Strategy Session: The post-pandemic business, w/questions from Village Global and co-host Bob Safian, editor-at-large

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Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. I am thrilled to share some of the new names who will be joining us at this year's Masters of Scale summit. This may be our biggest stage yet. Reed Hastings, Meredith Whitaker, Van Jones, Amjad Masad, and more. Will be there with us October 20th through 22nd in San Francisco. If you're building something great, or you want to build something great, We want you there with us too.

Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscom slash apply. Twenty six. Huge push. There are fires burning when you're going out. Such an idiot.

go back to this is totally gonna be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Oops. It just seems absolutely nutball. Ten years later I'm like, well that's just how you do it. We haven't made it. Just how you do it. This is masters of scale. I'm Reed Hoffman.

Co founder of LinkedIn. Partner Greylock. And your host. Welcome to our strategy session. Where we partner with a community of entrepreneurs to hear the questions that are keeping them up at night.

Our entrepreneurs on today's show are all part of Village Global. An early stage venture capital firm backed by some of the world's most successful entrepreneurs. The questions come from all over the world and cover topics very much on everyone's minds right now. How do you move fast? But carefully in today's pandemic stricken world.

How do you safeguard your business and your customers? And what? Are the benefits of constraints. I'm also sharing some stories about how we develop our strategy at PayPal. And

I hear from a LinkedIn alum. I hope that some of these questions and answers are useful for you. My co-host for today is Bob Safium. Bob is our editor at large here at Masters of Scale, and my co-host on our new Rapid Response Podcast. Many of you know Bob from the eleven years he spent as editor in chief of Fast Company.

Bob. We're lucky to have you. Welcome. Thanks, Reed. And hello, listeners.

As Reed mentioned, today's episode is a strategy session, which means It's a bit different. Instead of read asking questions, He'll be answering them. Sharing his direct insight.

The questions come from six entrepreneurs. Two from the healthcare area? As well as businesses like data and environmental sustainability. From San Francisco to Lagos, Nigeria. Reed's answers highlight important skills and practices.

About agility. The need for monitoring. And the focus provided by constraints. In the last question, he gives us some rich comparisons of his strategy building at PayPal and LinkedIn. Not to be missed.

So Let's get to it. The first question comes from the CEO of a London based firm called Circad Health. that is using AI and other tech tools to detect respiratory issues.

Reed's answer. Focuses on the goal of becoming a ubiquitous product. Let's listen in. My name is Baris Sidiki. CEO and co founder of Circadia Health.

Based here in London, UK. We enable early detection of respiratory failure, the third leading cause of death. Using contactless sensing And AI powered algorithms. My question is regarding product.

We target a variety of different health segments. From acute To subacute. And the home health market. Should we focus on building the most ubiquitous product for data visualization?

Or should we focus on only one segment? Ferris. It sounds like your product at Circadia Health is particularly important right now. Given of course the coronavirus's impact on the respiratory system. So I'm very glad that you have this product and

been developing it already. To answer your question Requires one more depth of analysis. The obvious grand target For the business.

Would be a ubiquitous product. for data visualization. And if you could build one product. That works on a lot of different segments. That's a much more valuable

Product and a much more valuable business. Then Only one segment. With an asterisk, of course, when the segment's sometimes super valuable. So Your ultimate target

Is if at all possible The ubiquitous product. The question is how you get there. Because Sometimes the problem of

Building ubiquitous product. Is that by being something For all people, you're nothing or nothing important enough for any one person. And so the frequent kind of challenge and question, which I'm sure you're familiar with.

within entrepreneurship is to say well Prove your value. to a segment where that segment loves you. That segment.

lives and breathes by you. And The truth of that is, is you have to get there. You have to be able to get to a place where Your customers will love you, your customers will go, I can't imagine

Doing My Medical Services by ability to be proactive and also to

Prevent respiratory failure. You are an essential tool in my tool chest. Because ultimately if you don't have A group of customers that are in that Case ultimately

The pattern doesn't work. So then the question is For circadia health. Do you need to focus on one segment and just win that, or can you be building the ubiquitous products? And

You will get customers who have that degree of love and commitment and need. for how you help them. Preventing.

