Praise
for 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
ful lling 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, 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. Ho man 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 Startup of You would be your
playbook. Reid Ho man is one of the world’s 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.
Crown
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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
650.1—dc23 2011033835 eISBN: 978-0-307-88892-1
Illustrations
by Von Glitschka and Brett Bolkowy
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
Contents
Cover
Title
page
Copyright
Dedication
1
ALL
HUMANS ARE ENTREPRENEURS
THE NEW WORLD
OF WORK WHY THE START-UP OF YOU WHY US?
WHY THE URGENCY?
Sixty to Zero
Detroits Are
Everywhere
THE PATH TO THE
FUTURE
The Start-up of You
Mind-set: Permanent Beta The Start-up of You Skill Set
2
DEVELOP A
COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
THREE PUZZLE PIECES
INFORM YOUR DIRECTION AND COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
Your Assets
Your Aspirations and
Values
The Market Realities
FIT THE PIECES
TOGETHER
All Advantages Are
Local: Pick a Hill That Has Less Competition
3
PLAN TO
ADAPT
ADAPTIVE START-UPS,
ADAPTIVE CAREERS
ABZ PLANNING
PLAN A: ALMOST READY,
AIM, FIRE, AIM, FIRE, AIM,
FIRE …
PLAN B: PIVOT AS YOU
LEARN
When to Pivot: To Pursue
Upside or Avoid Downside
Where to Pivot: To an
Adjacent Niche, Something
Different but Related
How to Pivot: Start
It on the Side
PLAN Z: JUMP ON YOUR
LIFEBOAT AND REGROUP
4
IT TAKES
A NETWORK
IWe (I to the We): You
and Your Team
Context Matters:
Relationship Building in Professional
Life
BUILD GENUINE
RELATIONSHIPS
THE STRUCTURE AND
STRENGTH OF YOUR EXISTING
NETWORK
Professional Allies
Weak Ties and
Acquaintances: Expand the Breadth of
Your Network
Your Extended Social
Network: Second- and Third-
Degree Connections
The Best Professional
Network: Cohesive and Diverse
HOW TO STRENGTHEN AND
MAINTAIN YOUR
NETWORK
In Touch and Top of
Mind
Navigate Status
Dynamics When Dealing with Powerful
People
When to Let Go
5
PURSUE
BREAKOUT OPPORTUNITIES
MIND ON FIRE: BE
CURIOUS
HOW TO FIND AND
GENERATE CAREER
OPPORTUNITIES
Court Serendipity and
Good Randomness
Connect to Human
Networks: Groups and Associations of People
Do the Hustle
6
TAKE
INTELLIGENT RISKS
ASSESSING AND
MANAGING RISK
Pursue
Opportunities Where Others Misperceive the Risk SHORT-TERM
RISK INCREASES LONG-TERM STABILITY
7
WHO YOU
KNOW IS WHAT YOU KNOW
NAVIGATE PROFESSIONAL
CHALLENGES WITH
NETWORK INTELLIGENCE
How to Pull
Intelligence from Your Network
Pose Questions to
Your Entire Network
Target Direct
Questions to Specific Individuals
Ask Good Questions
Occasion Serendipity
SYNTHESIZE
INFORMATION INTO ACTIONABLE INTELLIGENCE
CONCLUSION
Connect with Us
Further Reading
Acknowledgments
Notes
All human beings are entrepreneurs.
When we were in the caves, we were all self-employed … nding 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
|
Y
|
ou were born an entrepreneur.
This doesn’t mean you
were born to start companies. In fact, most people shouldn’t 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. We’ve 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 you’re 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 won’t nd
tips and tricks on how to format your résumé or how to prepare for a job
interview. What you will nd are the start-up mind-sets and skill sets you need
to adapt to the future. You’ll nd 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 ourishes when people think entrepreneurially. More world
problems will be solved—and solved faster—if people practice the values laid
out in the pages ahead. This is a book about you, and it’s also about improving
the society around you. That starts with each individual.
THE NEW WORLD OF WORK
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.1 Since our country’s birth, each
generation of Americans has generally made more money, been better educated,
and enjoyed a higher standard of 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.2 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 ll
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- ve, you stepped o the escalator,
allowing those middle-ranked employees to ll the same senior positions you just
vacated. You, meanwhile, coasted into a comfortable retirement nanced by a
company pension and government-funded Social Security.
People didn’t assume all
of this necessarily happened automatically. But there was a sense that if you
were basically competent, put forth a good e ort, and weren’t 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.3 At the same time, men and women in their sixties and seventies,
with empty pensions and a government safety net that looks like Swiss cheese,
are staying in or rejoining the workforce in record numbers.4 At best, this keeps middle-aged
workers stuck in promotionless limbo; at worst, it squeezes them out in order
to make room for moresenior talent. Today, it’s hard for the young to get on
the escalator, it’s hard for the middle-aged to ascend, and it’s hard for
anyone over sixty to get o . “Rather than advancing in smooth procession,
everyone is stepping on everybody else,” Brownstein says.
