Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman

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Technology Business

What's Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman about?

How do companies grow from zero to a gazillion? Legendary Silicon Valley investor / entrepreneur Reid Hoffman tests his theories with famous founders. Guests include Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg & Sheryl Sandberg, Netflix’s Reed Hastings, Google’s Eric Schmidt, Spanx's Sara Blakely. With original music and hilariously honest stories, the show sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard. Masters of Scale is a WaitWhat original series in association with Stitcher.

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10 New Rules for Big Career...

06.21.2019

On Masters of Scale, we talk a lot about how businesses grow. But we also talk about how people grow: How key decisions (and happy accidents) can shape your future, and how your setbacks can actually set you up for ...

Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman episodes:

06.21.2019 10 New Rules for Big Career Changes (The Graduation Episode) w/ Jordan Harbinger On Masters of Scale, we talk a lot about how businesses grow. But we also talk about how people grow: How key decisions (and happy accidents) can shape your future, and how your setbacks can actually set you up for ...
06.05.2019 How pirates become the navy w/Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi Early-stage startups are a lot like pirate ships – they need a buccaneering spirit to survive. But every startup needs to shed its pirate nature at some point, and evolve into something more akin to a navy – no less ...
05.21.2019 The case for bootstrapping w/Mailchimp’s Ben Chestnut You can bootstrap your business to scale, but you'll have to make your own luck. Nobody knows this better than Mailchimp's Ben Chestnut. He used a DIY ethos to grow a $600M company without ever raising a dollar of outside ...
04.30.2019 Open or closed? The answer is both—w/Joi Ito, MIT Media Lab Director No organization that’s entirely closed – or entirely open – can scale as successfully as an organization that combines both. Yes, organizations that are open invite a bit of chaos – but that chaos breeds innovation. Knowing which aspects of ...
04.11.2019 When your invention becomes a weapon – from Should This Exist When former Wired Editor Chris Anderson launched DIY drones — an open source community for makers — drones were still considered a military technology. His drones were used by filmmakers, farmers and conservationists. He believes they were also used by ...
03.26.2019 Take bigger risks w/Shellye Archambeau If you try to avoid risk, you actually risk total failure. Or worse: mediocrity. Take it from Shellye Archambeau. She led the most stunning Silicon Valley turnaround you’ve never heard of. She took the role of CEO for a failing ...
03.12.2019 Check your blindspot w/Sallie Krawcheck (Ellevest) If your company's dominated by one type of person, you run the risk of tunnel vision. You might move fast — but you'll often drive straight into traps as you grow. Truly scalable companies need a diverse portfolio of viewpoints ...
03.05.2019 Build a more human internet — w/ Caterina Fake (Host of “Should This Exist?") How do you build a thriving online community? One human connection at a time. Caterina Fake is the host of our spinoff series "Should This Exist?” and she knows: Whatever you are when you're SMALL — gets amplified as you ...
02.26.2019 The Reid Hoffman Story (Part 2) — Make everyone a hero We’re back with Part 2 of our special turn-the-tables episode with Reid Hoffman. In this episode, we follow Reid through PayPal, LinkedIn, the Microsoft acquisition, his angel investments, Greylock, and his hosting of Masters of Scale — all the while ...
02.21.2019 Introducing: Should This Exist? Introducing a brand new show from the team behind Masters of Scale: Should This Exist? Neuroscientist Daniel Chao created a headset that hacks your brain with electricity so you can learn as fast as a kid again. It’s called Halo, ...
01.22.2019 The Reid Hoffman Story (Part 1) — Make everyone a hero In this special episode, we turn the tables on host Reid Hoffman. He’s the guest and we tell his story, while proving a theory that’s perfect for Reid: You can chart an epic journey to scale, if you make everyone ...
01.08.2019 Let your customers be your scouts – w/Eventbrite's Julia Hartz That constant roar of customer feedback? Be thankful for it. It holds all the secrets to your success, if you learn how to read the signs. Listen to what users say, sure. But also watch what they do and interpret ...
12.18.2018 To scale, you must master the skill of storytelling w/Charity: Water’s Scott Harrison You need a great story to build a great company. And great stories are unwaveringly TRUE. No one embodies this principle more fully than Scott Harrison, founder of Charity: Water. A master storyteller, Scott built his nonprofit on 3 radical ...