Respiratory failure. On one hand. That'd be a better in depth set of data. That you have with your product.

Today. But on the other hand. You're also probably making a Risk. Judgment.

Your Probably making a Judgment of the Okay. Here is our theory of the case. Here is our theory.

About why this group would really love us. And It works with a sufficiently ubiquitous product. Then okay, great. Do it and test it.

Test it as early as possible. Because The Silicon Valley aphorism of fail fast. It's not

Failing it's Testing these hypotheses to learn from them. In order to succeed. And so you want to test that hypothesis as fast as possible and test it however you can. You can test it by calling people, you can test it by building the product. You can test it by

Wanting a focus group? There's a set of different things you can do. But you need to get to the place where People essentially Love you.

For your product. And in so They will. be high net promoters and high users and they'll think that Circado health.

І за кі to how they deal with Preventing Respiratory failure. Good luck.

It's an important time. Building love and failing fast. Two of Reed's key pillars for entrepreneurs. And as he notes. They're connected by one simple, but too often neglected area.

Testing. Worth reminding ourselves, especially right now. Our next question drills in on one of Reed's favorite recommendations. Allocating resources in a seventy percent, twenty percent, ten percent mix

Across efforts, expansion, and venture bets. CEO Kathleen Egan's business is offering tools to improve environmental sustainability. Reed's recommendations revolve around ambition and prioritization. Here's Kathleen's question. Hi, my name's Kathleen Egan. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Eco Meetes.

We're a SaaS startup in San Francisco that helps enterprises save money, watts, and water. through sustainability. We Help suppliers sell to these Buyers.

digitally and have digitized seven hundred thousand different products that go into buildings and all of the environmental data that can help achieve the savings. My question is about the typical allocation you have shared for Silicon Valley startups Seventy, twenty, ten. Focus on core expansion and venture bets. I'd like to hear if you have any tips on how to achieve this allocation.

Especially how to achieve it when you have large regulatory systems that you're serving, such as the US government's procurement compilation and lead standards for buildings. They require full coverage of categories and full coverage of data. Which makes it hard. to pull allocation away from the seventy percent for the expansion and venture bets that

We want to do. Thanks for sharing any tips you have. Kathleen. Great question. People always assume.

the the seventy, twenty, ten rule. is just an easy thing to apply across all businesses. And you're highlighting that actually in fact The way you apply it. And even the degree to which it's a

Rule or heuristic. Varies. depending upon the nature of the business you're in. So for example, For you.

That full coverage of categories and full coverage of data. Means that That is your absolute top priority in getting to. And every distraction is super expensive and needs to be very choiceful.

So there's at least two ways you could approach this. One way is to say, Well, this notion of twenty ten, we're gonna do that later. After we've gotten full coverage and full data.

Then We can begin to Try to do the development cycle on top of that. Another one we can say is say, Well, okay. You know, we're six people

We're gonna make one or two people have ten to twenty percent of their time. being the Experiments new things or Things on top of

That we need to look at. And that will be future planning. Definitely priority two. Or lower.

For getting to our regulated position. Now The tips. As you ask for is really a set of questions that you ask around your business, which is to say

Well Look, I understand what the evolution and the continuation of my businesses. But If I have these much larger

Ambitions. What are the things that I'd want to experiment with? What are the things that I'd want to see as adjacent to what I'm doing. Or as potential venture bets. That could greatly expand. where my product and service gets to.

There's a lot of different ways you can ask these questions. You can ask these questions as product. And service innovators and builders from where you are out. You can say Yeah. Are you?

Nother company was going to try to compete with us. How would they compete with us? You could say What are competitive substitutional effects and how are we a lot better than that? And then the other areas.

By which you can generate questions. that go to the potential twenty and the potential ten. is what else is happening in the industry. For example Are there technological platform changes?