With the death of traditional career paths,
so goes the kind
of traditional professional development previous generations enjoyed. You can
no longer count on employersponsored training to enhance your communication
skills or expand your technical know-how. 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.5 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 don’t want to invest in you, in part because
you’re not likely to commit years and years of your life to working there—you
will have many di erent jobs in your lifetime. There used to be a long-term
pact between employee and employer that guaranteed lifetime employment in
exchange for lifelong loyalty; this pact has been replaced by a
performance-based, short-term contract that’s perpetually up for renewal by both
sides. Professional loyalty now ows “horizontally” to and from your network
rather than “vertically” to your boss, as Dan Pink has noted.
The undoing of these
traditional career assumptions has to do with at least two interrelated macro
forces: globalization and technology. These concepts may seem overhyped to you,
but their long-term e ects are actually underhyped. Technology automates jobs
that used to require hardearned knowledge and skills, including wellpaid, white-collar jobs such as
stockbrokers, paralegals, and radiologists.6 Technology also creates new jobs, but this creation tends to lag
the displacement, and the new jobs usually require di erent, higher-level
skills than did the ones they replaced.7 If technology doesn’t eliminate or change the skills you need in
many industries, it at least enables more people from around the world to
compete for your job by allowing companies to o shore 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.
So forget what you thought
you knew about the world of work. The rules have changed. “Ready, aim, re” has
been replaced by “Aim, re, aim, re, aim, re.” Searching for a job only when
you’re unemployed or unhappy at work has been replaced by the mandate to always
be generating opportunities. Networking has been replaced by intelligent network building.
The gap is growing between
those who know the new career rules and have the new skills of a global
economy, and those who clutch to old ways of thinking and rely on commoditized
skills. The question is, which are you?
WHY THE START-UP OF YOU
With change come
new opportunities as well as challenges. What’s required now is an
entrepreneurial mind-set. Whether you work for a ten-person company, a giant
multinational corporation, a not-for-pro t, a government agency, or any type of
organization in between—if you want to seize the new opportunities and meet the
challenges of today’s fractured career landscape, you need to think and act
like you’re running a start-up: your career.
Why the start-up of you? When you start a
company, you make decisions in an information-poor, time-compressed,
resource-constrained environment. There are no guarantees or safety nets, so
you take on a certain amount of risk. The competition is changing; the market
is changing. The life cycle of the company is fairly short. The conditions in
which entrepreneurs start and grow companies are the conditions we all now live in when fashioning a
career. You never know what’s going to happen next. Information is limited.
Resources are tight. Competition is erce. The world is changing. And the amount
of time you spend at any one job is shrinking. This means you need to be
adapting all the time. And if you fail to adapt, no one—not your employer, not
the government—is going to catch you when you fall.
Entrepreneurs deal with
these uncertainties, changes, and constraints head-on. They take stock of their
assets, aspirations, and the market realities to develop a competitive
advantage. They craft exible, iterative plans. They build a network of
relationships throughout their industy that outlives their start-up. They
aggressively seek and create breakout opportunities that involve focused risk,
and actively manage that risk. They tap their network for the business
intelligence to navigate tough challenges. And, they do these things from the
moment they hatch that nascent idea to every day after that— even as the
companies go from being run out of a garage to occupying oors of o ce space. To succeed professionally in today’s world,
you need to adopt these same entrepreneurial strategies.
They are valuable no
matter your career stage. They are urgent whether you’re just out of college, a
decade into the workforce and angling for that next big move, or launching a
brand-new career later in life. Companies act small to retain an innovative
edge no matter how large they grow. Steve Jobs called Apple the “biggest start-up
on the planet.” In the same way, you need to stay young and agile; you need to
forever be a start-up.
WHY US?
I (Reid)
cofounded LinkedIn in 2003 with the mission of connecting the world’s
professionals to make them more productive and successful. More than 100
million members (at the time of the LinkedIn IPO in May 2011) and nine years
later, I’ve learned a tremendous amount about how professionals in every
industry manage their careers: how they connect with trusted business contacts,
nd jobs, share information, and present their online identities. For example,
from LinkedIn’s massive professional engagement, my colleagues and I have
gleaned insights about the most-sought-after skills, industry trends, and the
career paths that lead to opportunities. I’ve gleaned insight about which
approaches succeed and which fail; which tactics work and which fall at. Along
the way, I began to notice something utterly fascinating that related to my
other passion: investing.
As executive chairman,
LinkedIn is my primary day job, but I also invest in other start-ups. As an
angel investor and now as partner at Greylock, I’ve invested in more than one
hundred companies. This has given me an opportunity to help awesome
entrepreneurs scale their businesses: be it brainstorming with Mark Pincus at
Zynga on social gaming strategy, thinking through the future of the mobile
Internet with Kevin Rose at Digg and Milk (his mobile apps rm), or
collaborating with Matt Flannery to bring Kiva’s microloan model to all the
world’s poor. Through these diverse experiences, I’ve developed an eye for the
patterns of success and the patterns of failure in entrepreneurship.
