The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career [Hardcover]

Reid Hoffman (Author), Ben Casnocha (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 14, 2012

A blueprint for thriving in your job and building a career by applying the lessons of Silicon Valley's most innovative entrepreneurs.

The career escalator is jammed at every level. Unemployment rates are sky-high. Creative disruption is shaking every industry. Global competition for jobs is fierce. The employer-employee pact is over and traditional job security is a thing of the past.  
 
Here, LinkedIn cofounder and chairman Reid Hoffman and author Ben Casnocha show how to accelerate your career in today's competitive world. The key is to manage your career as if it were a start-up business: a living, breathing, growing start-up of you.
 
Why? Start-ups - and the entrepreneurs who run them - are nimble. They invest in themselves. They build their professional networks. They take intelligent risks. They make uncertainty and volatility work to their advantage.
 
These are the very same skills professionals need to get ahead today.
 
This book isn't about cover letters or resumes. Instead, you will learn the best practices of Silicon Valley start-ups, and how to apply these entrepreneurial strategies to your career. Whether you work for a giant multinational corporation, a small local business, or launching your own venture, you need to know how to:
 
* Adapt your career plans as you change, the people around you change, and industries change.
* Develop a competitive advantage to win the best jobs and opportunities.
* Strengthen your professional network by building powerful alliances and maintaining a diverse mix of relationships. 

* Find the unique breakout opportunities that massively accelerate career growth.
* Take proactive risks to become more resilient to industry tsunamis.
* Tap your network for information and intelligence that help you make smarter decisions.
 
A revolutionary new guide to thriving in today's fractured world of work, the strategies in this book will help you survive and thrive and achieve your boldest professional ambitions. The Start-Up of You empowers you to become the CEO of your career and take control of your future.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Thomas Friedman Interviews Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha

Thomas L. Friedman is a New York Times foreign affairs columnist, three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and author of international best seller Hot, Flat, and Crowded.

Whatever you may be thinking when you apply for a job today, you can be sure your prospective employer is thinking this: Can this person add value every hour, every day--more than a worker in India, a robot, or a computer could? Can he or she help my company adapt by not only doing the job today but also reinventing the job for tomorrow? And can he or she adapt with all the change, so my company can adapt and export more into the fastest-growing global markets? In today's hyper-connected world, more and more companies cannot and will not hire people who don't fulfill those criteria. This is precisely why LinkedIn's founder, Reid Garrett Hoffman, one of the premier starter-uppers in Silicon Valley--besides cofounding LinkedIn, he is on the board of Zynga, was an early investor in Facebook, and sits on the board of Mozilla--has written The Start-up of You, coauthored with Ben Casnocha. Its subtitle could easily be: "Hey, recent graduates! Hey, thirty-five-year-old midcareer professional! Here's how you can build your career today." Here is our brief chat about their book.

Tom: You're a serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist. Why did you feel the need to offer this message?

Reid: As you write in That Used to Be Us, our country faces enormous challenges. The path to the American Dream has changed. We wanted to focus on what individual professionals can do to survive and thrive in a flat world. The premise of the book is that all of us are entrepreneurs of our own lives. We must act as CEO of our careers, take control of our professional future, and become globally competitive.

Tom: Really? Anyone can be an entrepreneur? Really? Even me?

Reid: Not only can anyone be an entrepreneur, but they must be. Even you, Tom! Not everyone should start companies, but everyone must be the entrepreneur of his or her own life. The skills people need to manage their careers are akin to the skills of entrepreneurs when they start and grow companies. For example, entrepreneurs can both be persistent on a plan and flexible when conditions change. They take intelligent risk. They build networks of allies and tap those networks for intelligence on what's happening in the world. Silicon Valley's most innovative entrepreneurs possess unique skills--you can learn them and apply them, no matter your profession.

Tom: Who is the target audience for this book?

