Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman

Tinder. Top Gun. Roots. The Simpsons. What do they have in common? Media icon Barry Diller. Barry is what we call an "infinite learner." He’s only interested in things he's never done before. And if they’ve never been done by ANYONE? Better yet. He succeeds by embracing that he is, in fact, a master of nothing. Entrepreneurs, take note: You just might be an infinite learner yourself, and Barry shares a lesson or two you can use. 

In your company’s darkest moment, remember: You CAN pivot from failure to success. But only if you slash and burn everything that isn’t working. Slack’s Co-Founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield has twice navigated this kind of Big Pivot. He launched two different game companies, which turned into game-changing communications platforms (Flickr and Slack).

Business plan not entirely clear? Not sure how you’ll make enough money or find your users? That's OK. Really. The most scalable ideas often come at you sideways. You'll find yourself crabwalking from a small market to a bigger to one of unimaginable scale. We talk to the master of the entrepreneurial crabwalk, Diane Greene, who brought us into the age of cloud computing. As the founding CEO of VMWare and now the head of Google’s cloud division, she shares how she scampered sideways into a market of boundless potential.

If you want to grow your business, your goal isn’t to beat the competition — it’s to escape the competition altogether. No one knows this better than Paypal founder Peter Thiel. “Competition is for losers,” he’s been known to say. Thiel is a former colleague, frequent co-investor and long-time intellectual sparring partner with Host Reid Hoffman. Their combined thinking on the competitive landscape is unmissable.

The Masters of Scale team brings you a special blend of leadership tips from season one guests — including clips we haven’t aired yet. In this bonus episode, we’ll share our favorite insights from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Y Combinator’s Sam Altman, Zynga’s Mark Pincus and more.

If you try to put out every fire, you’ll only burn yourself out. The best entrepreneurs? They let fires burn. Knowing which problems not to solve is just as critical as knowing which problems must be solved. You won’t have time to sit down and assess every blaze burning around you. And good luck ranking your startup’s problems from most to least severe. The reality is problems flare up unexpectedly and on a daily basis — yesterday’s whisp of smoke might be today’s five-alarm fire. So you have to conserve energy for the biggest blazes, and learn how to sleep easy while other fires smolder around you. That means you can ignore emails, tolerate buggy code, risk server outages and even ignore customers until their complaints hit fever pitch.

What’s the secret to Silicon Valley? And can any other region nurture such a thriving startup scene? Linda Rottenberg, CEO of Endeavor, makes the case that a startup culture can be nurtured almost anywhere, so long as you have the raw ingredients — namely, a few initial entrepreneurs with access to capital and a willingness to pay it forward. Bear in mind that Silicon Valley is so much more than an archipelago of thriving tech companies. It’s actually an ecosystem — one that’s deeply  interconnected and self-reinforcing. Silicon Valley companies constantly swap talent — investors, entrepreneurs, hackers and managers  — as they grow from seedlings to huge proportions.  And any up-and-comer would have to do the same. Today,  no region can match Silicon Valley’s collective wisdom for scaling a business. But — from Buenos Aires to Boston, Tel Aviv to Shenzen — there are fledgling startup scenes that could ultimately give Silicon Valley a run for its money.

Guest host Tim Ferriss shares advice you’ll will want to etch into stone: the Ten Commandments of Startup Success. We teamed up with Tim’s eponymous podcast, the Tim Ferriss Show, to bring you this special remix of actionable lessons from every episode of Masters of Scale, Season One, including previously unaired insights from Airbnb’s Brian Chesky, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Endeavor’s Linda Rottenberg. Tim is an accomplished speaker who’s given multiple TED Talks and author of The 4 Hour Work Week. He’s masterful at extracting tips, tricks and lifehacks for busy entrepreneurs.