Wearing these two hats—helping
LinkedIn enable
more economic opportunity for our members as well as helping my other portfolio
companies grow—led me to a revelation: The business strategies employed by
highly successful start-ups and the
career strategies employed by highly successful individuals are strikingly similar. Ever since,
I’ve been
distilling into strategic frameworks all that I’ve learned from twenty
fortunate years in Silicon Valley and applying them to the idea that every
individual is a small business. I think about my own career in exactly this
way: as a start-up.
When I rst met Ben, he was
at a career juncture: he was deciding whether to do more tech entrepreneurship
(he had already started a couple of companies), more writing (he had written a
book about entrepreneurship), more international travel (he had traveled abroad
extensively), or some combination of all of them. Then in his early twenties,
he was grappling with questions like: How far in the future should he plan?
What kinds of career risks are advisable? How does someone experiment broadly and build specialized expertise? Then he
said something that intrigued me. He told me that even if his next move wasn’t
to start a new company, he still was going to approach all of these critical
career questions as an entrepreneur would.
In the months leading up
to our rst meeting, Ben visited dozens of countries and met thousands of
students, entrepreneurs, journalists, and businesspeople—from community college
students in middle America to small-business owners in rural
Indonesia to government leaders in Colombia.
In these far- ung places he spoke about his own experiences and simultaneously
observed and learned about the aspirations and attitudes of the talented local
people. The remarkable thing he noticed was that entrepreneurship—in the broad
sense of the word—was everywhere: thousands of miles from Silicon Valley, in
the hearts and minds of people not necessarily starting companies. While they
may not have considered themselves entrepreneurs, their approach to life seemed
every bit the Silicon Valley way: they were self-reliant in spirit,
resourceful, ambitious, adaptive, and networked with one another. From these
experiences he arrived separately at the same conclusion that I did:
entrepreneurship is a life idea, not
a strictly business one; a global
idea, not a strictly American one. (Which I also experienced by serving on the
board of the global entrepreneurship organization Endeavor.) And, as the two
decades between us attest, it’s also a lifelong
idea, not a generational one.
WHY THE URGENCY?
Before we look
forward at how entrepreneurship as a life idea can transform your career, we
rst need to understand what’s at stake. There’s no better way to demonstrate
the perils of failing to adapt the start-up of you mind-set than by looking
back at an industry that once
embodied the best of entrepreneurship:
Detroit.
In the middle of the
twentieth century, Detroit ourished into a dynamic capital of the world thanks
to three local start-ups: Ford Motor Company, General Motors, and Chrysler. At
the time, these automakers were as innovative as they come. Ford gured out a
way to mass-produce cars and trucks on an assembly line, a technique that
changed manufacturing forever. GM and its legendary chairman Alfred Sloan
developed a system of management and organization that was imitated by hundreds
of other corporations. They were also visionaries. They boldly believed (when
few did) that cars would be ubiquitous in a country that celebrated the idea of
an open frontier. Alfred Sloan promised “a car for every purse and purpose.”
Henry Ford said he would build a car “so low in price that no man making a good
salary will be unable to own one.”
Like the best
entrepreneurs, they did more than just dream. They went out and created the
future they had imagined. Collectively, in the latter half of the twentieth
century, American carmakers produced hundreds of millions of innovative,
stylish vehicles, and sold them to customers in every part of the world. In
1955 GM became the rst corporation in history to earn a billion dollars of
revenue.8 By the end of that
decade, GM was a juggernaut so powerful that the Justice Department considered
breaking it up.
A job at these companies
perfectly embodied the old career escalator. There was unbeatable job
security—almost no one got red from car companies. If you lacked the necessary
skills, your employer would train you. General Motors even ran its own
undergraduate university, a mix of classroom study and factory work.
Graduating from
its institute virtually guaranteed lifelong employment and its accompanying
bene ts. As you accumulated years on the job, you ascended in job rank.
During the boom years of
the auto industry, the city of Detroit prospered. It was the land of dreams,
riches, and nextgeneration technology. “This was Silicon Valley, man,” local
newspaper columnist Tom Walsh told us, re ecting on Detroit’s golden age.
Entrepreneurs were taking home colossal fortunes, and a million new people
ooded into Detroit wanting a piece of it—an in ux that made Detroit the
fourth-most-populous city in the country.9
Wages were high; the city’s median income was the
highest in America. Home ownership soared. Aside from being a great place to
make a living, Detroit boasted a diversity, energy, culture, and progressive
spirit that rivaled Chicago and New York. It was the rst city to assign
individual telephone numbers, pave a mile of concrete road, and develop an
urban freeway.
In the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, Detroit was a
crown jewel of
America. “The word Detroit is a
synonym throughout the world for the industrial greatness of America,” boomed
President Harry Truman at the time.10 It was a key part of the “arsenal of democracy,” so symbolic of
American exceptionalism that visitors from around the world ocked there to get
a glimpse of entrepreneurship and innovation at its very best.
