How to live and act (and get hired) within a network | Reid Hoffman

in the fall of 2002 I had the lucky position to realize the web - Oh Revolution was about to begin essentially we were going to move from the Information Age how you might describe web 1 oh and earlier media technologies to the networked age the information age is about broadcasting and finding information the networked age is about identities and networks of trust framing information the information age treats content as primary the network age treats relationships as primary where those relationships become the conduit and the interpretation of the information obviously information is still critical in the network age but what started changing was the way that you broadcast discover and consume information I decided to lean all the way in the web - and I decided that you know that would be the last decade of my life I invested intrapreneurs doing the social side of the revolution the social experiences that you get for example from you know photo sharing and games and birthdays and all these other social gestures that were all very familiar with and that's been well covered but I decided to dedicate my life and my work in the last decade to how the networked age transforms the world of work and what it means that we you know how we can navigate the world differently and that which is why I started LinkedIn I saw the transition as something that could create new possibilities for each individual work to work each individual professional to work better from daily activities to managing the career at the same time the networked age has also introduced challenges that every professional has to grapple with you see there's a story for many decades running that we tell ourselves and we tell our children about how a career works in America the job market for educated workers the story goes functions like an escalator after graduating from college you get an entry-level job at the bottom of escalator at a company like IBM G Goldman Sachs your groom did mentored given professional development opportunities and you are whisked up on this escalator frequently at the same company not always eventually clearing room for next wave of college graduates to come in and start their own path on the escalator and so long as you play nice and well you move steadily up the escalator each step brings with it more income power and job security it's rather like the Milton Bradley game of life if any of you have played that there's just one problem with this story of the career escalator it's no longer true it's not true because a networked world is a globally competitive world and we've seen this in persistent unemployment numbers today youth unemployment is at the highest level since World War two and a trend line is even worse the fast-moving interconnected world has displaced the career ladder it is Jam the escalator we need a new map the new map is a network we're not climbing a ladder or riding an escalator we're traveling multi-dimensional interconnected networks your network is what connects you to different opportunities when I first thought about this in 2002 I started LinkedIn to be the relevant technology platform over the years I've realized that people need more than a software tools more than a software platform to navigate the new career space they need the right conceptual framework and I've been thinking about what this conceptual framework should be I believe that it should be be the intrapreneur of your own life it may seem somewhat surprising because intrapreneurs are stereotyped as lone wolves pioneers as individuals set from society groups or even you know existing companies but in fact an in contradiction Empire intrapreneurs start companies by building networks networks of employees networks of customers Finance ears partners advisers and so on and just as company intrapreneurs have always built networks in order to build their companies individuals now need to build but build networks to build their companies individuals now need to build networks for their careers for their work life as an interpreter builds a company you build a network in a sense your network is a virtual company the group of people around you who help you with your work this harkens back to the lexical origin of the word company which in Latin means literally break bread together and to be the entrepreneur of your own life you need to break bread with the people in your network today because of the networked age because we can have this network of connections around us you an individual can become the interpreter of their own life and can have this virtual company around them helping them with what they're doing now what I see networks I don't mean networking I don't mean follow up with someone after you get a business card I don't mean you know introduce yourself well as we just did to someone new right at a conference I'm talking about deeper understanding of what it means to live and work in a networked world it said that architects walk through buildings they see ceiling ornamentation they see structure design when psychologists work walked through an office they see behavior and lots of people trying to cope with childhood issues when I engage with the world I see networks I know I sound like the little boy from the sixth sense I don't see dead people but I do see networks I see networks of people coordinating and collaborating sharing experiences sharing information this is one of the reasons why investing in web to made so much sense to me I never see a person by themselves when I first met Jeff Weiner I had already formed a networked image of him I talked with James Slavitt and others I had a sense of who he worked with who trusted him what the shape of the network around that already before I met him I knew I wanted to build a relationship that's part of having a networked image of somebody and what if someone asked me for example do I know someone who works at Sony I don't just immediately kind of go to my rolodex and say well okay does anyone here have the title Sony in it or the company Sony I think about who is the right person and what is the the connect the network connectivity into the company what is the degrees and strengths the connections that could provide the right way of solving this challenge when you see networks you are network literate I like the word literacy because it's fundamental it's a skill that is that is absolutely critical to how we navigate the world it a decade ago John Battelle today here in the audience coin the term search literacy namely those people who could effectively execute a Google search had an edge in today's world this is being literate in the information age now those who can conceptualize and understand networks both offline and on have an edge in terms of building and network and a career in today's competitive landscape this is being literate in the networked age so what are the four attributes that make someone network literate first there's the baseline understanding of new technology think of this as network nology and the technology is important because it makes the the network's tangible in completely new ways they were always there but now they're tangible second there is identity network identity think you are who you know but also how they know you who else they know what they know about you kind of a network coming out from around you information is framed by networks network intelligence this is a change of perception what information gives me the edge what information do I need to know and forth new capabilities because of the network age or network capabilities this relates to new parameters emotion new capabilities let's start with network technologies because