Move to the cloud. AI. Ubiquity of sensors. Internet of things. Drones.

These things then might give you an idea of what should be in the twenty and ten. Because Part of how you make executive decisions, usually by the way, in much larger companies.

Then Echo Metes is. The way you make these decisions is you say, Okay, what are the best set of ideas that we have, and then we triage Through them. But even in a six person

Company. You can be looking at Well what are the questions and what are the ideas and how do we think about them and how do we plan for them? Good luck with Echomedes. I'm always glad to see things that are working on

The very important future. With climate change. I love the way Reed equates how larger companies set their decisions. With the way even a six person startup can approach things. The discipline, the process.

It's the same. Our next question comes from a growing service platform in Nigeria. with twenty staff people and a group of vendors who often provide the service itself. The question is about quality control.

Read's answer delves into how to address error. And also to expect it. Here's the question. Hi Reed. And master just kill listeners.

My name is Nadir Enegesi, co founder and CEO of Eden Life here in Lagos, Nigeria. We're a home concierge service for busy Africans. We manage food, laundry, and cleaning services for our customers on a recurring schedule so they can reclaim their time and energy. So the way Eden works is that your concierge, let's call her Jennifer, she shows up to your home at ten AM in the morning with all your food for the week. She picks up your laundry bag, brings it back in forty-eight hours, everything is washed, ironed, folded. And on Friday she sends the clears to your home and she checks in on them to make sure they have done a good job. When this experience works, when the suppliers do what they're supposed to do according to spec. It works really, really well.

And the ten percent of the time that they miss some of the instructions and they miss the playbook. It fails spectacularly. So my question is related to maintaining service quality. How do we incentivise suppliers to deliver at a high bar?

Consistently. How do we have more control over quality? Should we vertically integrate some of the services to gain control? Looking forward to your response. Thank you.

The dyer. Great question. And one of the things that I In particular. like about this question is that's actually one of the areas where I think

our Silicon Valley perspective. can actually be helpful. around the world. There's a couple different answers. One is people vertically integrate, as per your question, where they say, Okay, well, we're just doing ourselves.

You'll see places like Mercado Libre and Marcos Galperin. doing that in South America. Another is to set up an entire ecosystem where you have enough different suppliers that their competition To get your business.

is based upon Kinda like well if if this one doesn't do the work and the business well enough, then the other one will. And that is available if you have enough different suppliers and you can set up the right competitive dynamic and you're a valuable enough party to be supplying to Another one is to get much closer to one or more of the suppliers.

And that can be depth of contract. In terms of guarantee. A SLA agreement. in terms of what would work and of course the the question is will the SLA agreement motivate them and will it work and so forth.

Usually if you have to litigate the SLA agreement, that's a problem. Sometimes there's even other Kinds of Incentives. In terms of

For example, If you can meet this quality bar. We'll give you the following warrants. In our company. Over the next year or two.

So there's other kinds of ways to even think about and align Interest and success. And then the last area. of shifting the incentive curve is if they would agree to penalties. on missing the playbook.

Because usually some incentives are a combination of upside. You know, carrots. And then some kind of stick. So if they agree that they have to essentially cut their margin or something else.

When they missed the playbook. Or take at least some kind of penalty hit. That will also cause them to do it. Now there are some areas to think about. Oh.

The normal business one working with supplier one, two, and three. as a way of thinking about how to mitigate this business. One of them is to say, well You can implement your own cross checks. That could also be with technology. In terms of or in your example

If You have your concierge caller Jennifer. gonna also be checking that. In the right way. Now, with these services, there's not a lot of extra time, unfortunately, so maybe that doesn't really work.

