How LinkedIn's founder got started

Reid Hoffman talks about his path from academia to social media. (Fortune Magazine)

-- My dad wouldn't let me have a computer because he didn't think it was relevant. I was in college before I actually got one. I think if he knew then what he knows now, I would have had one much earlier.

But I've always had an interest in how we improve people's ecosystems -- whether it's civics or education or economics. When I was an undergrad at Stanford, I thought the way to do that was to be an academic. Then I saw that wasn't the right way, because you become a scholar and publish in an area where only, like, 50 people will read it.

Find ways to reach people.
How do you change lives for millions of people? At Oxford [as a graduate student in philosophy] I decided software entrepreneurship was the way. I came back to Silicon Valley and worked for Apple and then Fujitsu before starting Socialnet, an early social-networking site. After a while I didn't agree with the direction it was going, so I talked to Peter [Thiel, co-founder of PayPal], whom I knew from Stanford. He said, "Come join us. Help us at PayPal."

Improve users' lives.
What I realized before PayPal was sold was that there was going to be a confluence of two forces. One was how the world of work is changing -- every individual is now somewhat entrepreneurial. They're getting the next gig themselves. The other was the Internet, which could empower all these individuals to establish profiles online so that people can find them. You'd be able to use your network to get access to people to better chart your path.

I started LinkedIn because changing people's professional lives is a massive transformation. In 2003 we got financing from Sequoia Capital, and we started to get more and more people into our service. Everyone began to realize the value. That's when I was, like, "This could work."

Secrets of my success

• It's okay to be brief
When people ask me about work/life balance, I just laugh. But I try to be time-efficient by scheduling meetings in appropriate increments --15 minutes or less sometimes. I've also tried to build a culture that understands writing brief e-mails is not emotional coldness.

• Be willing to change course
Entrepreneurs tend to believe, "I've got my idea, I'll go until I die." But I advise them to take seriously the questions about whether their [business] plan is irredeemably flawed and whether they need to change what they're doing. Be diligent about failing fast so that you don't spend five years doing something that's just going to fail.

• Don't be a perfectionist
I frequently tell Internet entrepreneurs, "If you're not somewhat embarrassed by your 1.0 product launch, then you've released too late." There's value in launching early, getting engaged with customers, and learning from them. That can direct your progress.

From http://money.cnn.com/2009/08/24/technology/linkedin_reid_hoffman.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2009082505

Reader's Digest declares bankruptcy

Unsexy and unsuccessful

From The Economist print edition 20 Aug 2009

How a once-mighty publisher fell, and why it may rise again

A FEW years ago it was feared that the investors scooping up one media company after another and loading them with debt would ruin their purchases. As it turns out, some have also ruined themselves. On August 17th the Reader’s Digest Association, publisher of America’s most widely read magazine, said it would seek bankruptcy protection to restructure $2.2 billion in debt. The consortium that bought the company two years ago, led by Ripplewood Holdings, a private-equity firm, would lose its investment under the plan. The future of Reader’s Digest, by contrast, looks brighter.

These days Reader’s Digest is a global business: it generates less than half of its revenue in America. Most of its money comes from direct marketing (that is, junk mail) and sales of things as varied as wine, vitamins and books. It also runs Allrecipes.com, a popular website. But the corporate brand is built on the magazine, and the company has not been helped by its epic decline.

Reader’s Digest began in the 1920s by summarising books and “articles of lasting interest” from other publications. Gradually it acquired its own editorial voice, and with it a somewhat stodgy image. The magazine emphasised homespun values and leaned to the right—Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were fans. In the 1970s it sold as many as 18m copies a month. The Wall Street Journal described it as the greatest publishing success since the Bible.

Yet cracks were appearing. The magazine came to depend on competitions and sweepstakes, particularly to lure younger subscribers. Forced out of that business by public and legal pressure, Reader’s Digest attempted to reinvent itself as a celebrity-heavy lifestyle magazine. Despite heroic (and expensive) efforts to keep up the numbers, circulation has fallen relentlessly. It now stands at 8.2m in America—not many more than Better Homes and Gardens.