12.04.2018 Your Plan B Needs a Plan B — w/Nancy Lublin of Do Something and Crisis Text Line [A favorite episode returns!] To succeed as an entrepreneur, you need grit. But grit is more than persistence. You’re not just charging up the same hill over and over. You're generating an endless supply of Plans B. And Nancy Lublin ...
11.19.2018 The Millennial Episode — with Brit + Co’s Brit Morin You can marshal the power of millennials to grow your company, but you have to redefine your concept of loyalty. To keep millennials as users (and employees), you’ll need to keep evolving — and help them evolve. No one understands ...
11.05.2018 The elusive formula for great hiring w/Workday's Aneel Bhusri Your first hires = cultural cofounders. And it’s worth your time to get every one right. Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri personally interviewed his first FIVE HUNDRED employees at Workday. He knows how to map back from the culture he wants, ...
10.22.2018 Shake Shack's Danny Meyer — When to ignore conventional wisdom To revolutionize an industry, you have to cast off received wisdom. Shake Shack’s Danny Meyer knows this well. When he opened his first high-end restaurant, New York’s Union Square Cafe, received wisdom told him food was the star attraction. But ...
10.03.2018 Arianna Huffington—What great founders do at night To survive your entrepreneurial journey, you have to learn to recharge. In fact, knowing when to turn the lights OUT may be the only way to keep the lights on. You need a sustainable strategy that maximizes your team's efficiency, ...
09.19.2018 Spotify's Daniel Ek — How to build trust FAST Normally, trust = consistency + time. But when you're scaling fast — you have to find shortcuts, with your partners and your users. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek knows a thing or two about this. When he founded Spotify, he did ...
09.06.2018 Instagram's Kevin Systrom — Keep it simple while scaling big You can scale big with a simple idea (and a tiny team!) — but only if you catch the prevailing winds. That's what Kevin Systrom did when he co-founded Instagram: The simple photo app tapped the right trends, built on ...
08.08.2018 Marissa Mayer — How to make the star employees you need Can't find the star employees you need? Then make them. That's what Marissa Mayer did when she founded the Associate Product Manager program at Google — one of the company's crown jewels. She mentored a team of young, hungry, talented ...
07.25.2018 How to kill your bad ideas w/ Zynga's Mark Pincus To succeed, you have to be relentless about pursuing a big opportunity — and ruthless about killing your own bad ideas along the way. Zynga founder Mark Pincus up-ended the gaming industry with social games like Farmville and Words with ...
07.11.2018 Keep Humans In the Equation w/ TaskRabbit's Stacy Brown-Philpot You may think that to scale you need to cut humans out of the equation. The opposite is true. You can harness the power of the "human cloud" to solve almost any problem — as long as you keep the ...
07.09.2018 Introducing Season 3 Masters of Scale returns on Wed July 11th with Season 3, featuring the entrepreneurs who wrote the rule book of Silicon Valley - as well as the ones who challenge those rules. We'll hear hard-won insights from the founders of ...
03.21.2018 How to find your big idea w/ Spanx's Sara Blakely To find your big idea? Look for it. And look for it. And be ready to act. Spanx founder Sara Blakely was actively seeking a business idea when she thought of Spanx. Then she moved fast, found help in the ...
03.07.2018 How To Do Good And Do Good Business with Starbucks' Howard Schultz You can make your social impact and your bottom line work hand-in-hand. But you'll have to be as creative and innovative about your company's values as you are about the business itself. Howard Schultz, chairman and former CEO of Starbucks, ...
02.28.2018 BONUS: The 10 Commandments of Startup Success with Guest Host Tim Ferriss Guest host Tim Ferriss shares advice you'll want to etch into stone: The 10 Commandments of Startup Success. We teamed up with Tim's eponymous podcast, the Tim Ferriss Show, to bring you this special remix. You'll hear actionable lessons from ...
02.21.2018 Never Underestimate Your First Idea w/ Twitter/Medium's Ev Williams Never put a limit on your first idea. It could span your entire career. Ev Williams, co-founder of Twitter and Medium (and Blogger, before that), shares what he learned in every iteration of his grand vision to connect the world’s ...
02.14.2018 How To Price Your Product To Scale w/ ClassPass' Payal Kadakia The price that bleeds your business could also save it. When you invent something innovative, you can’t know how to price it on day one. First, get people in the door — get a LOT of people in the door ...
