The Startup of You
Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, 2012
Table of contents
1: All Humans Are Entrepreneurs
Your Career, Your Startup
- all humans have the will to create encoded in their DNA
- you can approach your career like you would a start-up
- the forces of globalization (flattening of the playing field) and automation (replacing low skill jobs and some medium or high skill jobs) has made it so that pact between employee and employer, long-time employment for lifetime loyalty, no longer exists
- you need to invest in yourself
Don’t be Detroit
- Detroit offers an object lesson in how quickly success can fade
- in 50s and 60s, Detroit was height of the world – American autos employed 100s of 1000s for lifetime, gainful employment
- Detroit companies got complacent and slow and lost market share and then the market to competition
- now Detroit is in dire straits
- “The forces of competition and change that brought down Detroit are global and local. They threaten every business, every industry, every city. And more important, they also threaten every individual, every career.” (18)
strategy for the start up of you is
- to “[t]ake intelligent and bold risks to accomplish something great
- build a network of alliances to help you with intelligence, resources, and collective action
-
pivot to a breakout opportunity
- need to be in a “permanent beta”
- “Some people say they have 20 years experience, when in reality, they have 1 year’s experience repeated 20 times.” - Richie Norton
2: Develop a Competitive Advantage
- you can ask yourself what are you offering that is both rare and valuable – why would a company hire me over someone else?
- your competitive advantage is formed by three components: assets, aspirations/values, and market realities, or supply and demand
Assets
- assets are what you have right now, soft and hard skills
- soft skills are things like knowledge, info in your brain, training
- hard skills are things like assets and money
- a competitive edge emerges when you combine multiple different assets, like communication and engineering skills
Aspirations
- includes your deepest wishes, ideas, goals, and visions of future
- when you are doing work you care about, you tend to work harder and better
- it isn’t right to think of a “true self” that needs to be uncovered via introspection – rather, you remake yourself as you grow and the world changes, your identity doesn’t get found, it emerges.
Market Realities
- supply and demand of market
- if someone won’t pay you for what you love to do, it isn’t a viable career
Local Advantages
- while it might be helpful to learn a skill to increase your marketability, it is also viable to go to a less competitive pool – think NBA players in Europe or G League
3: Plan to Adapt
- the notion that you can choose your vision/calling, then meticulously plan to achieve it, is naive in this age
- this is the idea central to What Color is Your Parachute, one of the top-selling business books of all-time
- this idea is wrong because
- it presumes the world is static and you don’t need to change to accommodate anything new
- it presumes that fixed, accurate self-knowledge can be easily attained
- just because it is a calling doesn’t mean someone will pay you for it
ABZ Planning
- you can create an adaptive, iterative plan
- Plan A, what you are doing right now, something you iterate on constantly
- Plan B, what you pivot to (you can start this on the side)
- Plan Z, the fallback or lifeboat
Guidance on Plans
- plans should make use of your competitive advantage (your assets, aspirations, and market realities)
- prioritize learning about yourself and the world
- learn by doing
- make reversible, small bets
- think two steps ahead
- establish an identity separate from your employer
tube
Inflection Points
- when a 10x force disrupts a business
- these are points of high leverage and can be taken advantage of
- plan for unknowns so you are adaptable
4: It Takes a Network
- if you want to accelerate your career, you need the help and support of others
- when it comes to getting promoted, strong relationships and good terms with boss can matter more than competence
- “the fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be” (85)
- research shows that a team in business world tends to perform at level of worst individual member (pulled from this blog)
- different contexts matter - professional colleagues compared to personal friends (e.g., from school)
- past idea of networking was “transactional”, new ideas are that relationship builders prioritize high-quality relationship over quantity
building a genuine relationship depends on (at least) two things:
- seeing the world through someone else’s perspective
- thinking about how you can help and collab with other person rather than what you can get from them
- best way to engage with new people is through people you already know
two types of relationship that matter:
- allies - you can typically have at most 8 to 10, these are people you implicitly trust for honesty, feedback, etc
- weaker ties and acquaintances - which can be broken down to 2nd and 3rd degree (friends, and friends of friends)
Dunbar’s Number - animals are limited in how large their social group is by the size of their neocortex – for humans the number is 150 Degrees of Separation theory - the amount of degrees of separation that might tie you to someone, almost always at most 5 to 7 degrees
- hanging out with people you have a lot in common with can be limiting to exposure to new experiences, thoughts, connections – what is valuable is the breadth and reach of your network
- you should be making or receiving one introduction a month
- “The value and strength of your network are not represented in the number of contacts in your address book. What matters are your alliances, the strength and diversity of your trust connections, the freshness of the information flowing through your network, the breadth of your weak ties, and the ease with which you can reach your second- or third-degree connections.” (120)
- all it takes to stay in touch is the desire to do it, a modest amount of organization, and proactiveness
- the business world is rife with power jostling, gamesmanship, status signalling, so any relationships need to take that into account
5: Pursue Breakout Opportunities
- “There are always breakout projects, connections, specific experiences, and yes, strokes of luck—that lead to unusually rapid career growth.” (145)
you can deliberately increase these opportunities:
- curiosity – be curious about everything, ask questions, invest ongoing effort in learning
- court serendpidity and good randomness
- serendipidity is word invented by Horace Walpole from old Arabian story The Three Sisters of Serendip – sisters were lucky, but also worked hard to be put in a spot to seize a chance given, i.e., being alert to potential opportunity then acting on it
- opportunities are attached to individuals
- hustle – work your butt off, and great opportunities almost never fit your schedule
All-Star Networks
what makes an allstar network?