These days Reader’s Digest is aiming for a circulation of about 5.5m, having dropped the notion of being all things to all readers. Instead it will emphasise the heartland values of family and practicality. Other initiatives point in a similar direction. In 2006 the firm successfully launched a magazine featuring Rachael Ray, a cheerful and uncomplicated television cook. Earlier this year it formed a publishing alliance with Rick Warren, an evangelical pastor whose book, “The Purpose-Driven Life”, has a more plausible claim to be the greatest publishing success since the Bible. Mr Warren is conservative but pointedly non-political.

This is wise. There are a lot of people in the heartland, and not just in America. Reader’s Digest’s talent for distilling complex arguments ought to be more valuable in an era of information overload. In the past year Every Day with Rachael Ray and the American edition of Reader’s Digest have lost less than a tenth of their advertising pages, according to Mediaweek—far less than the competition. If it can escape that troublesome debt, the least sexy of publishing companies ought to be around for a while yet.

Boiling the Frog

Is America on its way to becoming a boiled frog?

I’m referring, of course, to the proverbial frog that, placed in a pot of cold water that is gradually heated, never realizes the danger it’s in and is boiled alive. Real frogs will, in fact, jump out of the pot — but never mind. The hypothetical boiled frog is a useful metaphor for a very real problem: the difficulty of responding to disasters that creep up on you a bit at a time.

And creeping disasters are what we mostly face these days.
I started thinking about boiled frogs recently as I watched the depressing state of debate over both economic and environmental policy. These are both areas in which there is a substantial lag before policy actions have their full effect — a year or more in the case of the economy, decades in the case of the planet — yet in which it’s very hard to get people to do what it takes to head off a catastrophe foretold.

And right now, both the economic and the environmental frogs are sitting still while the water gets hotter.

Start with economics: last winter the economy was in acute crisis, with a replay of the Great Depression seeming all too possible. And there was a fairly strong policy response in the form of the Obama stimulus plan, even if that plan wasn’t as strong as some of us thought it should have been.

At this point, however, the acute crisis has given way to a much more insidious threat. Most economic forecasters now expect gross domestic product to start growing soon, if it hasn’t already. But all the signs point to a “jobless recovery”: on average, forecasters surveyed by The Wall Street Journal believe that the unemployment rate will keep rising into next year, and that it will be as high at the end of 2010 as it is now.

Now, it’s bad enough to be jobless for a few weeks; it’s much worse being unemployed for months or years. Yet that’s exactly what will happen to millions of Americans if the average forecast is right — which means that many of the unemployed will lose their savings, their homes and more.

To head off this outcome — and remember, this isn’t what economic Cassandras are saying; it’s the forecasting consensus — we’d need to get another round of fiscal stimulus under way very soon. But neither Congress nor, alas, the Obama administration is showing any inclination to act. Now that the free fall is over, all sense of urgency seems to have vanished.

This will probably change once the reality of the jobless recovery becomes all too apparent. But by then it will be too late to avoid a slow-motion human and social disaster.
Still, the boiled-frog problem on the economy is nothing compared with the problem of getting action on climate change.

Put it this way: if the consensus of the economic experts is grim, the consensus of the climate experts is utterly terrifying. At this point, the central forecast of leading climate models — not the worst-case scenario but the most likely outcome — is utter catastrophe, a rise in temperatures that will totally disrupt life as we know it, if we continue along our present path. How to head off that catastrophe should be the dominant policy issue of our time.

But it isn’t, because climate change is a creeping threat rather than an attention-grabbing crisis. The full dimensions of the catastrophe won’t be apparent for decades, perhaps generations. In fact, it will probably be many years before the upward trend in temperatures is so obvious to casual observers that it silences the skeptics. Unfortunately, if we wait to act until the climate crisis is that obvious, catastrophe will already have become inevitable.

And while a major environmental bill has passed the House, which was an amazing and inspiring political achievement, the bill fell well short of what the planet really needs — and despite this faces steep odds in the Senate.