Reid: Jeff Bezos says that at Amazon.com "it's always day one." This is a book for people just starting out, and it's equally for people midflight in their career who need to reinvent, restart, or reimagine their career as if it were day one, as if they were in permanent beta. We think that's most people, and eventually everyone.

Tom: What does it mean to be in "permanent beta?"

Reid and Ben: Technology companies sometimes keep the "beta" label on software for a time after the official launch to stress that the product is not finished, so much as ready for the next batch of improvements. For entrepreneurs, finished is an F-word. Great companies are always evolving. Finished ought to be an F-word for all of us. We are all works in progress. Each day presents an opportunity to learn more, do more, be more, grow more in our lives and careers. You will need to adapt and evolve forever--that's permanent beta.

Tom: Why the urgency of The Start-up of You?

Reid and Ben: A billboard that once ran along the 101 highway in Silicon Valley summed it up pithily: "A million people can do your job. What makes you so special?" We wanted to give people tools to take control of their lives, without having to wait around for the government or a company to rescue them.

Tom: Is China going to eat America's lunch?

Reid and Ben: National competitiveness is really a reflection of the individual competitiveness of its citizens. The question for each American is, "Is a professional in China going to eat your lunch?" Some will be competitive, and some will not. And the distinction is not set in stone. Just look at Detroit. All of us need to have a plan for investing in ourselves every day.

---

Review

 
"Being an entrepreneur isn’t really about starting a business.  It’s a way of looking at the world: seeing opportunity where others see obstacles, taking risks when others take refuge. Whatever career you’re in ­ or want to be in ­ The Start-Up of You holds lessons for success."
-Michael Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg, L.P. and Mayor, New York City

"Everyone, women and men alike, needs to think big to succeed. This is a practical book that shows you how to take control and build a career that will enable you to have real impact."
-Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer, Facebook
 
 
"Forging a fulfilling career is one of the most important--and often, most difficult--challenges in building a happy life. The Start-Up of You is crammed with insights and strategies to help each of us create the work life we want."
-Gretchen Rubin, author of the #1 bestseller, The Happiness Project
 
 "The Startup of You" describes how to take the Silicon Valley approach to building a life: start with an idea, and work over your entire career to turn it something remarkable. In the world today, I think that the startup approach to life is necessary. This book distills the key techniques needed to succeed." 
-Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, co-founder of Square
 
“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 Startup of You is that key playbook: it will help you revolutionize yourself and achieve your own career breakout.”
-Marc Andreessen, co-founder Netscape; director at HP, Facebook, and eBay
 
"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 entrepreneur ­ not in a particular company ­ but in the most important enterprise of all: one's own life."
-Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark
 
""The Internet has fundamentally changed the architecture of business and society. This terrific book shows you how to live, learn, and thrive in a networked world."
-Joi Ito, Director, MIT Media Lab

“In times of change and uncertainty...adaptability creates stability.  It is insights like this that make The Startup 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

"The same extraordinary vision and timing that enabled Reid to found LinkedIn is once again on display with his book "the start-up of YOU."  His central thesis, that every individual can benefit from acting as the entrepreneur of their own life and career, has never been more important than it is in today's increasingly globalized, competitive, and networked world." 
-Jeff Weiner, CEO, LinkedIn    
 

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Crown Business (February 14, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307888908
• ISBN-13: 978-0307888907
• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 1 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (68 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #99 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #1 in Books > Business & Investing > Personal Finance
  • #1 in Books > Business & Investing > Job Hunting & Careers > Guides
  • #2 in Books > Business & Investing > Small Business & Entrepreneurship > Entrepreneurship

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The power of the weak link is explained, January 26, 2012

By 

Charles Ashbacher (Marion, Iowa United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