Then Detroit’s automakers
lost their entrepreneurial spirit. The entrepreneurs became labor. And like the
Titanic colliding with the tip of a
giant iceberg, Detroit started to sink slowly to the bottom.
Sixty to Zero
“Year after
year, decade after decade, we have seen problems papered over and tough choices
kicked down the road, even as foreign competitors outpaced us. Well, we have
reached the end of that road,” said President Barack Obama in 2009, at a press
conference announcing that the federal government was loaning $77 billion to GM
and Chrysler (and granting access to a line of credit to Ford) to prop up the
companies as they led for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.11
For older Americans who grew up enchanted by the grandeur
of Detroit, President Obama’s announcement neatly summed up three decades of
decay and disillusionment.
What happened? Many
things. But the overriding problem was this: The auto industry got too
comfortable. As Intel cofounder Andy Grove once famously proclaimed, “Only the
paranoid survive.” Success, he meant, is fragile—and perfection, eeting. The
moment you begin to take success for granted is the moment a competitor lunges
for your jugular. Auto industry executives, to say the least, were not paranoid.
Instead of listening to a customer base
that wanted
smaller, more fuel-e cient cars, the auto executives built bigger and bigger.
Instead of taking seriously new competition from Japan, they staunchly insisted
(both to themselves and to their customers) that MADE IN THE USA automatically
meant “best in the world.” Instead of trying to learn from their competitors’
new methods of “lean manufacturing,” they clung stubbornly to their decades-old
practices. Instead of rewarding the best people in the organization and ring
the worst, they promoted on the basis of longevity and nepotism. Instead of
moving quickly to keep up with the changing market, executives willingly
embraced “death by committee.” Ross Perot once quipped that if a man saw a
snake on the factory oor at GM, they’d form a committee to analyze whether they
should kill it.
Easy success had
transformed the American auto companies into risk-averse, nonmeritocratic,
bloated bureaucracies. When the competition heated up and customer needs
changed, the company executives and the autoworker employee unions did not
adapt. Instead, they did more of the same.
Detroit did not burst overnight. It saw a
gradual de
ation. In fact, that was part of the problem. Because companies were still
generating billions of dollars of revenue for years during their decline, it
was easy for management to get complacent, to ignore the problems that were
piling up. No one stress-tested the organization, or tried to identify and x
long-term weaknesses. This made the day of reckoning painful. By the time the
red alarm started ringing—that is, when GM lost $82 billion in the three and a half years leading up to the federal bailout
—it was too late.
The auto industry’s
collapse has left the Motor City in dire straits. “The great thing about living
in America’s most abandoned city,” deadpanned Walsh, the local
columnist, “is
that there is never any tra c at any hour.” Abandoned
is certainly the word that comes to mind if you walk the streets just outside
of the main downtown drag in Detroit. You can go blocks without seeing anybody.
Empty houses languish. Some are professionally boarded up, with CONDEMNED signs tacked to the front door; others have only black tarp stapled
within empty window frames. Many buildings bear an eerie resemblance to
crumbling gingerbread houses. About a third of the city —an area the size of
San Francisco—is deserted.
For those who remain, life
is grim. Detroit is the second-most-dangerous city in the United States (behind
Flint, Michigan). Half of its children live in poverty. It leads the country in
unemployment—estimates run anywhere from 15 to 50 percent. The school system is
a travesty: eight out of ten eighthgraders are unable to do basic math.12 Most local politicians are variously
corrupt and inept. Unbelievably, there is not one produce-carrying grocery
chain in the whole city.
Detroit was once the
symbol of progress, of what is good and possible. The auto industry was once
the symbol of entrepreneurship. Now Detroit is the symbol of despair.
Detroits Are Everywhere
The story of Detroit isn’t simple. There are
other complicating factors we haven’t mentioned in our brief sketch, and there
are early indicators that things may be improving. Nor is the Detroit story
unique. We hold the auto industry up as an example not because it’s
exceptional, but because it isn’t.
Recent history teems with industries and companies that have experienced
similarly precipitous declines. Once-great companies are falling both more
frequently and more quickly than in times past. In the 1920s and ’30s rms
stayed in the S&P 500 for an average of sixty- ve years. By the late 1990s
the average tenure was just ten years. John Seely Brown and John Hagel, of
Deloitte, report that the topple rate—the
rate at which big companies lose their leadership positions—has more than
doubled over the past forty years. Today more than ever, “ ‘winners’ have
increasingly precarious positions.”13
Why are so many winners
ending up like Detroit? Each case is di erent, but underlying causes tend to
include the hubris that comes from success, the failure to recognize and match
competition, an unwillingness to exploit opportunities that contain risk, and
an inability to adapt to relentless change. 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.
This is not a book about
the economic history of Detroit. So why is Detroit important? Because no matter
what city you live in, no matter what business or industry you work for, no
matter what kind of work you do—when it
comes to your career, right now, you may be heading down the same path as
Detroit. The forces of change that toppled the once great city and industry
risk toppling all of our careers—no matter how secure they may seem at the
moment.