What makes the apparent paralysis of policy especially alarming is that so little is happening when the political situation seems, on the surface, to be so favorable to action.

After all, supply-siders and climate-change-deniers no longer control the White House and key Congressional committees. Democrats have a popular president to lead them, a large majority in the House of Representatives and 60 votes in the Senate. And this isn’t the old Democratic majority, which was an awkward coalition between Northern liberals and Southern conservatives; this is, by historical standards, a relatively solid progressive bloc.

And let’s be clear: both the president and the party’s Congressional leadership understand the economic and environmental issues perfectly well. So if we can’t get action to head off disaster now, what would it take?

I don't know the answer. And that's why I keep thinking about boiling frogs.

From http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/

Mind your manners

The Cost of Bad Behaviour
How incivility is damaging your business and what to do about it
By Christine Pearson and Christine Porath

It’s a mean old world. Cynicism and disrespect characterise public debate. Old-fashioned courtesies are seen as just that. The meek do not inherit the earth – they get crushed in the stampede being led by the aggressively ambitious.

Is any of this surprising? People are worried about their jobs and economic livelihoods. In their anxiety, many will look after number one. Is this really such a problem?

The authors of this new book say that it is. Christine Pearson, a professor at the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Arizona, and Christine Porath, assistant professor at the Marshall School of Business in California, have been studying the impact of bad behaviour for more than a decade.

Their conclusion? Incivility, as they label it, is doing untold commercial damage to many businesses. It is not just that life would be nicer if everybody were nicer. Businesses would be more successful, too.

What is incivility? It is, according to this book, “the exchange of seemingly inconsequential, inconsiderate words and deeds that violate conventional norms of workplace conduct”. That casts the net pretty wide. Indeed, a list of examples of incivility printed at the start of the book appears to locate this argument in rather banal territory.

“Acting irritated when someone asks a favour” is one of them. So are “spreading rumours about colleagues”, “failing to return phone calls or respond to e-mails” and “leaving a mess for others to clean up”. If this is incivility, there are a lot of uncivil workplaces out there.

But, bit by bit, the authors make a strong case that cumulative rudeness or unpleasantness, whatever you call it, does damage the bottom line and should not be tolerated.

Why is there more incivility than in the past? Partly it reflects social change, and the more abrasive, less automatically deferential relationships people often have with each other today. But there are economic factors at work here as well.

Less permanent working arrangements undermine stability. “Skilled employees ... build their own career paths and establish their relationships with employers on their own terms. One consequence is that employees have become more accustomed to getting what they want and more uncivil when they don’t,” the authors say. “When workplace relationships become transactional rather than loyalty based, civility can seem like a giant waste of time.”

But how do the authors know that incivility has a financial impact? Because they have actually tried to cost it. Once you start to consider the consequences, the hidden costs become more apparent. The commitment of those on the receiving end of unpleasantness diminishes. They spend more time worrying. They reduce the time they spend at work. They criticise their employer to their friends and family. They try less hard. They look for other jobs. And sometimes they leave, taking their experience and contacts with them.

“Unhappy flight attendants told us that they spent their flight time sitting in the back of the plane reading magazines, and disgruntled ramp workers recalled how they disappeared to sleep in the maintenance shack until the next plane arrived,” Profs Pearson and Porath say. It is obvious how this sort of staff dissatisfaction, brought about by incivility, can undermine customer service and the performance of a business.

Do any companies have a better story to tell? Cisco is the first organisation the authors know of to have introduced a formal training programme based on civility. Managers at Starbucks are encouraged to monitor staff behaviour and report anything that is in conflict with the company’s founding principles.

If this reviewer can enter an uncivil note, the book is a bit short of ideas on what the victims of unpleasantness should do about it. They argue against fighting back in kind. But their other suggestions – including, simply, “leave” – are a little underwhelming. There is also little acknowledgement of the fact that some workplaces, and some businesses, seem to survive and even thrive in an atmosphere of incivility.

But these are relatively minor criticisms. The big point of this book is valid. Rudeness may be slowly killing your business. It is time to stamp it out.

From Financial Times July 29 2009