Learnings from Reid Hoffman's Masters of Scale
I read the transcripts of Reid Hoffman’s interesting interviews with 16 tech & non-tech leaders and entrepreneurs for his Masters of Scale podcast, which you can find here: https://mastersofscale.com/
While there were many interesting & informative anecdotes and titbits contained in these interviews, I am sharing below some insights that stood out for me, and will hopefully benefit you too.
…as entrepreneurs, part of the journey that we're on is learning how to separate our winning instincts from our losing ideas. I think as a rule of thumb if you're a good entrepreneur you can assume that your instincts are right 95% percent of time and your ideas might be right 25% percent of the time.
Mark Pincus, Founder, Zynga
Hospitality, as I define it, is very simple. It all comes down to one preposition: "for"… if you ask for your salmon rare and I bring it to you rare, that's not hospitality. That's what you expected. Hospitality might be that I remember and I don't even have to ask you.
Danny Meyer, Founder, Shake Shack
The combination of persistence and curiosity is a very good predictor of employee success in a knowledge economy.
Eric Schmidt, ex-CEO, Google
Many cultures have one or two or three successful business people that create companies. But if they don't pay it forward and if they don't reinvest in the ecosystem becoming mentors, becoming angel investors, inspiring their employees to start companies, then it stops.
Linda Rottenberg, CEO, Endeavor
The science of insufficient sleep in the workplace can be summarized in the following five facts. Firstly, under-slept employees, defined as getting 6 hours of sleep or less, they will select less challenging problems that you give them. Second, under-slept employees will actually generate fewer creative solutions to novel problems that you do actually force them to try and solve. Third, the less that an employee has, the more likely they are to slack off when they are working in teams and just ride the coattails of other people's hard work. One of the more surprising facts is that the less and less that an employee has had, the more and more likely they are to lie, become unethical. So for example, falsify data in a spreadsheet.
Dr. Matt Walker, Professor of Neuroscience at University of California and author of the NYT bestseller, Why We Sleep