Silicon Valley Legend Reid Hoffman

August 20, 2020

More Ways to Listen

LISTEN TO PODCAST

Subscribe on Your Favorite Platform

Other Platforms

About the Guest

Reid Hoffman

Silicon Valley entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author

Reid Hoffman is an iconic Silicon Valley entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author. Perhaps best known as the co-founder and former CEO of LinkedIn, as well as a member of the so-called PayPal mafia, as an early board member and executive at that company. Reid was also an early stage angel investor in companies such as Facebook and AirBnb. Since 2009, he has been a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners, where he focuses on early stage investing. He hosts the podcast, Masters of Scale, and he has co-authored multiple books including his most recent, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies. Reid is an Aspen Institute Crown Fellow, was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford, and a graduate of Stanford University.

Episode Overview

478: Reid Hoffman is an iconic Silicon Valley entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author. Perhaps best known as the co-founder and former CEO of LinkedIn, he is currently a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners, where he focuses on early-stage investing. He hosts the podcast, Masters of Scale. In this interview, we discuss:

The current pandemic and the economic crisis
How one must lean on one’s ecosystem for insights and support while offering the same back into the ecosystem
How the pandemic has caused previous market failures to move to market readiness
The importance of entrepreneurs co-designing their go-to-market strategy
The precise definition of blitzscaling and its application to large companies

Among a variety of other topics.

This episode was recorded live at the 2020 Metis Strategy Digital Symposium.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

“I would take the great go-to-market idea because if I can get it there, I can use customer feedback and I can iterate the product. And there's a bunch of stuff I can do whereas if no one ever sees the product, it doesn't matter how good it is. If you can't get it to scale, it just doesn't matter."