Fortunately, there is another path—both
metaphorically
and physically thousands of miles away from Detroit. Silicon Valley has become
the twenty- rst-century model for entrepreneurship and progress and has had
multiple generations of entrepreneurial companies over the decades: from
Hewlett
Packard’s
founding in 1939 to Intel, Apple, Adobe, Genentech, AMD, Intuit, Oracle,
Electronic Arts, Pixar, and Cisco, and then to Google, eBay, Yahoo, Seagate,
and Salesforce, and then more recently to PayPal, Facebook, YouTube,
Craigslist, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
In each passing decade,
Silicon Valley has kept and intensi ed its entrepreneurial mojo, with dozens of
companies creating the future and adapting to the evolution of the global
market. These companies provide not only a new model for corporate innovation,
but also the entrepreneur mind-set needed to succeed in individual careers.
What do these companies
have in common? The principles of Silicon Valley are the principles in this
book. Take 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.
You can think like a
start-up, whoever you are and whatever you do. Anyone can apply this
entrepreneurial skill set to his or her career. This is a book about how to do
just that. It’s about keeping Detroit from happening to you and making the Silicon Valley way work for you.
THE PATH TO THE FUTURE
In 1997 Reed
Hastings, a software entrepreneur living in the hills of Silicon Valley, was
faced with a problem. He had rented Apollo
13 from a video store, returned it days late, and was dealt a late fee so nasty
that he was too embarrassed to tell his wife what had happened. His
entrepreneurial instinct kicked in: What if you could rent a movie and never
face the risk of a late fee? So he began researching the industry and learned
that the new DVD technology was light and cheap to ship.14 He realized that the shift toward
ecommerce, in concert with the DVD revolution, could be a huge opportunity. So
that year he launched a business that combined e-commerce with old-fashioned
postal mail: customers would select their movie on a website, receive a DVD of
the movie in the mail, and then mail it back whenever they were nished. It was
a compelling idea, but Reed knew from his years in the technology industry that
it would inevitably evolve. He avoided calling his business DVDs-by-Mail (or
some other name that was speci c to the business’s current iteration) and
instead came up with a more expansive company name: Netflix.
Net ix wasn’t instantly
successful. Originally, customers paid for each DVD they rented, like at
Blockbuster, the industry gorilla that operated thousands of video rental
stores worldwide.15 It didn’t
catch on.
So Reed began o
ering monthly subscription plans that allowed unlimited rentals. Yet customers
still complained that it took too long from the time they selected a ick online
to when it arrived in the mail. In 1999 he set up a meeting at Blockbuster’s
headquarters in part to discuss possibly partnering on local distribution and
faster ful llment. Blockbuster was not impressed. “They just about laughed us
out of their office,” Reed recalls.16
Reed and his team kept at
it. They perfected their distribution center network so that more than 80
percent of customers received overnight delivery of movies.17
They developed
an innovative recommendation engine that prompted users with movies they might
like based on past purchases. By 2005 Net ix had a subscriber base four million
strong, had fended o competition from imitations like Walmart’s online
movie-by-mail e ort, and became the king of online movie rentals. In 2010 Net
ix made a pro t of more than
$160 million.
Blockbuster, in comparison, failed to adapt to the Internet era. That year it
filed for bankruptcy.18
Net ix is not resting. In
fact, in 2010 and 2011 the company shifted focus from its still pro table
DVDs-by-mail business and jumped to the next curve: instant online streaming of
movies and TV shows to computers, smart-phones, and tablet devices. It’s
something they’d wanted to do for years, and wide-scale broadband adoption now
allows it. The majority of their customers now watch TV shows and movies via
streaming rather than by DVD, and, at the time of writing, Net ix accounts for
more than 30 percent of all Internet tra c during the week. Soon, online
streaming may well feature signi cant Net ix original programming, or
incorporate some new technology not yet invented. Nonetheless, their ongoing
success is not assured. There are always new challenges.
“Most of the time, change in the world
overtakes you,” Reed says. When a Hollywood
executive once asked him during an on-stage interview whether he makes ve-year
strategic plans or three-year strategic plans, Reed said he does neither: three
years is an eternity in Silicon Valley, and they can’t plan that far in
advance. Instead, Net ix stays nimble and iterates, always in the test phase.
We call this mindset “permanent beta.”
The Start-up of You Mind-set: Permanent Beta
Technology
companies sometimes keep the beta test phase label on software for a time after
the o cial launch to stress that the product is not nished so much as ready for
the next batch of improvements. Gmail, for example, launched in 2004 but only
left o cial beta in 2009, after millions of people were already using it. Je
Bezos, founder/CEO of Amazon, concludes every annual letter to shareholders by
reminding readers, as he did in his rst annual letter in 1997, that “it’s still
Day 1” of the Internet and of Amazon.com:
“Though we are optimistic, we must remain vigilant and maintain a sense of
urgency.”19 In other
words, Amazon is never nished: it’s always Day 1. For entrepreneurs, finished is an Fword. They know that
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. Keeping your career in permanent beta forces you to
acknowledge that you have bugs, that there’s new development to do on yourself,
that you will need to adapt and evolve. But it’s still a mind-set brimming with
optimism because it celebrates the fact that you have the power to improve
yourself and, as important, improve the world around you.