A classic Silicon Valley way of thinking about this would be like an AI quality check. As a way of thinking about doing this. And then finally You can think about the way is that You do essentially

Error correction. And their correction could be is the hey, we'll do the delivery tomorrow for you. And we'll bring the extra goods and then we'll bring you something that's On top. So the thinking about error correction.

is an important part of this'cause by the way. You almost never can get it to a zero percent error. Ten percent's probably way too expensive and you need to get it down. But You get it to point one percent, well you still have an error case. And in Airbnb's case, it's a

part of what Airbnb does is they have a whole group That says oh the apartment, the room wasn't available. Let's help this person. rebook right now

in something that's better. And still will only charge them Essentially the same price. But that error correction can also be a really good chance for

having your customer be very happy with you. Especially when they realize that it's you're doing the error correction and you're making it Work for them. Sounds like a great business.

Good luck with the Eden Life. And Thank you for listening to Masters of Scale. Our next question comes from Bob Moore, the CEO of a data service platform called Crossbeam.

Based in Philadelphia. Crossbeam is thriving despite the economic challenges of the great lockdown. And Bob is wondering about how aggressive to be in playing offense. Here's where Reed digs into the importance of what he calls agile monitoring. For playing defense as well as offense.

It's an answer every business should be mindful of right now. And in the future. Whatever their stage or circumstance. Let's listen. Hey Reed.

This is Bob Moore. I'm the CEO of Crossbeam. We're a partner ecosystem platform that acts like an escrow service, but for data. So we allow companies to find overlapping customers and prospects with their partners, all while keeping the rest of their data private and secure. We are eighteen months old, we're about twenty five employees, and we just closed our series A round a couple of months ago. My question is related to the current economic climate. A lot of startups are understandably shifting from playing offense to playing defense as they try to rein in costs and hunker down.

But at Crossbeam we're fortunate and frankly lucky because we still have a lot of runway and usage of our product has actually gone up since the market started turning down. So my question is this. How do we know if it's okay to continue playing offense? Especially when it feels like the conventional wisdom is that everybody should be dialing things back right now. And in the event that we do keep being aggressive, what unique opportunities for companies in that position that didn't exist before the market got into this state.

Thanks for your advice. Bob, I'm really glad to hear. that you actually in fact are having This kind of challenge. In this.

Crisis. And it's very natural and very good to think about offense. Вен обвісли You both have a lot of runway. And

your usage is up. So it's absolutely okay. to continue playing offense. Now What you want to do is you want to Utiliz the crisis.

So You want to say well If there are things that you'd want to trim or experiment or do differently, the crisis gives you a chance to do that. So it isn't because everyone else And conventional wisdom is dialing things back. It's because

You actually, in fact, s opportunities. For An experiment. For a try for something else that the fact that All the

Marbles are tossed up into the air. gives you a chance to do that. It's also important As you know as an entrepreneur. to cut across conventional wisdom.

In certain kinds of selected circumstances. We're going to keep Picking up the pace. We're gonna keep expanding into our market opportunity.

And maybe experiment with some additional ways or some new ways of doing it. One thing that these kind of crises and this kind of economic climate can mean is What happens if there's a sudden downturn. Like we go, Oh, look, it was really up.

for March But all of a sudden in April it turns down, or it was really up through June, and July it turns down. And it's because of some unknown Impacts. Of

this climate. So for example, some of the people you supply to themselves may end up run into trouble and then that may come back to you. in terms of your data escrow business. So what you have to do is you have to monitor And part of monitoring is

Cross checking with your customers. Hey We recognize these are weird times and it's hard to predict, but how do things look? Can always be a customer positive moment. How do things look? Is that working well? We're trying to forecast demand.

It's about the same, it's gonna be up, it's gonna be down. And to figure that out. it's very possible that we could still be surprised in the next month or two. And I think that that Does it mean

Cut back thou. Because you want to realize the opportunity. What it does mean is increase your monitoring. Increase your Sense of What does the future projection look like?

And Then to do that in a way That Plays out that Three years from now, that's still a good practice to have built.

I mean, sometimes you have to do one offs during the crisis, but if at all possible, it's not just a one-off. during the crisis. It's a Hey. We might not have prioritize in normal circumstances building out. these high touch customer service points, making sure that our customers are doing well, making sure that our customer success is our success and that their success with this is working out well and monitoring their future demand.

