Reid riffs on going from idea to launch

In this episode, Aria asks Reid about the path from idea to execution—and Reid draws from LinkedIn to share his launch lessons. Plus, Reid predicts how AI will—and won’t—impact food, dining, and restaurants. For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all the episodes, visit https://www.possible.fm/podcast/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Reid Hoffman?

  I'm Reid Hoffman.

• 0:02Aria Finger?

  And I'm Aria Finkler.

• 0:03Reid Hoffman?

  We want to know what happens if, in the future, everything breaks humanity's way.

• 0:08Aria Finger?

  Typically, we ask our guests for their outlook on the best possible future. But now, every other week, I get to ask Reid for his take.

• 0:18Reid Hoffman?

  This is Possible.

• 0:24Aria Finger?

  This week, we're talking about creativity, the creative process, and the future of food. We had such a great conversation with Masamobetura about these topics, and I'm excited to get Reid's takes. So we often talk about creativity, and we also talk about execution. And so I want to talk to you about how do you bridge that? You're dreaming, you're thinking of a new company, you're thinking of a new app. Like, how do you go from thinking about the thing to putting it into reality? With LinkedIn, you had a vision for this new network that would provide skills and jobs and opportunities to all these people. How do you get to execution from the idea?

• 1:04Reid Hoffman?

  So one of the things I love about entrepreneurship is it's kind of, to do it well, you're always blending dualities. So it's kind of like you're long-term focused, but you're solving the immediate short term. You're having a vision that you're kind of struggling to get to in the future, but you're being flexible, and you're adapting, and you're learning, and you're changing what you're doing. And that is an important part of the creativity because the notion that you sit in a room, a garage, canonically, and you go, "Oh, I know exactly what to do." That's not what happened. You know, when Bill Gates was creating MS-Dos, he was not thinking Microsoft Office. Right? You know, it's the, "Okay, I start here,

• 1:49Reid Hoffman?

  and I understand that I'm trying to go there, like a computer on every desk and software running it, and Microsoft providing that software." But the way that you learn and you realize and you adjust and that kind of synthetic, you know, whether it's a yin and a yang, or kind of, you know, a thesis and antithesis and a synthesis, or, you know, a blend of opposites, or, you know, oxymorons, or whatever. It's the whole thing of that, that creative balance, which is a combination of art and science, which is one of the things that's really important about the creativity, the judgment, the vision, the dynamism, the flexibility that goes into entrepreneurship. And it's one of the things where, it's one of the reasons I kind of, you know, someone

• 2:33Reid Hoffman?

  always tend to be somewhat deflationary on the, you know, here are the four things you really need to understand as an entrepreneur. It doesn't just say that those aren't good things to have in the mix, but part of it is you're navigating, like, the best, the best parallel, if you said, well, what, what word would you use if it wasn't entrepreneur, would be pioneer. Because you're kind of going into an unknown space and you're adjusting to it. And you've brought some stuff with you and you're discovering some new stuff and you have a team and, and, and you're figuring that out as you go. And so that, that, that dynamism and flexibility and frankly, creativity, which does involve

• 3:13Reid Hoffman?

  skills you've learned and, and things that are part of it, but also is the creation of the new.

• 3:21Aria Finger?

  When you were creating LinkedIn, was there a specific moment when you were like, let's flip the switch, or not, or you were like, let's wait a week, or let's do it a week early? Like, when did you decide, like, this is ready for prime time? Because you famously have said, if you're not embarrassed by your first product, you launched too late. So how did you know in that moment what came?

• 3:39Reid Hoffman?

  So the first thing is, by the way, that is a, you know, famous infamous saying that, you know, applies to software and especially consumer internet software. If you were launching a hardware product and you were embarrassed, you're probably dead. So it's kind of, it, but, but the idea was to show that in, especially in kind of internet software, mobile software now. What you're trying to do is you're trying not to overly think the whole future. You're trying to get out, frequently described as minimum viable product, to get product market fit, blah, blah, blah. But the, uh, but you're trying to get out the, the, the most basic thing you can to start learning, to not overly presume.

• 4:21Reid Hoffman?

  And obviously there are geniuses, you know, Steve Jobs or the iPhone and so on. Then it does happen. And that's like the point oh, oh, oh, oh, one percent case. So the, for, for the rest of us mere mortals, it's better to, to get something out there, be learning from it and adjusting, even as you maintain a true north. And so, for example, when we, uh, launched, uh, LinkedIn on, you know, kind of May 5th, basically our whole team didn't want to launch, right? And they were like, there's not enough, there's not a feature yet. There's not enough to do. It's, it's not really fully usable. And I was like, and, and there was a feature that they had really wanted to, to, to include called Contact Finder, which is an ability to, to say to your network, I'm looking for,

• 5:05Reid Hoffman?

