Name: LinkedIn founder on failures and the future of media consumption
Uploaded: 2015-07-02
Duration: 4 min 39 s
Description: Fortune's Leena Rao sits down with Reid Hoffman to discuss his best advice and current business trends,

What's the best piece of advice that you've ever gotten? Best piece of advice I've ever gotten was actually from my father when I was young. Which is he told me the hard thing about making decisions is they reduce opportunity in the short term. But the reason why they're critical is that there the only thing that create opportunity in the long term. And that was really helpful to me because it helped me. It was like a key skill for entrepreneurship, because you have to make Decisions very quickly and you have to make them pretty decisively. And the reason you're hesitant is cause you're hesitant about closing off a path. They go, well if that was the right path? And so people tend to take too much time in that kind of decision making. But if you realize the only way you make long term opportunity is actually by making those difficult decisions short term. It makes you much more effective at decision making. You bring up entrepreneurship. Do you think that society is now glamorizing entrepreneurship? Because entrepreneurship is very difficult, as you really know. And do you think that there is kind of a view of entrepreneurship that is probably not the reality of how difficult things actually are? Well I think it's definitely becoming more glamorous, more accepted, more of a aspirational target for folks. I think all of that's good, I do think the point you bring up which is important, which is actually in fact, the metaphor I usually use for entrepreneurship is you throw yourself off a cliff and you assemble an airplane on the way down. That is actually in fact a pretty scary thing, it's pretty hard. And it doesn't mean that people shouldn't do it. But there should be a real awareness of the fact that, you know, you look at the fact that you look at the success cases and go oh that'd be fun to do. But you've got to realize there's lots of broken parts of planes at the bottom of the cliff, too. So if you get into it, you have to either be really committed to what you're doing, or you have to realize that you will probably have a number of failures, and you have to be comfortable with that. And you have to be, really. People frequently ask about entrepreneurship balance. And your like no, there is no balance. It's your all into it and you're really trying to make it happen. Because that's your only chance at actually really making it successful. So I think it's Good to hold it up as an aspiration, but also good to be wise about it. Do you often think about your failures? Do you think you've learned, like is that, was that? Not that you've had failures [ LAUGH ]. I don't mean to imply [ LAUGH ]. No, no, actually I have had failures. My first company, SocialNet, sold for return on capital. That's a failure. The, I think that the. I think that one should think about one's failures as a source of learning. Like one of the really key things for a successful entrepreneur is to always be learning, and to be thinking about it, and to be learning, and learning, and learning. Learning from talking to other people in the communities. Learning from From doing and succeeding and learning or failing and learning and that's the kind of really key lesson. It's also important not to be discouraged by your failures because part of the thing is when you fail, that hopefully increases your likelihood of succeeding next time. And that's what your optimism and your energy should be going toward. Do you think a lot about this new sort of generation of millennials and how they're consuming media, and content, and the networks? Their networks are different than the networks of our generation. How do you think about that as an investor? I guess I think about millennials in three ways. There's a lot of interseting consumer internet companies created by very young founders. What kinds of founders of the millennials? What kind of products are they creating? That's not with a class as much as an individual basis. Second thing is How are, like a completely mobile native, you know, generation that actually is in fact unlike us, who like, I have a very strong preference for keyboards for writing. What is that going to mean for a new generation of applications, anything from entertainment to productivity and, And what does that mean for the kind of changing technology landscape. And the last one is, I'm really intrigued about how culture changes create preferences. And there's a lot of things that are written about millennials that prefer omission. They prefer getting engaged in something that's world changing earlier. Those all sound great to me. I'd be curious to see how they play out over time because everyone starts, you know there is this classic path that I've seen for all the generations I've seen, is just you're much more idealistic when you're young. One of the things I like about entrepreneurship is you try to keep that idealism. But how does that all play out? Is something I'm fascinated to see.

LinkedIn founder on failures and the future of media consumption

Fortune's Leena Rao sits down with Reid Hoffman to discuss his best advice and current business trends,