Reid Hoffman - Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths from the Worlds Most Successful Entrepreneurs

Each of us, in our own way, aspires to make an impact, especially on the people closest to usour families, friends, and colleagues. Some of us set our sights higher, hoping our ideas will spread beyond our immediate networks, touching our communities, affecting even those people we may never meet personally.

And a few of us dream even bigger. We dream of changing the world; of doing something never done beforeor at least not in this particular way; of disrupting old models and building new ones; of having our visions for business and social change achieve the kind of rapid growth that becomes self-perpetuating.

We dream of reaching scale.

Here at Masters of Scale, we believe scaling is not just a science but also a mindseta journey that requires equal measures of faith and a willingness to fail.

As founders ourselves, we recognize whats at stake when launching a new business initiativeespecially in times of uncertainty, when conventional thinking can no longer be relied on. We understand that the arduous path to entrepreneurial success is often a risky adventure rife with contradictions and unexpected turns. And we believe that within each of us is the capacity to cultivate an entrepreneurial mindset that will lead to successand to scale.

When you talk to people who have scaled a businessand we have talked to many, at length and in depthyou begin to uncover some counterintuitive truths about scaling:

• The best, most scalable ideas are often the ones that seem the most implausible.

• An encounter with resistance at the start of your journey is a good thing.

• Early, honest feedback from the right people will have an outsized impact on helping you refine your idea.

• Doing things that dont scaleespecially at the earliest stagescan set you up for dramatic scale later on.

• Even if everything you thought you knew turns out to be wrong, you can still achieve your goalsas long as you accept the truth and adjust your plan.

Lessons like these were learned the hard way by the seventy extraordinary people featured in this book. They are among the most iconic entrepreneurs behind the disruptive companies that have shaped our cultural landscape.

Among the pantheon of modern scale leaders sharing their stories with us: Bill Gates, Mark Cuban, Starbucks Howard Schultz, Netflixs Reed Hastings, Apples Angela Ahrendts, Googles Eric Schmidt, Yahoos Marissa Mayer, Airbnbs Brian Chesky, YouTubes Susan Wojcicki, Spotifys Daniel Ek, Canvas Melanie Perkins, Xapos Wences Casares, Spanxs Sara Blakely, the Black Lists Franklin Leonard, ClassPasss Payal Kadakia, Duolingos Luis von Ahn, Minteds Mariam Naficy, Shake Shack founder Danny Meyer, Walker & Companys Tristan Walker, designer Tory Burch, investor and philanthropist Robert F. Smith, and media maven Arianna Huffington.

These leaders represent a wide range of industries as well as the nonprofit world. They hail from all over the worldfrom rural towns to urban housing projects (and everywhere in between). In the pages ahead, youll learn not just about their winning strategies but also their embarrassing mistakes and their dark moments of defeat. At times, it may feel a bit like youre eavesdropping on a private conversation between them and the books expert navigator, Reid Hoffman, who conducted all the interviews.

Reid knows firsthand what it takes to scale a company, both as a founder and as an investor. He helped launch some of the most successful startups of our time, including PayPal and LinkedIn. As an angel investor and later an investor with Greylock Partners, he was among the first to spot the potential in paradigm-shifting companies like Airbnb, Facebook, Zynga, Aurora, and Dropbox, among many others. Reid has even created new and original language on the subject, such as the term blitzscaling, which refers to the pursuit of aggressive growth by prioritizing speed over efficiency, or risk-intelligent scaling.

So as the host of the Masters of Scale podcast, it makes sense that he would help to scale the podcast series itself, turning it into one of the most popular and influential of its kinda dependable place to find hard-fought wisdom, a resource entrepreneurs and business leaders turn to in times of opportunity and in times of crisis.

Fans of the series know that Masters of Scale is a business podcast that doesnt sound like any other business podcastwith immersive storytelling, original music, and a quirky sense of humor. Today it has millions of passionate fans in more than two hundred countries, and its listen-through rate of 75 percent confirms that it has one of the most engaged podcast audiences in the world.

Since 2017 weve produced more than eighty podcast episodes based on hundreds of hours of conversation with the most admired founders in the world. In each episode, we set out to prove a theory about how companies scale, using one founders story and career as a starting point. The show then unfolds like a detective story, with Reid as the listeners guide, as he tests our theory, pulling insightsand counterpointsfrom our guests.

Part of the podcast series appeal is that Reid uses his own inside knowledge of scaling to probe deep in his interviews. As someone whos been in the trenches himself, he is able to draw out insights and ideas from his guests that the typical interviewer would never think to ask. But Reid also recognizes that these legends of modern business are people, too. Some of the richest, most fascinating material comes from their thoughts on human relationships, problem solving, purpose, and meaning.