But a light way of doing that, which ascertains their engagement with the product. Their happiness of relationship with us. And a lightweight Knowledge about

What future forecasting looks like. Then We can Build that into I'm more successful.

service, a more successful product, a more successful business. Because we've already put that loop. of our customer success in. In this. Економік цунами

Many businesses are not so Fortunate. For the majority of businesses when you get to this kind of economic tsunami You first check defense. And the question is where do you set the defense line?

In general, the default is let's presume a couple months of frozen. Let's presume a year of much slower. Sale cycles. smaller contract. And everything else.

So in essence Let's presume a recession. And let's presume a recession of an unknown And then let's budget for that.

You go, Okay, well how do we get A sense of is our business coming back? How do we monitor that on an ongoing basis? And then how do we adjust from that? The new normal

is not gonna be the old normal. presume that it's much more turbulent than that, and that's part of the reason why Monitoring. Is so important. My reflex from your quick description of your business is yes, it's totally okay.

To keep playing aggressive. To experiment some to take advantage of the crisis. An opportunity. And To certainly build in monitoring and to understand that there are

Sometimes, even though everything looked fine the first couple of months. The the domino effect. within the business network. may still come back to you. So you wanna be monitoring so that you can adjust as soon as you know Yeah.

Maybe things will be different. Good luck with Crossbeam. Sounds great. Notice how Reed finds a through line. That we all need to be considering both offense and defense. And constantly monitor on both sides.

To keep moving in the right direction at the right pace. When you build substantial wealth through your business, it's often tied up in a single equity position. The upside is real, but so is the risk, and knowing when to act isn't always obvious. Creative planning works with business owners to build a strategy around concentrated equity.

When to diversify, how to manage tax risk, and how to protect what you've spent years building. Creative planning where wealth works together. Learn more at creative plating dot com slash masters of scale. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. There's gonna be two types of companies. Those are great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't how do we build a future.

That is human centered. I'm Rana El Calyubi. And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. And we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in.

Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show. Because every Friday we release a second rapid response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford's CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there. The next question is from our second health firm CEO, Nancy Yu.

At R D M D. Which focuses on rare diseases. Her question is about balancing standards with the iteration. Here it is. My name is Nancy U.

Co founder and CEO of RDMD. Where our mission is to accelerate drug approvals and rare disease. There are seven thousand rare diseases affecting one in ten people globally. Collectively. Rare disease makes up a hundred fifty billion dollar drug market.

But only five percent of diseases have currently an approved treatment. This is because the traditional model of drug development for common conditions like Hart disease and cancer. breaks when it comes to rare diseases. Where there's fewer patients, researchers, and doctors who understand the disease itself.

RDMD makes it easy for patients to participate in drug research online and offers evidence to drug researchers in an FDA grade way. We're a team of sixteen. Based in San Francisco And we recently raised a fourteen million dollar series A. In rare disease because everyone is starting from scratch.

There are often few research standards already in place. This is true for drug companies, the FDA, and research doctors alike. when designing their drug programs. Our internal research team at RDMD currently desig new standards using our own platform to generate concrete research outcomes ourselves. My question is related to defining industry standards when there are none.

In an industry like drug research. Where standards are critical. How do you balance A The need for careful long term standard design.

And B The need to iterate and learn and produce real life case studies fast. Thank you. Nancy. Wow.

You're not asking a small question, are you? Obviously. Very important. And also Tricky.

And I'm glad you're focused on this rare disease market. Because so often it goes completely ignored. Due to the financials and economics of the situation and how drug development works. The general principle Is that

The faster that you can make The iteration and learning. In ways that are safe. And do not trap you in local maxima. The faster progress you can make.

The problem, of course, is High cost there. People's health. And When you generate a standard

If people generate a standard on something that's suboptimum The standards usually have network effects. And lock things in. Part of what you want to be. Thinking about

Is How do you maintain that agility and learning and evolution. While you are Building

that long term standard What's the way to make it? flexible and adaptive, what's the way to make it Change. What are the ways that you can actually take experiments

And learn fast, move fast. Where the consequences Or Opportunity cost, economics. Good idea, bad idea. Not

People's hells. Or Where it is people's hells. It's something along the lines of Light.