Andy Hargadon, head of the
entrepreneurship center at the University of
California–Davis,
says that for many people “twenty years of experience” is really one year of
experience repeated twenty times.20 If you’re in permanent beta in your career, twenty years of
experience actually is twenty years of experience because each year will be
marked by new, enriching challenges and opportunities. Permanent beta is
essentially a lifelong commitment to continuous personal growth.
Get busy livin’, or get
busy dyin’. If you’re not growing, you’re contracting. If you’re not moving
forward, you’re moving backward.
The Start-up of You Skill Set
The permanent beta mind-set alone won’t
transform your career. There are real skills involved in becoming the
entrepreneur of your own life. In the following chapters, we’ll introduce how
to:
•
Develop your competitive advantage in the market by
combining three puzzle pieces: your assets,
your aspirations, and the market realities. (Chapter 2)
•
Use ABZ Planning to formulate a Plan A based on your competitive
advantages, and then iterate and adapt
that plan based on feedback and lessons learned. (Chapter 3)
•
Build real, lasting relationships and deploy these relationships
into a powerful professional network.
(Chapter 4)
•
Find and create opportunities for yourself by tapping networks, being resourceful, and staying in motion.
(Chapter 5)
•
Accurately appraise and take on
intelligent risk as you pursue
professional opportunities. (Chapter
6)
•
Tap network intelligence from the people you know for the insight that
allows you to nd better opportunities and make better career decisions. (Chapter 7)
At the end of each
chapter, we include speci c action items on how to invest in yourself.
These skills do not cover all things related
to work and
careers. Nor is this book an analysis of all ideas related to entrepreneurship.
Instead, we draw on the entrepreneurial strategies that can help you achieve
the following two goals.
First, we will show how to survive in
times of change
and uncertainty to avoid the fate of Detroit. We’ll show you how to get healthy
stability in your career by adapting.
Adaptability creates stability.
Second, we aim to equip
you with the strategies that help you break out from the pack and ourish as a
globally competitive professional. Whether you want to move up in a
corporation, start your own small business, or transition into an entirely new
industry—whatever your ambitions for a successful career, we’ll show you how
you can achieve them by thinking and acting like an entrepreneur. These
entrepreneurial career strategies aren’t a magic bullet. But they will help you
move up that jammed escalator and not only survive, but thrive, in today’s
fractured world of work.
Let’s get going. You have a start-up to
run.
|
A
|
billboard that sat along the 101 Highway in
the Bay Area in 2009 put it bluntly: “1,000,000 people overseas can do your
job. What makes you so special?”1 While one million might be an exaggeration, what’s not an
exaggeration is that lots of other people can
and want to have your dream
job. For
anything desirable, there’s
competition: a ticket to a championship game,
the arm
of an
attractive man or woman, admission to a good college, and every solid
professional opportunity.
Being better than the competition is basic
to an
entrepreneur’s survival. In every sector multiple companies compete over a
single customer’s dollar. The world is loud and messy; customers don’t have
time to parse minute di erences. If a company’s product isn’t massively di
erent from a competitor’s—as Do Something CEO Nancy Lublin says, unless it’s
rst, only, faster, better, or cheaper—it’s not going to command anyone’s
attention. Good entrepreneurs build and brand products that are di erentiated
from the competition. They are able to nish the sentence, “Our customers buy
from us and not that other company because …”
Zappos.com,
the online shoe retailer founded in 1999, has a clear answer to that question:
insanely good customer service. While other online shoe stores like shoebuy and
onlineshoes.com o ered 30-day return
windows, Zappos made a name for itself by being the rst to o er a 365-day
return policy on everything they sold. While retailers like L.L. Bean and J.
Crew expected customers to pick up the shipping costs each time they returned
something from an online order, Zappos o ered free shipping on all returns, no
questions asked. And even when giants like The Gap mimicked the free shipping
and free returns o er in their online shoe store, they buried a customer
service phone number in small print at the bottom of the page. Zappos’ 1-800
number, on the other hand, is displayed “proudly,” in CEO Tony Hsieh’s words,
on every single page of its website. Moreover, local employees working at
corporate headquarters in Nevada answer every call. There are no scripts and no
time limits on such calls—virtually unheard of in an age of quota-driven,
outsourced customer service centers. Zappos massively di erentiated itself from
its competition by building a culture that is customer-centric in every way
imaginable. This is what has made Zappos a trusted destination for millions of
loyal online shoppers (and it’s also why it was acquired by Amazon for close to
a billion dollars).
Yes, you are di erent from an online shoe
store. But you
are selling your brainpower, your skills, your energy. And you are doing so in
the face of massive competition. Possible employers, partners, investors, and
other people with power choose between you and someone who looks like you. When
a desirable opportunity arises, many people with similar job titles and
educational backgrounds will be considered. When sifting through applications
for almost any job, employers and hiring managers are quickly overcome by the
sameness.2 It’s a blur.
