Reid Hoffman - The Start Up of You

A profound book about self-determination and self-realization. By capturing and universalizing the wisdom of successful start-up businesses, the authors provide an exciting blueprint for building a fulfilling career. Invaluable for any person who wants to be a successful entrepreneurnot in a particular company, but in the most important enterprise of all: ones own life.

CORY BOOKER, mayor of Newark, New Jersey

Silicon Valley revolutionizes entire industries through the way we work. It is now time to export our playbook to the rest of the world. The Start-up of You is that key playbook: it will help you revolutionize yourself and achieve your own career breakout.

MARC ANDREESSEN, venture capitalist and director at HP, Facebook, and eBay

In times of change and uncertainty adaptability creates stability. Insights like this make The Start-up of You such a compelling new way to approach your life. Hoffman and Casnocha have distilled the essence of entrepreneurship into a potion for personal success, regardless of your career plans.

JOHN ETCHEMENDY, provost, Stanford University

If work and career were a game, The Start-up of You would be your playbook. Reid Hoffman is one of the worlds great business strategists, helping dozens of entrepreneurs transform their businesses. Now let him help you take your personal start-up to the next level.

MARK PINCUS, CEO, Zynga

Copyright 2012 by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Business, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN BUSINESS is a trademark and CROWN and the Rising Sun colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hoffman, Reid.
The start-up of you: adapt to the future, invest in yourself, and transform your career/by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha.1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Career changes. 2. Career development. 3. Business networks.
I. Casnocha, Ben. II. Title.
HF5384.H63 2012
650.1dc23 2011033835

eISBN: 978-0-307-88892-1

Illustrations by Von Glitschka and Brett Bolkowy
Jacket design by David J. High, Highdzn.com
Jacket photography Altrendo Images/Getty Images

v3.1_r2

To my mom and dad,
who have tried to teach me wisdom,
and to Michelle,
who tries to teach me compassion every day.
RGH

To the Mac Doctor,
for inspiring me to Think Different.
BTC

All human beings are entrepreneurs. When we were in the caves, we were all self-employed finding our food, feeding ourselves. Thats where human history began. As civilization came, we suppressed it. We became labor because they stamped us, You are labor. We forgot that we are entrepreneurs.

Muhammad Yunus,
Nobel Peace Prize winner and microfinance pioneer

Y ou were born an entrepreneur.

This doesnt mean you were born to start companies. In fact, most people shouldnt start companies. The long odds of success, combined with the constant emotional whiplash, makes starting a business the right path for only some people.

All humans are entrepreneurs not because they should start companies but because the will to create is encoded in human DNA, and creation is the essence of entrepreneurship. As Yunus says, our ancestors in the caves had to feed themselves; they had to invent rules of living. They were founders of their own lives. In the centuries since then we forgot that we are entrepreneurs. Weve been acting like labor.

To adapt to the challenges of professional life today, we need to rediscover our entrepreneurial instincts and use them to forge new sorts of careers. Whether youre a lawyer or doctor or teacher or engineer or even a business owner, today you need to also think of yourself as an entrepreneur at the helm of at least one living, growing start-up venture: your career.

This book is not a job-hunting manual. You wont find tips and tricks on how to format your rsum or how to prepare for a job interview. What you will find are the start-up mind-sets and skill sets you need to adapt to the future. Youll find strategies that will help you expand the reach of your network, gain a competitive edge, and land better professional opportunities.

Your future success depends on understanding and deploying these entrepreneurial strategies. More broadly, society flourishes when people think entrepreneurially. More world problems will be solvedand solved fasterif people practice the values laid out in the pages ahead. This is a book about you, and its also about improving the society around you. That starts with each individual.

Centuries of immigrants risked everything to come to America with the conviction that if they worked hard, they would enjoy a better life than their parents had.living than the generation that came before it. An expectation of lockstep increases in prosperity became part of the American Dream.

For the last sixty or so years, the job market for educated workers worked like an escalator. After graduating from college, you landed an entry-level job at the bottom of the escalator at an IBM or a GE or a Goldman Sachs. There you were groomed and mentored, receiving training and professional development from your employer. As you gained experience, you were whisked up the organizational hierarchy, clearing room for the ambitious young graduates who followed to fill the same entry-level positions. So long as you played nice and well, you moved steadily up the escalator, and each step brought with it more power, income, and job security. Eventually, around age sixty-five, you stepped off the escalator, allowing those middle-ranked employees to fill the same senior positions you just vacated. You, meanwhile, coasted into a comfortable retirement financed by a company pension and government-funded Social Security.

People didnt assume all of this necessarily happened automatically. But there was a sense that if you were basically competent, put forth a good effort, and werent unlucky, the strong winds at your back would eventually shoot you to a good high level. For the most part this was a justified expectation.

But now that escalator is jammed at every level. Many young people, even the most highly educated, are stuck at the bottom, underemployed, or jobless, as Ronald Brownstein noted in the Atlantic. At best, this keeps middle-aged workers stuck in promotionless limbo; at worst, it squeezes them out in order to make room for more-senior talent. Today, its hard for the young to get on the escalator, its hard for the middle-aged to ascend, and its hard for anyone over sixty to get off. Rather than advancing in smooth procession, everyone is stepping on everybody else, Brownstein says.