  you know, a person who can help me edit a podcast or something, or I'm looking for expertise on, on, on, on financing to, to consult with. And I kind of go through my network or, you know, I'm looking for a business deal. I'm looking for a company that does this, you know, that kind of like, like who would be the person that you might know that I would forward to you? And so I grabbed the whole team and I said, okay, we may very well discover that after we launch, that the thing that we most need to build is Contact Finder. And if on May 6th and May 7th, that's the thing we decided, then we'll be building it and we'll be adding it in. That's exactly what we'll be doing. The whole point of this principle is to not overly presume

• 5:48Reid Hoffman?

  that we know exactly what we need to do, but be learning from engagement with our customers, with our members, with the market and seeing what's going on. And today, 20 years later, we still haven't built Contact Finder. And that's the, that's the point of that launch and go and learn as a, as a way of going. Now you had to have, of course, a website that worked. You had to be able to invite people. You had to be able to do searches. You had to be able to communicate with the people you're connected to. Cause obviously if you just kind of said, I put up a blank webpage, said, well, I've launched, I'm embarrassed. You're, you have a, that you're not learning anything from it. Cause the whole, the whole thing is that speed of learning. Towards the thing that could make a real difference for your customers.

• 6:27Aria Finger?

  So we know AI is going to affect everything. And obviously, we've been talking about creativity. People are talking about copyright and newspapers and text to speech. Actually, not a lot of people are talking about how AI and technology are going to affect the future of food. Do you have thoughts how it will change?

• 6:45Reid Hoffman?

  I think AI is going to affect everything, just as you say. And I think that will affect food on multiple levels. So there is obviously at the end of the baseline of what you could already do today with pie and other things, which is I have these ingredients in my fridge. What can I make? Right? And so it's here now, right? Like, it's not like, oh, in the future and so on. It's like here now. It could be the, you know, that you could feed in a recipe and you could say, I'd like this to be healthy or I'd like this to be gluten free or my friend's vegan. What should I do? Like, all of that is there now. And so there's that.

• 7:28Reid Hoffman?

  There's the questions on, for example, again, as kind of the, the, the, the, the personal intelligence, the pie and pie can do this as well. Like, say, for example, I'm making food. I might be saying like, okay, like, or like I'm a farmer or I'm a rancher. I'm like, okay, how do I navigate this thing with the chickens, the pigs? You know, like, one of the things that, you know, I actually was talking to a friend of mine who was visiting a farm. And he's like, the ravens were getting into the hen coop and killing the chickens, trying to get the eggs. And I was like, okay, well, what would you do about that? And how would you navigate that? So, so that, that kind of, that, that personal intelligence, that co-pilot will affect all the kind of human roles around us.

• 8:09Reid Hoffman?

  Now, obviously, the, the science fiction thing tends to be the, oh, you're going to have a robot waiter and a robot chef and a robot. And, and you will have some of those things in various ways. And, you know, there have been some startups already, like, you know, your food is made in a little pre-cubicle that you open up and so on. Then that can, there's a role for that. There's, there's value there. But what I think that people frequently forget in these things and they in the technological development is something that I learned from John Naismith with Megatrend, which is this high-tech, high-touch. Yes, the tech continues to to grow and amplify our lives in various ways, but then we adjust to it. And it's important what's human beings also

• 8:54Reid Hoffman?

  have high touch, that human touch, the tactile experience, the humanity in the loop for this. And so, yes, we will have all those things. And yes, but it's not, you know, and if it was Black Mirror, that would be the dystopia of the the the robot waiter gone wild, you know, like force feeding you food or something like that. But we'll actually in fact have various elements of where and in which elements are how humans will be in the loop will be different at different times, at different circumstances as as we evolve. And so, so I think that we that food won't become a completely non-human thing. Obviously, we have to eat, we have to experience, we're connecting with the people, you know,

• 9:38Reid Hoffman?

  part of the thing that is, I think, you know, all of human history is we we break bread together, we're companions, we have, you know, we have breakfast together because we break our fast. And that that social connectivity, what makes us human, will still be there, will still be the high-touch part of that as we're navigating. And I frankly think like people go, oh, my God, I fear change. I fear that what technology will do. And so they create these like horror shows and you go, well, actually, in fact, it's pretty easy to navigate. It's not difficult to say, well, how do we keep, you know, just keep bringing humanity back to it. And that's part of the reason why like the, you know,

• 10:22Reid Hoffman?

  gave the speech in Malonia about, you know, remembering the Renaissance, remembering humanism, because we only need to be thinking about it, even in small ways, as we we shape our human future.

• 10:40Reid Hoffman?

  Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network. It's hosted by Aria Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Katie Sanders, Edie Aller, Sarah Schleid, Adrian Bain, and Paloma Moreno Jimenez. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.

• 10:59Aria Finger?

  Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Sayida Sepieva, Ian Ellis, Greg Beato, Ben Relis, Parth Patel, and Little Monster Media Company.