Something they voluntarily and legally can participate in. So This question about balancing is somewhat a question of say, well There are

Critical principles. In the Careful long term standard design. And you wanna make sure you don't get offside to those. How you're balancing

this need for careful long term standard design and the need to iterate, learn and produce real life case studies. Is you go, Okay. The constraints Try to do it as minimal as you can. are set by the outside boundaries that need.

Then Within that You iterate and learn and produce those real life studies as much as you can. Your question may be reflecting Another underlying

Important need to this. Which is all startups. need to move to a place where they've gotten their product market fit. They've established it. This is where in my parlance of your assembling an airplane on the way down.

You've gotten the airplane assembled and you're beginning to fly. Another way of looking at At this balance A and B. is to simply say, Well what's the thing that we need to do To get to that.

baseline we're now going concerned. Baseline. It's working. That's another fundamental because if you don't obviously do that Then

This Question of a balance. Doesn't really help you. Doesn't really mean anything. And so that may say, Well actually in fact

We're just going to Produce some quick real life studies. And iterate through that. And that that's the thing that allows us To create that.

Foundation. Or creates the basis by which people will Continuo investe нас and continue to build out. The general platform. So

that lens of what's the thing that allows us to get to the next stage and establish the foundation of the business. Maybe the analytic lens. about balancing this long term and Iterate.

Quick. Real life studies. Good luck. R D M D has a super important mission and I'm rooting for you. Reed has a great way of capturing both the aspiration that a startup needs.

And the reality that it needs to adapt to. The baseline, as he puts it. That you need to stay alive as a going concern. In order to meet your larger goals. The practical reality is paramount.

And now our final question. From Derek Brown. CEO of a nascent social network called Bunches. To help him out.

Reed shares some history of his own choices and strategies at PayPal and LinkedIn. Let's listen. And learn. Hey read. My name is Derek Brown, co founder and CEO of Bunches.

We're building the easiest way to create a paid group chat. I'm also a LinkedIn alum and would like to take the opportunity to say thanks for having such an impact on my career. Boshes is an early stage social network. So my question is about defining consumer markets. The early stages of PayPal seems to have been defined by focusing on eBay users

Whereas LinkedIn appears to have been built for professionals regardless of their industry, and therefore. Horizontal from the start. Is this characterization true? And what advice would you have for building a horizontal platform today? Thanks again.

Hi, Derek. Thank you for being part of the LinkedIn. network and family. The high level point. I'm sure you already know, which is how do you get

to the value proposition critical mass. What's the way That engine, the network. Starts functioning. And that people

Start Using bunches. In the way that You hope that they will in a way that will grow to scale. As the first scale is what matters.

And sometimes That's through a vertical focus. А сам тайм That's through a general focus. And I'll describe a little bit of both PayPal and LinkedIn.

As a way of Get into this. PayPal. And certainly a lot of Silicon Valley people know and maybe is not as well known in the rest of the world. Started with

being payments on palm pilots. Sink through email. So they didn't actually in fact Target eBay users. What they found in the first week is that eBay use was where the usage was growing.

And by being super smart and responsive to opportunity. Which is the kind of thing that is a very good idea to do with early stage startups. They realize that their eBay users Were their customers.

And that the mobile payments The notion of cash on Palm Pilots, cash on mobile phones. We're not yet ready in terms of a product market fit. And so they pivoted entirely Towards focusing on eBay users.

Initially. So as to get that flywheel going. And then spent the greater part of their product evolution being a better and better fit for

individuals and small businesses on eBay Selling and buying. Because there was such a tremendous amount of Good work to do there.