02.07.2018 How To Build Your Company To Last w/ Fiat's John Elkann Forget being a unicorn. Learn to be a “Phoenix.” Your company can last 100+ years — but you'll need the resilience to rise and fall, and rise again. Fiat’s Chairman John Elkann shares the principles that allow the "horseless carriage" ...
01.31.2018 Why Customer Love is All You Need w/ Y Combinator's Sam Altman Better to have 100 users love you than 1 million that kinda like you. The true seed of scale is love, and you can't buy it, hack it, or game it. Ask Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator, Silicon ...
01.24.2018 Model Behavior w/ entrepreneur/investor Caterina Fake (Etsy, Kickstarter, Flickr) Whatever you are when you're small gets amplified when you grow. So if you're staring any kind of online community (social media, e-commerce, crowd-funding...), be careful what you cultivate. Caterina Fake has founded or invested in companies with interesting and ...
12.13.2017 Learn to Unlearn (Part 2) w/ IAC's Barry Diller To move from one success to another, you have to learn to unlearn. Take everything that helped you win the first time, then discard it and learn a new way. That's how Barry Diller, titan of "old" media (ABC, Paramount, ...
12.06.2017 Infinite Learner (Part I) w/ IAC's Barry Diller 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 ...
11.29.2017 Learn From Every 'No' w/ Bevel Razor's Tristan Walker “If you’re laughed out of the room, it might actually be a good sign.” Entrepreneurs inevitably face a lot of rejection — as does anyone championing a big new idea. But the different ways that investors say “no” could reveal ...
11.15.2017 The Big Pivot with Slack's Stewart Butterfield 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 ...
11.10.2017 Look sideways with Google / VMware’s Diane Greene 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 one ...
11.08.2017 Escape the Competition w/ PayPal's Peter Thiel 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. ...
08.26.2017 BONUS: Seven Lesser Known Laws of Leadership 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 ...
07.19.2017 Let Fires Burn w/ Gixo's Selina Tobaccowala 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 ...
07.12.2017 The Next Silicon Valley Is...? W/ Endeavor's Linda Rottenberg 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 ...
07.05.2017 Bonus Episode: The Ten Commandments of Startup Success 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 ...
06.29.2017 BONUS: Uncut interview w/ Netflix's Reed Hastings Host Reid Hoffman visits Netflix's headquarters for an extended interview with the company's founding CEO, Reed Hastings. They discuss the distinctive culture that enabled Netflix to leap from DVD's to online streaming to becoming a content-production studio that blends the ...
06.28.2017 Netflix's Reed Hastings in Culture Shock I believe strong company cultures only emerge when every employee feels they own the culture — and this begins even before the first job interview. CEO Reed Hastings has built an adaptive, high-performing culture at NetFlix by being unabashedly upfront ...
06.15.2017 BONUS: Uncut Interview w/ Crisis Text Line's Nancy Lublin In this extended interview, Nancy Lublin, founding CEO of Crisis Text Line, shares insights from her restless career as a serial entrepreneur, recruiting armies of volunteers to the causes she’s passionate about.
06.14.2017 Grit Happens with Crisis Text Line's Nancy Lublin To succeed, entrepreneurs need a good idea, timing, money, luck. But more than anything, they need grit. Don’t confuse grit with sheer persistence; it’s not about charging up the same hill, again and again. The sort of grit you need ...
06.07.2017 Google/Alphabet's Eric Schmidt in Innovation = Managed Chaos Google has succeeded by innovating again and again. Not just search, but Gmail and Google Docs and even self-driving cars. Their secret? They don’t tell their employees how to innovate; they manage the chaos. Eric Schmidt—CEO of Google since 2001 ...
06.01.2017 BONUS: Uncut Interview w/ Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg Host Reid Hoffman met Sheryl in a conference room at One Facebook Way to discuss a vexing subject: How does she lead an organization that doubles or triples in size each year? She also reveals previously unaired insights from her ...
05.31.2017 Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg in Lead, Lead Again In just 6 years, Facebook grew to 2 billion users and 14,000 employees. How? Well first, they hired COO Sheryl Sandberg. And she knew that to lead a fast-changing organization, you have to be as skilled at breaking plans as ...
05.25.2017 BONUS: Uncut interview w/ Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg This is the extended, uncut version of Reid Hoffman's rare, hour-long interview with Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg from Ep. 4 “Imperfect is Perfect". Our recommendation: Listen to the episode first. Then enjoy the full interview, with its previously ...

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