- each individual is high-quality
- the group has something in common
- the group is co-located or in close geographic density
- strong ethos of sharing and cooperation
6: Take Intelligent Risks
- “Risk” in a career context is the downside consequences from a given action or decision
- you should pursue only those opportunities with enough upside to justify possible downsides
- assessing risk is not impossible – it is unrealistic to weigh all pros and cons of every decision
a few heuristics to assess risk
- it’s not as risky as you think - negativity bias, or sticks get our attention more easily than carrots
- is worst-case tolerable or intolerable?
- can you change decision midway through?
- don’t conflate uncertainty with risk
- what will the risks be like in a few years, and are you in a position in your life to absorb more risk?
- risk is personal, as Warren Buffett says: “be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.”
some examples of career risks:
- jobs that pay less in cash but offer tremendous learning
- part-time or contract gigs that are less “stable”
- hiring someone without much experience but they are a fast learner
- an opportunity where the risks are highly publicized
Volatility Paradox
- in taking on smaller risks more frequently, you harden yourself to bigger risks, (Taleb’s Black Swan events) later, much like a forest with small controlled burns to prevent large forest fires later
7: Who you Know is What you Know
- the knowledge you need isn’t static but always changing
- “What will get you somewhere is being able to access the information you need, when you need it” (195)
your network is indispensable because:
- it offers private observations and impressions
- it offers personalized and contextualized information
- it can filter information you get from other sources
- asking a lot of good questions is key to network intelligence
- good question: “What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned over the past few months?”
Book Summary
While not all of us have the stomach or desire to be business entrepreneurs, we can approach our careers with the same set of principles that entrepreneurs approach new opportunities. The world has changed from the pact-based employment of the 20th century, requiring active investment in yourself to meet the flattening forces of globalization and automation. In this book, Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, and Ben Casnocha, entrepreneur, lay out a framework for what a start up of you might look like. In this new world, you need to
- press your competitive advantage via your assets, aspirations, and the market realities,
- develop a Plan A, Plan B, and Plan Z,
- build a network of allies and second and third degree connections,
- put yourself in position to take advantage of serendipity and breakout opportunities, and
- take calculated risks to increase opportunities for learning and experience as well as the breadth and reach of your network
Thoughts
The book isn’t the worst – it’s well-written enough, and the lessons distilled are likely useful. Any book that references David Foster Wallace and then Jonathan Franzen has my attention. Like any of these books written by Silicon Valley vets, though, it reads either as ad copy for their companies or as a mythology of the Silicon Valley ethos, or worse, both. Go figure the founder of LinkedIn is espousing the importance of networking and what’s more, all that networking can be achieved on LinkedIn! Hoffman calls this book his “gift back to society”, which feels pretentious, and perpetuates that mythologization of Silicon Valley practices ways of life. All of these Silicon Valley vets live in this incestuous petri dish of collaboration and poaching, and the best us poor schlubs languishing in the backwaters of the country can do is to prostrate at the foot of the Mount Olympus of business that is Silicon Valley. Just be more like us, they say, and here’s the manual, for a low fee of $15 bucks. It’s informational multilevel marketing.
One of the tidbits of advice is that you should be “receiving or making one introduction a month”, which frankly who has the time for? Professional networks are exceptionally powerful, and I have received several opportunities because I kept in contact with folks and was a generally pleasant person to work with. And maybe that’s all networking advice needs to be: keep in touch and don’t be an asshole.
This all might not be fair though. This book does have some decent advice. Like always be learning. And maximize your opportunities. And leverage the people you know to learn and find new opportunities. It just doesn’t say anything new, which is par for the business book genre.