Reid

While failure is often the default state for startups, it is neither inevitable nor is it necessarily the end of the story. If you are able to bring yourself to look failure in the eye, you can take steps to maximize your chance of success. And even if you fail despite your best efforts, if you behave ethically and demonstrate that you've learned from the mistakes you might have made along the way, failure is definitely not the end. In fact, it may be the beginning.

In an increasingly politicized world, it’s harder and harder for CEOs to keep business and politics separate. And in an increasingly politicized world, they shouldn’t. When an issue creates risks that are severe, broad in scope, and systemic in impact, business leaders have an obligation to speak up, especially if the issue clashes with the company’s ethics, culture, and vision for the future. Reid Hoffman and Blitzscaling co-author Chris Yeh outline a set of principles that can help decide when, how, and why CEOs should speak out.

The term “early-stage” covers a lot of territory in venture investing, from incubating a brand-new idea, to investing in a Series A. Moreover, the indicators that show founders are ready to take on new capital in order to progress to the next phase of company-building – be it hiring, expanding into a new market, launching a product or more – can vary from company to company. As the Greylock team has learned after decades of partnering with early-stage founders, the best approach is establishing a core set of fundamental questions that can be tailored to each individual company, rather than looking at a rigid set of metrics.

The fundamental choice that venture-backed entrepreneurs face is simple: M&A or IPO? The short answer is that it almost never makes sense to start a company with the intent of selling it. You incur nearly as much risk, and shed as much blood, sweat, and tears whether you sell or go public. And even though only a small set of companies succeed in going public, the value of going public is such that the expected value of going public is mammothly higher. The big problem with building to sell is that companies are bought, not sold. As a result, in a very real sense, it's harder to build your company to sell than it is to build it to go public because if you’re aiming to go public, at least you know what public market investors want to see. Fortunately, there is one approach that allows you to build to go public AND to sell.

Today’s entrepreneurs find themselves falling from the cliff and assembling a plane with tools that are on fire while being attacked by a swarm of murder hornets. Yet despite the increased risks, entrepreneurs are still taking those leaps of faith, for which we should all be grateful. Greylock partner Reid Hoffman and his Blitzscaling co-author Chris Yeh explore how to help and encourage those entrepreneurs by offering some thoughts on how to mitigate – or even leverage – the present set of risks to accelerate their progress.

While there is a tendency for pundits to say that everything has changed, and that we’re in a new world, Reid Hoffman posits that more is actually the same than different. Converting challenge into opportunity is a normal part of the entrepreneurial journey, and right now is precisely when people with entrepreneurial skills are accomplishing amazing things, because generally speaking, it's actually better in the long-run to successfully start a business during a recession than during a bull market.

In 2014, Greylock general partner Reid Hoffman co-authored The Alliance with Chris Yeh and Ben Casnocha. The book argued that in the modern economy, the key to a stronger, healthier, longer-lasting employee relationship was to be honest about the temporary nature of nearly every job. Much like negotiators of a treaty of alliance, employees can work with their managers and employers to steer their careers on a track that transforms both company and employee. In 2020, the world is suffering through the Covid-19 pandemic and its economic fallout, and those alliances are under more stress than ever before. Chris and Reid discuss how the current crisis also represents an opportunity to honor and strengthen those alliances, even in cases where employers are furloughing or laying off employees.

In May, Jeff Weiner stepped down as CEO of LinkedIn after 11 amazing years. Greylock general partner and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman shares his favorite memories and key lessons learned from their long partnership.

Today we are excited to announce our investment in Neeva, an ad-free and deeply personal consumer-focused search service built with privacy at the foundation.

While the disruption and turbulence associated with the Covid-19 pandemic is broadly negative and unpredictable, it does open up new opportunities. Even during a pandemic, there will still be blitzscaling opportunities. They’ll just look different from the opportunities that emerged during the long economic expansion. Greylock general partner Reid Hoffman and his Blitzscaling co-author Chris Yeh say it is now more critical than ever to focus on and enable entrepreneurship.

Greylock-backed founders joined our virtual town hall to hear general partner Reid Hoffman's assessment of the current economic, political and public health landscape. He answered questions about how entrepreneurs, investors and new graduates can adapt to the new market and societal conditions.