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
“Hoffman and Casnocha make a number of astute observations about shifts in the world of work. . . . As well as explaining network intelligence, or why your contacts’ contacts may be the best source of leads about potential jobs . . . the book also gives numerous tips—including ones gleaned from the world of online dating—about how best to broker effective relationships.”—The Economist
“If you are starting a career, it is an excellent book for thinking through the practical issues you will face in branding yourself in what is becoming a more volatile and very different labor market.”—Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution
“Hoffman has pulled off something extraordinary in his book-writing debut. He has challenged a well-worn idea . . . and replaced it with something better.”—Fortune
“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 Startup of You holds lessons for success.”—Michael Bloomberg, founder, Bloomberg, L.P., and former mayor of 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, author of Lean In
“Forging a fulfilling career is one of the most important—and often, most difficult—challenges in building a happy life. The Startup of You is crammed with insights and strategies to help each of us create the work life we want.”—Gretchen Rubin, author of 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 into 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, Twitter and Square
“This great book shows that entrepreneurship is really about taking control of your life, and you don’t need a big startup to be an entrepreneur—you need personal responsibility and intellectual exploration.”—Penelope Trunk, author of Brazen Careerist
“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
“A profound book about self-determination and self-realization. By capturing and universalizing the wisdom of successful startup 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.”—Senator Cory Booker
“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
About the Author
Reid Hoffman is the co-founder of LinkedIn, a partner at Greylock, and director at Microsoft, and is widely viewed as one of the most successful investors of all time. He is the host of the award-winning podcast Masters of Scale and the New York Times bestselling author of The Alliance, Blitzscaling, and Masters of Scale.
Ben Casnocha is an entrepreneur and cofounder of Village Global, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has funded hundreds of successful startups. He has appeared on CBS’s The Early Show, CNN, and CNBC. He is a co-author, with Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh, of the bestseller The Alliance.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction
All Humans Are Entrepreneurs
All human beings are entrepreneurs. When we were in the caves, we were all self-employed . . . finding our food, feeding ourselves. That’s 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
You were born an entrepreneur.
This doesn’t mean you were born to start companies. In fact, most people shouldn’t start companies. The odds of success are small, the emotional roller coaster constant.
All humans are entrepreneurs not because they should start companies but because the will to create and take control of our destiny 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 first, and founders of civilizations only later. In the millennia since then we forgot that we are by our very nature entrepreneurs. Instead, we’ve been acting like “labor,” as Yunus puts it. This isn’t the way to create a great career.
To adapt to the challenges of professional life today and take control of our careers, we need to rediscover our entrepreneurial instincts and use them to forge new paths. Whether you’re a lawyer or a doctor, a teacher or an engineer, an Uber driver or even a business owner, in the twenty-first century you need to also think of yourself as an entrepreneur at the helm of at least one living, breathing, growing startup venture: your career. In the pages ahead, we’re going to help you do just that.
When we published the first edition of this book in 2012, we were confident that the core idea of approaching your career as an entrepreneurial venture would have staying power. But we didn’t fully anticipate that over the course of the subsequent decade this central tenet would become even more relevant and important for everyone. As we write this in 2022, we have entered a brave new professional world. Massive large-scale changes have occurred, from where we work, to how we communicate, to shifts in culture, to political upheavals, to global pandemics. This updated edition addresses these recent developments.
This book is not a job-hunting manual. You won’t find tips and tricks on how to format your résumé or how to prepare for a job interview. What you will find are the startup mindsets and strategies that will help you expand the reach of your network, gain a competitive edge, and land better opportunities.
How Did We Get Here?
In the United States and other developed economies, the latter half of the twentieth century offered career trajectories for educated workers that 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 you and your peers had moved up from. So long as you played nice and performed relatively well, you rose 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 mid-level 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 retirement program. People didn’t assume that all of these steps necessarily happened automatically. But there was a sense that if you were basically competent, put forth a good effort, and weren’t unlucky, the strong winds at your back would eventually lift you to a respectably high level. For the most part this was a justified expectation. You didn’t have to be entrepreneurial. You just had to go to work and meet expectations.
When we published the first edition of this book, that “career escalator,” as the writer Ronald Brownstein dubbed it, was jammed at every level. It had been for a while. Many young people, even the most highly educated, were stuck at the bottom, underemployed, or jobless, or trapped in dead-end positions out of sync with their ambitions and talents. Meanwhile, men and women in their sixties and seventies, with empty pensions and a government safety net that looked like Swiss cheese, were staying in or rejoining the workforce in record numbers. At best, this formula keeps middle-aged workers stuck in promotionless limbo; at worst, it squeezes them out in order to make room for more-senior talent. Today, this is all still true, only more so. It’s harder than ever for the young to get on the escalator, for the middle-aged to ascend, and for anyone over sixty to get off. Honestly, career paths barely even look like an escalator anymore—more like a jungle with trees we are all scrambling to climb without falling. Even the time-tested pipeline to entering the workforce—a four-year college degree—is in crisis as higher education enrollment steadily declines.
Globalization and the tech revolution have undone traditional career assumptions. Technology automates jobs that used to require hard-earned knowledge and skills, including well-paid white-collar jobs such as paralegals and radiologists, to name just two examples. This erasure of certain positions will only continue with the AI revolution that is already sweeping across industries. Of course, technology also creates new jobs, but job creation tends to lag behind job displacement, and the new jobs usually require different, higher-level skills than the ones they replaced. If technology doesn’t eliminate or change the skills you need in many industries, it at least enables more people from around the world (often cheaper freelancers) to compete for your job by allowing companies to offshore work more easily—knocking down your salary in the process. Trade and technology did not appear overnight and are not going away anytime soon. The labor market in which we all work has been permanently altered.
One major change has been the disintegration of the longterm pact between employee and employer that used to guarantee lifetime employment and training in exchange for lifelong loyalty. With the death of traditional career paths, you can bid farewell to the kind of traditional professional development previous generations enjoyed. You can no longer count on employer-sponsored training. The expectation for even junior employees is that you can do the job you’ve been hired to do upon arrival or that you’ll learn so quickly you’ll be up to speed within weeks. Whether you want to learn a new skill or simply be better at the job you were hired to do, it’s now your job to train and invest in yourself. Companies aren’t inclined to invest in you, in part because you’re not likely to commit years and years of your life to working there. This relentless decaying of the employer-employee relationship is especially true as companies become more geographically distributed and more employees work remotely—those employees can often feel less personally connected to their colleagues and company culture. As we describe in our book The Alliance, the old indefinite employment pact has been replaced by performance-based “tours of duty” that are periodically up for renewal by both sides.
Professional loyalty in your career now flows “horizontally” to and from your network rather than “vertically” to your superiors, as Dan Pink has noted. The United States (and its peers) have largely become, as he famously put it, a free agent nation.
We are now living in a free agent world.
Forget the old world of careers. That era is over. The rules have changed.