If you want to chart a course that
di erentiates
you from other professionals in the marketplace, the rst step is being able to
complete the sentence, “A company hires me over other professionals because …”
How are you rst, only, faster, better, or cheaper than other people who want to
do what you’re doing in the world? What are you o ering that’s hard to come by?
What are you o ering that’s both rare and valuable?
You don’t need to be
better or faster or cheaper than everyone.
Companies, after all, don’t compete in every product category or o er every
conceivable service. Zappos focuses on mainstream shoes and clothes. If it
tried to o er over-the-top customer service on a range of high-end luxury
products, it couldn’t be the place for quality shoes delivered with terri c
service, because its focus would be diluted and its di erentiation eroded. In
life, there are multiple gold medals. If you try to be the best at everything
and better than everyone (that is, if you believe success means ascending one
global, mega leaderboard), you’ll be the best at nothing and better than no
one. Instead, compete in local contests— local not just in terms of geography
but also in terms of industry segment and skill set. In other words, don’t try
to be the greatest marketing executive in the world; try to be the greatest
marketing executive of small-tomidsize companies that compete in the
health-care industry. Don’t just try to be the highest-paid hospitality
operations person in the world; try to be a top-notch hospitality operations
person in a way that’s aligned with your values so that you can sustain your work
over the long run. What we explain in this chapter is how to determine the
local niche in which you can develop
a competitive advantage.
Competitive advantage
underpins all career strategy. It helps answer the classic question, “What
should I be doing with my life?” It helps you decide which
opportunities to pursue. It guides you in
how you should be investing in yourself. Because all of these things change,
assessing and evaluating your competitive advantage is a lifelong process, not
something you do once. And it’s done by understanding three dynamic puzzle
pieces that t together in different ways at different times.
THREE PUZZLE PIECES INFORM YOUR
DIRECTION AND COMPETITIVE
ADVANTAGE
Your competitive
advantage is formed by the interplay of three di erent, everchanging forces:
your assets, your aspirations/values, and the market realities,
i.e., the supply and demand for what you o
er the marketplace relative to the competition. The best direction has you
pursuing worthy aspirations, using your assets, while navigating the market
realities. We’re not expecting you to already have a clear understanding of
each of these pieces. As we show in the next chapter, the best way to
learn about these things is by doing.
But we want to introduce the concepts so you can begin to understand how they
work, and how they inform the career decisions we’ll talk about in the rest of
the book.
Your Assets
Assets are what
you have right now. Before dreaming about the future or making plans, you need
to articulate what you already have going for you—as entrepreneurs do. The most
brilliant business idea is often the one that builds on the founders’ existing
assets in the most brilliant way. There are reasons Larry Page and Sergey Brin
started Google and Donald Trump started a real estate rm. Page and Brin were in
a computer science doctoral program. Trump’s father was a wealthy real estate
developer, and he had apprenticed in his father’s rm for ve years. Their
business goals emerged from their strengths, interests, and network of
contacts.
You have two types of
career assets to keep track of: soft and hard. Soft assets are things you can’t
trade directly for money. They’re the intangible contributors to career
success: the knowledge and information in your brain; professional connections
and the trust you’ve built up with them; skills you’ve mastered; your
reputation and personal brand; your strengths (things that come easily to you).
Hard assets are what you’d
typically list on a balance sheet: the cash in your wallet; the stocks you own;
physical possessions like your desk and laptop. These matter because when you
have an economic cushion, you can more aggressively make moves that entail
downside nancial risk. For example, you could take six months o to learn the
Ruby programming language with no pay—i.e., pick up a new skill. Or you could
shift to a lower-paying but more stimulating job opportunity. During a career
transition, someone who can go six to twelve months without earning money has
di erent options—indeed, a signi cant advantage—over someone who can’t go more
than a month or two without a paycheck.
Soft assets are more di cult
to tally than
cash in a bank
account, but assuming your basic economic needs are taken care of, soft assets
are ultimately more important. Dominating a professional project at work has
little to do with how much dough you’ve socked away in a savings account; what
matters are skills, connections, experiences.
Because soft
assets may be abstract, there’s a tendency for people to underestimate them
when pondering career strategy. People list impressive-sounding-yet-vague
statements like “I have two years of experience working at a marketing rm …”
instead of specifying, explicitly and clearly, what they are able to do because of those two years of
experience. One of the best ways to remember how rich you are in intangible
wealth—that is, the value of your soft assets—is to go to a networking event
and ask people about their professional problems or needs. You’ll be surprised
how many times you have a helpful idea, know somebody relevant, or think to
yourself, “I could solve that pretty easily.” Often it’s when you come in contact
with challenges other people nd hard
but you nd easy that you know you’re
in possession of a valuable soft asset.3
Usually, however, single assets in
isolation don’t
have much value. A competitive edge emerges when you combine di erent skills,
experiences, and connections. For example, Joi Ito, a friend and head of the
MIT Media Lab, was born in Japan but raised in Michigan. In his midtwenties he
moved back to Japan and set up one of the rst commercial Internet service
providers there. He also kept developing connections in the United States,
investing in Silicon Valley start-ups like Flickr and Twitter, establishing the
Japanese subsidiary for the early American blogging company Six Apart, and more
recently helping to establish LinkedIn Japan. Is Joi the only person with
start-up experience who does angel investing in the Valley? No. Is he the only
person with roots in both the
United States
and Japan? No. But combining these transpaci c, bilingual, tech-industry assets
gives him a competitive advantage over other investors and entrepreneurs.