And part of the reason why the companies combined was because Both companies realized That PayPal could be A payments network for the rest of the world. That was indeed

the vision and the mission by which PayPal was Established. It wasn't established as a payment service rebay. But that in order to do that It required

Essentially Having a safe platform on eBay in order to launch. And so the combination made sense Because putting these together directly align the interest, including getting PayPal

to this global payment infrastructure it is today, which then of course it then spun out of eBay. So LinkedIn like PayPal. Had the general this is for all people. who work and who get better at work.

And we knew That it would start in much more of the white collar arena that would start on the high end of professions because those professionals would have more of a reason to get the really great match.

relative to their economics and relative to How the career progression would work. And so we knew that we'd have a collection of different professionals But we didn't actually know which ones.

And we were alert and we were looking to see if we needed to Build specific features. Specific features for engineers, or specific features for doctors, or specific features for Salespeople. As individuals in doing it.

Every quarter and every Year looked at it. Look. We're definitely growing in some industries and some areas like technology, we grow a lot more than in other areas. But that just may be lagging curves as we get to critical mass.

And so we'll continue to work. For the features for the individuals. In just a completely general way. Then As we begin to build

Professional products, product for people to pay us for. Then we will get to more specific kinds of tools tools for recruiters, tools for salespeople, tools for entrepreneurs. We'll build those specific tools. in ways that will

Enable. A specific profession to go a lot deeper with LinkedIn. But we'll do that. Probably mostly within an economic loop.

So LinkedIn When completely general and both PayPal LinkedIn were using virality. And the virality worked on PayPal outside of eBay. But the only place it stuck.

was within eBay. So At PayPal we tune the virality. To eBay. And at LinkedIn the virality was working just normally'cause people would say, Well, this service is more valuable. When I'm connected.

To the people who can recommend me. Who can help me? Find other professionals that I'm looking for. whatever my particular need is, as an entrepreneur, as a Salesperson as a

Recruiter as a business development person. As an executive. Whatever that need may be as a job seeker, obviously. Whatever that need may be. being connected to all of the professionals that I know and trust is actually useful.

To me. And that played out. And so that's How those two Stories played, and obviously There is hours and hours of more content in virality, in the design of go to market.

So I'll end with a general comment. to All businesses, but especially all consumer internet businesses, which is The recommendation that I give to entrepreneurs is co design Your product and service.

with your go to market. There's too often a belief in entrepreneurs, I just build a totally new product and service and then However I go to market, well that's a general thing. I hire salesforce. I try to do some virality, I do search engine optimization, I do whatever the thing is.

I advertise. And actually in fact It's much smarter to be co-designing your product and service with the go to market.

And iterating on both of them. Because the short answer is if you don't succeed in the go to market, you'll never succeed in the product service anyway. And you know the truism. The aphorism. Is

The skeptical statement if we build it, they will come. Which is meant to be ironic because it Омост Омост невер. Plays out that way. Yeah.

Good luck with bunches. If we build it, they will come. We all wish it were that easy. But as Reed says, it almost never works that way. We need to be more intentional.

With an integrated strategy to bring any viral loop and any business potential to scale fruition. Thanks to all of these entrepreneurs for their questions, and of course Reed for so generously sharing his perspective. And thank you for listening. I'm Bob Safian. Until next time.

Masters of Scale is a white water original. The show is recorded remotely with Sanitized Audio Gear. Our executive producers are June Cohen and Darren Treff. Our supervising producer is Jay Punjabi. Our producers are Chris McCloud, Adam Skuse, Jenny Cataldo, Jordan McCloud. Catherine Clark Gray.

Hali Bondi, Christina Gonzalez, and Ben Manila. Our editor at large is Bob Safi. Original music and sound design by Ryan Holliday. And Daniel Nissenbaum. Audio editing.

by Keith J Nelson. Mixing and Mastering by Brian Pugh. Special thanks. Criche Elisa Schreiber. David Sanford.

Say it's a piano. Adam Heiner, Emily McManus. Kelsey Capitano. Tim Cronin. Sarah Sandman.

Charlie Menessis, and Colin Howarth. Visit. Masterthe Scale.com to find the transcript for this episode. And be sure.

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