Hoffman is the cofounder of LinkedIn, the online community of professionals and in this book there is some excellent advice for the modern professional. Some of it, such as the reality that there is no such thing as lifetime employment anymore, is well-known but still bears repeating. The best item of advice and one that I have never heard elsewhere, is the value of the weak link.
The authors split the connections that a person has into strong and weak links. A strong link is a person that you know very well and they know you and your skill set very well. People in this category also tend to have a skill set similar to yours. A weak link is someone that fits into the category of acquaintance, a person that knows of you and something about what you can do, but they do not have detailed knowledge and generally have skill sets distinct from yours.
Weak links are considered extremely valuable because they dramatically extend your reach into unfamiliar areas, which is essential in the modern world where your employable skill sets must be changed or improved on a regular basis. Furthermore, many new job descriptions are a synthesis of categories formerly considered distinct. They can provide the powerful peek into an area that you otherwise would not consider.
It is natural that there are many references to the LinkedIn model but they are well-embedded in the sense that they do not detract or overshadow the advice. The authors also are very positive in their discussions of the free-lance or itinerant worker. As a member of that category of workers that has encountered skepticism from people unfamiliar with such a work pattern, I appreciated the defense of that group of workers. Although we don't have a full-time job with one company, our continued ability to earn a living is more secure than many with full-time jobs.
The future is approaching even faster now than ever before and the image of the former present receding in the mirror just as fast. New jobs are created and vanish at a rapid rate and the modern professional must be adaptable to the new circumstances. It is a scary and exciting environment and this book can help you survive and thrive in it.

85 of 97 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A book that needs to take more risks, February 6, 2012

By 

Trevor Burnham (Cambridge, MA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

No matter what you do, think of yourself as an entrepreneur. Be willing to take risks. Accept failure and learn from it. Keep trying, and you'll succeed.

If this all sounds familiar, then you'll be as disappointed as I was by The Start-Up of You, a generic career advice book churned out by two tech elites who could have done better. Rather than drawing directly on their experiences as founders and venture capitalists, Hoffman and Casnocha make a rote journey through modern Silicon Valley-themed business book territory. When they tell the stories of successes like Apple, Amazon, Netflix, PayPal, and Zappos, it feels like they're going through a checklist. There's far less original substance than in Casnocha's My Start-Up Life, which benefited enormously from his being a teenager who knew little beyond his own experiences. He could tell it like it is, rather than drawing on played-out archetypes. The older Casnocha has tailored his book to the broadest possible audience, with all the mediocrity that entails.

Simply put, I'm tired of hearing "They told him he was crazy..." stories. You know the type:

1. They [potential investors] told him [the entrepreneur] he was crazy.
2. He kept going. For years, he poured his heart and soul into his dream.
3. Today, [company he started] is valued at $x billion.

The problem with these stories is that there's only so much you can learn from them. The moral isn't "If they tell you that you're crazy, you're probably on to something"--to the contrary, if they tell you that you're crazy, you're probably crazy. "They" are often smart people like Hoffman and Casnocha. The moral is in the second part of the story: You're not going to succeed unless you put your time and effort where your mouth is. Hopefully, you already knew that.

Still, "The Start-Up of You" gets the essentials right: The US economy is no longer adapted to reward loyalty with job security. There are no more risk-free, high-reward options on the table. You can't just work your way up within a static hierarchy. You have to be constantly prepared for change. In short, every worker is now an independent contractor to some degree. You have to make sure that you're always supplying something that's in demand--just as startups do. That's a lesson worth learning. You just don't need this book to do it.

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great for the right audience., February 8, 2012

By 

Shlok Vaidya (New Orleans, LA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha have written a book for people with normal jobs. Corporate jobs. What they call the "escalator model." Show up for 9-5 every day, get a steady paycheck, and earn promotions every so often.

The two explain that the classic model is dying. Then they explain in understandable way, that you need to embrace your personal brand, engage with the people 'around' you in a meaningful way, and have an eye on the adjacent possible (what they call, in classic bizbook lingo, ABZ planning).

To that segment, this is a pretty decent call to step it up, hustle as they say, and own their careers. So if you know someone still in that mindset, send them this book.

But for those of us who have already embraced this approach, or, honestly, will probably never know any other, this book will read like like a primer. That's not a knock, especially since I haven't found the perfect book on this topic, but something to be aware of.