Your asset mix is not xed.
You can strengthen it by investing in yourself—that’s what this book is about.
So if you think you lack certain assets that would make you more competitive,
don’t use it as an excuse. Start developing them. In the meantime, see how you
can turn a weakness into a strength. For example, you may not see inexperience
as an asset to highlight, but the ip side of inexperience tends to be energy,
enthusiasm, and a willingness to work and hustle in order to learn.
Your Aspirations and Values
Aspirations and
values are the second consideration. Aspirations include your deepest wishes,
ideas, goals, and vision of the future, regardless of the state of the external
world or your existing asset mix. This piece of the puzzle includes your core values,
or what’s important to you in life, be it knowledge, autonomy, money,
integrity, power, and so on. You may not be able to achieve all your
aspirations or build a life that incorporates all your values. And they will
certainly change over time. But you should at least orient yourself in the
direction of a pole star, even if it changes.
Jack Dorsey is cofounder
and executive chairman of Twitter and cofounder and CEO of Square, a mobile
credit card payments start-up. He’s known in Silicon Valley as a product
visionary who prizes design and who takes inspiration from sources as varied as
Steve Jobs and the Golden Gate Bridge. Both his companies have grown to
towering heights (and multibillion-dollar valuations) while keeping Jack’s
values and priorities intact. Twitter is still minimalistic and clean; the
Square device is still elegant. His aspiration to make complex things simple
and his value of design are part of the reason his companies have been so
successful: they clarify product priorities, ensure a consistent customer
experience, and make it easier to recruit employees who are attracted to
similar ideas. For a start-up, a compelling vision that acts as a pole star is
a meaningful piece of a company’s competitive advantage. Google’s clarity of
purpose to “organize the world’s information,” for example, has drawn some of
the brightest engineering minds while at the same time been broad enough to
allow adaptation and reinvention.
Aspirations and values are
both important pieces of your career competitive advantage quite simply because
when you’re doing work you care about, you are able to work harder and better.
The person passionate about what he or she is doing will outwork and outlast
the guy motivated solely by making money. It can be easy to forget this when
heading the start-up of you. In an e ort to scrappily improve on who you are today, you can lose track of who you aspire to be in the future. For example,
if you’re currently an analyst at Morgan Stanley, the savviest way to leverage
your existing assets may be to angle for a promotion within the rm. If the
banking industry is in a slump, the savviest way to attend to the market
realities may be to develop skills in a di erent but related industry, like
accounting. But would these moves re ect what you really care about?
That said, and contrary to
what many bestselling authors and motivational gurus would have you believe,
there is not a “true self” deep within that you can uncover via introspection
and that will point you in the right direction.4 Yes, your aspirations shape what you do. But your aspirations are
themselves shaped by your actions and experiences. You remake yourself as you
grow and as the world changes. Your identity doesn’t get found. It emerges.
Accept the uncertainty,
especially early on. Ben, for example, knows he values intellectual stimulation
and trying to change real people’s lives through entrepreneurship and
writing—though in what speci c ways, he’s still guring out. Entrepreneur and
writer Chris Yeh says his career mission is to “help interesting people do
interesting things.” That may sound airy, but it has real meaning: interesting reinforces the kind of
stimulation he’s looking for, and do
means “do,” not “think about.” Later in your career, you may have more speci c,
thought-out aspirations. These are not unlike a start-up’s mission statement.
My pole star is to design and build human ecosystems using entrepreneurship,
technology, and nance. I build networks of people using entrepreneurship,
nance, and technology as enablers. Whatever your values and aspirations, know
that they will evolve over time.
The Market Realities
The realities of
the world you live in is the nal piece of the puzzle. Smart entrepreneurs know
a product won’t make money if customers don’t want or need it, regardless of
how slick its form and function (think of the Segway). Likewise, your skills,
experiences, and other soft assets—no matter how special you think they are—
won’t give you an edge unless they meet the needs of a paying market. If Joi were
bilingual in an obscure African dialect as opposed to the language of the
world’s third-largest economy (Japan), it wouldn’t contribute to a compelling
advantage for working with technology companies. And keep in mind that the
“market” is not an abstract thing. It consists of the people who make decisions
that a ect you and whose needs you must serve: your boss, your coworkers, your
clients, your direct reports, and others. How badly do they need what you have
to o er, and if they need it, do you o er value that’s better than the
competition?
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