The Startup of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career

by Reid Hoffman

part it’s because the idea of a self-made man makes for a good story, and stories are how we process a messy, complex world. Good stories have a beginning, middle, and end; drama; clear causation; a hero and a villain.

Then there are those you know solely in a professional context. These include colleagues, industry acquaintances, customers, allies, business advisors, and service providers like your accountant or lawyer. You email these folks from your work address, and maybe not your personal Yahoo or Gmail account. Shared business goals and professional interests bring you together. Online, LinkedIn is where you connect with these trusted colleagues and valued acquaintances whom you recommend for jobs, collaborate with on professional projects, and tap for industry advice.

Relationship builders, on the other hand, try to help other people first. They

don’t keep score. They’re aware that many good deeds get reciprocated, but they’re not calculated about it. And they think about their relationships all the time, not just when they need something.

Relationship builders start by understanding how their existing relationships constitute a social network, and they meet new people through people they already know.

What we’re saying is you should let go of those easy thoughts and think about how you can help first. (And only later think about what help you can ask for in return.) A study on negotiation found that a key difference between skilled negotiators and average negotiators was the time spent searching for shared interests, asking questions of the other person, and forging common ground. The effective negotiators spent more time doing these things—thinking about ways the other person would truly benefit as opposed to just trying to drive a hard bargain out of pure self-interest.7 Do the same. Start with a friendly gesture toward the other person and genuinely mean it. (Later in the chapter we’ll show exactly how to help.)

is like the feeling you have when someone says your first name all the time in conversation and you know he’s been reading Carnegie.

Novelist Jonathan Franzen gets it right when he says inauthentic people are obsessed with authenticity.

Hahaha

The first is professional allies. Who would be in your corner in a conflict or when you come under stress? Whom do you invite to dinner to brainstorm career options? Whom

do you trust and proactively try to work with if you can? From whom do you solicit feedback on key projects? Whom do you review life goals and plans with? These are your allies. Many people can maintain at most eight to ten strong professional alliances at any given point in time.

She urged Milliken to move to Los Angeles so they could fulfill their vision. Milliken finally did, and they launched their first venture together: City Café, a cozy café in the eastern part of the city.

The Food Network gave them a TV show called Too Hot Tamales. Publishers courted them to write cookbooks.

What are the general characteristics that make their relationship an alliance and that define your own? First, an ally is someone you consult regularly for advice. You trust his or her judgment. Second, you proactively share and collaborate on opportunities together.

predicted the astronomical heights of success. With an ally, you don’t keep score, you just try to invest in the alliance as much as possible. What sustains all this collaboration? We are both driven by a passion for the Internet industry, especially the social networking space. We complement each other. We like each other as friends. We’ve known each other for a while—it was several years before we thought of each other as allies. And there’s another seemingly insignificant reason, but it’s important and worth noting: we both live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Physical proximity is actually one of the best predictors of the strength of a relationship, many studies show.

Notes on a great ally

An alliance is when a coworker needs last-minute help on Sunday night preparing for a Monday morning presentation, and even though you’re busy, you agree to go over to his house and help.

These “volleys of communication and cooperation” build trust. Trust, writes David Brooks, is “habitual reciprocity that becomes coated by emotion. It grows when two people … slowly learn they can rely upon each other. Soon members of a trusting relationship become willing to not only cooperate with each other but sacrifice for each other.”

that second- or third-degree connection?* The best (and sometimes only) way: via an introduction from someone you know who in turn knows the person you want to reach. When you reach out to someone via an introduction from a mutual friend, it’s like having a passport at the border—you can walk right through. The interaction is immediately endowed with trust

Better, as the introduction appears to benefit both parties. When you reach out to someone, be clear about how you intend to help the person to whom you’re being introduced—or at least how you’ll ensure it’s not a waste of that person’s time.

favor. Helping someone out means acknowledging that you are capable of helping. Reject the misconception that if you’re less powerful, less wealthy, or less experienced, you have nothing to offer someone else.

budgeted and precommitted real time and money to staying in touch—so they’d have no excuses when it came time to do so. Steve

Upon moving to Seattle, he declared that seven thousand dollars of his savings would be “California money.” Anytime someone interesting in the Valley invited him to lunch, dinner, or coffee, Garrity promised himself he would fly to San Francisco to do the meeting. He treated the plane flight like an hour-long car ride. One of his old Stanford professors called him, not realizing Garrity had left town: “Steve, some really interesting students are coming over to my house tomorrow night. I think you’d enjoy meeting them. Want to join?” Steve said yes, and booked his flight to San Francisco.

After a few years in the Bay Area, Singh is back in Washington, DC, working as an entrepreneur-in-residence at a small investment fund, an opportunity that arose thanks to meeting his new boss via his interesting people fund. With a bigger bank account, Singh has upped his interesting people fund to a thousand dollars per month, and he uses it mainly to reconnect with the network he built in the Bay Area during his time there.

