the possibilities before making a decision. That instinct is almost 100% wrong for entrepreneurial decision-making.

I describe entrepreneurial-decision (Read more...)