You show up late to a meeting with a fellow product manager. Tardiness is the classic power move because it says, “My time is more valuable than yours, so it’s okay for you to wait for me.” To be sure, we’ve all been late due to circumstances out of our control, so it’s not always a reliable signal. But usually it says something. Think about it: Would you allow yourself to be late to a meeting with Barack Obama? Certainly not.

depend on genuine shared passions and values. At the same time, your interests and attitudes evolve. One of the best things about adulthood is that you meet people who share your specific interests and intellectual verve. Often what you end up with is a situation where your school or childhood friends are part of an important emotional history, but some of them do not seem as interesting as newer friends you are meeting. What to do?

Introduce two people you know who do not know each other. Make sure the intro will be useful to both sides. (Visit startupofyou.com if you need help on how to craft the actual introduction email.)

Noted

Create an “interesting people fund” to which you automatically funnel a certain percentage of your paycheck. Use it to pay for coffees, lunches, and the occasional plane ticket to meet new people and shore up existing relationships.

Do this

By being in motion, you are spinning a web as wide and as tall as possible in order to catch any interesting opportunities that come your way. It’s easy to say you should be in motion—but move where, specifically? We’ll suggest some specific action items at the end of the chapter, but courting randomness can be as simple as extending your next trip to a different city by a day and meeting up with friends of friends. Or going to a dinner party where you don’t know anyone. Or picking up a magazine you don’t normally read. Obviously, motion in literally any direction is unwise. Backpacking around Darfur, for example, would generate randomness of the wrong sort.

He made new business cards, hired a developer to build a website, and enlisted a friend to draw a corporate logo. Then he went to the same networking events with new business cards that read, “Chris Sacca, Principal, Salinger Group.” Suddenly, the people he met were interested in talking more. Through these connections he eventually landed an executive job at a Web infrastructure company, and his career took flight.

Finally, the only thing better than joining groups is starting your own. Start your own mafia—your own group, meetup, or association with PayPal mafia characteristics. Once a year I co-organize something I call the Weekend to Be Named Later, a Franklin-inspired gathering of ambitious friends, to brainstorm ways to change the world. Since 2006 Ben has co-run a Junto modeled after Franklin’s original: a couple dozen folks (mainly from the tech industry) meet regularly over lunch to talk shop. The gatherings are focused yet informal, like Franklin’s. A laid-back atmosphere encourages candor, intellectual risk taking, and ultimately leads to the generation of better and more interesting ideas.

Awesome

the next day: • Budget time for randomness. Deliberately underschedule yourself for a day next week to read a book you wouldn’t otherwise read, take a coworker in a different department out for lunch, or attend a speech or seminar in a different but related field. • Ask the most curious person you know out to lunch, and try to get infected by their sense of awe.

So the first thing you want to ask of a possible opportunity is, If the worst-case scenario happens, would I still be in the game?

Common career opportunities or situations like this include: • Jobs that pay less in cash but offer tremendous learning. People focus on easily quantifiable hard assets—like how much they’re getting paid in cash. Jobs that offer less cash but more learning are too quickly dismissed as risky. • Part-time or contract gigs that are less “stable” than full-time jobs

Hiring someone without much experience but who’s a fast learner and much cheaper. This is a medium risk with high potential reward: fast learners can make up their inexperience. They tend to be undervalued by the market.

Experienced entrepreneurs know that in reality starting a company in a down economy has a lower risk than people think, precisely because other people are scared off by the risk.

much, your job responsibilities stay steady. These are the careers generally deemed less risky: government, education, engineering, health care.

Without frequent, contained risk taking, you are setting yourself up for a major dislocation at some point in the future. Inoculating yourself to big risks is like inoculating yourself against the flu virus. By injecting a small bit of flu into your body in the form of a vaccination, you make a big flu outbreak survivable. By introducing regular volatility into your career, you make surprise survivable. You gain the “ability to absorb shocks gracefully.”

Well said

projects—or a new job—that involve more ups and downs, more uncertainty? • Revisit your Plan Z. Is it still viable? If your Plan A were to unravel, will you still be in the game? Consult mentors in your network to help think through contingencies.

What will get you somewhere is being able to access the information you need, when you need

intelligence to navigate these challenges. You get it by talking to people in your network. It’s people who help you understand your assets, aspirations, and the market

realities; it’s people who help you vet and get introduced to possible allies and trust connections; it’s people who help you track the risk attached to a given opportunity. IWe is the formula for gathering the kind of information that will help you navigate professional challenges.

You probably instinctively do this already. You may have a go-to friend who is good at explaining what’s really happening in the economy (as I have in Peter Thiel). Or you may know someone who’s great at understanding people and emotions and whom you count on for relationship advice or navigating interpersonal challenges (as Ben has in Stephen Dodson). We all have certain people we call upon for advice or information on certain topics or issues, but not everyone knows who in their network to go to for intelligence on various career-related decisions.

Some people hesitate to ask too many questions because they fear it will make them look ignorant. It won’t. It’ll make you look like a curious, intelligent person hungering for valuable information.

Just as there are things you can do to court serendipity, there are ways to court serendipitous intelligence. Keep a few general questions in your back pocket to ask people in these kinds of situations or settings. A back-pocket question could be as broad as “What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned over the past few months?”