this is what makes the network's tangible networks have been around as long as people Aristotle wrote about us as being social animals we were creatures of the city and in the theme of today's Ted I think he means both cities one oh and two Oh the technology infrastructure today leverages the age-old human instinct of being social it's always been big now you can see it before technology you had no access to those extended ties for example we started LinkedIn with a hundred and twelve invitations from 13 people in Silicon Valley in the first day within six weeks we're at 12,000 people and over half are outside the US we started with 12 country to 12 countries in the pull-down tab and within days we were adding new countries every day as the network had grown to another country my own network on LinkedIn is just over 2,600 people but in the third degree friends of friends of friends it's 15 million people that's a quarter of the people that are in the United Kingdom that's more people than in Greece or Portugal people sometimes four how compounding math works this network is now visible to you for the last decade there's been a lot of discussion of Dunbar's number Dunbar theorized that we essentially can keep about 150 people 150 relationships as a number of relationships in our head my belief is it may be true but only as a memory cache Ram as you would it's the the people that you can keep in your mind at one time but with technology I believe that you can you have essentially a hard drive below the RAM that you can maintain a much broader set of connections and you can already see that of course in today's networks people frequently think about network technology in terms of basic social media posting status updates and becoming information it's kind of social media outlets it's the beginning but the most profound of these networked transformations is how it makes a web of trust trust in what to pay attention to trust and what to believe trust and how to act let's now move on to the second aspect of network literacy networked identity people frequently think about professional identity with a few simple tags works of company X has title y works in location Z how we're in a networked age identity is not so simply determined your identity is actually multivariate distributed and partially out of your control you are who you know shapes who you are let's take the dimensions my identity I have company LinkedIn my partners at Greylock are investing business but also my classmates people I meet at conferences like Ted people I've just published a book people I've met through that whole process each of these networks each of the identities and the other people in these networks forms part of my identity it's a networked age the brand of you is not just what you broadcast about yourself but it's what others say about you it's not just information it's information in a network thinking in terms of network identities inform line vist investing on online social platforms when I look at network investments I ask if the product or service could form part of someone's that identity if if hundreds of millions of people this would form part of the identity the fabric by which they connect to other people let's take perhaps a non obvious example with Zynga Mark Pincus always intended to build a gaming network the investment thesis was the Zynga create a set of games that would become part of how people shared experience with each other connect with each other most people were placing a games don't think of themselves as gamers they think themselves as having a social experience with their friend and when they get into it their farm or their city and the other people they play games with becomes part of their identity Facebook Linkedin last.fm Flickr these products all help shape network identity hence a key reason I invested the next the third part of network literacy is understanding networked information information is critical for all professionals but what's key is having the right information at the right time if you're Network literate you understand that this information flows within a network the quantity of information in the world is increasing at an exponential rate there's more information than anyone can know it's not just about access to information being an expert has less to do with accumulating the most information and more about knowing how to find the right information and there are lots of instances when search engines don't help you find information for example who is the best person to ask advice to build something to provide a service to approach it a company what should I do this evening with respect to a certain problem which of these two conflicting pieces of information should I believe your network not Google not a magazine is where you get help with these judgment calls the network age brings the technologies help us with this I'll give two personal examples that show acting on a network of information first a reference technique when I'm when I'm evaluating an entrepreneur for example someone has just been proposed as someone I should look at it's an investment I'll identify people who know this person and I will drop the old did also know me and I'll drop them an email saying hey do you know this person and how do you rate them 1 to 10 if you get back a lot of sevens that's a failure if you get back a bunch of 8 9s that's really great if it's below 7 it's a lot putting in an email something that's kind of referentially strange but maybe if they really you know they have a strong viewer they don't care and if it's above 9 maybe they don't have a good judgment what what basically it comes down to is I can now use the network to very quickly get a kind of a radar pulse and get a guide to webinar of the hundreds of intrapreneurs that I could spend time with this week that these would need the people to spend time with and something that's possible now in terms of networking information so we arrived at the fourth and final part of network literacy network capabilities when you truly see networks it changes the way that you plan and strategize you move differently when you see the networks around you I'll illustrate with two personal examples first venture capital I don't form a thesis and then go look for entrepreneurs who fit that thesis I actually positioned myself in the network and sort of and talked to the folks who do the sorts of things that I do so that they bring me interesting companies and interesting entrepreneurs it's the style has networks not informational I don't put out a listing saying investments here please right it's it's all about how I live and act within the network network literacy is key to the startup of you having a robust and varied network helps you as an individual accomplish key tasks in building your career just as an entrepreneur builds their company you can jump off the jet the jammed escalator and start moving in your network and you can navigate this hot flat and crowded world with a little help from your friends yes Susan Cain even an introvert network age presents many challenges to how we work and thrive and I hope that you know governments and stimulus packages and education and immigration there's all a bunch of things that need to happen but if you believe as I do that the surest way to build the future you want is to empower every individual I hope that you agree that network literacy and the startup review is for everyone as an important way to shape our future because the startup of you is both singular and plural of the word you it is how we build our future as individuals and as the crowd what does that mean next well that's where we go from here thank you Thank You Reid so first of all congratulations on your look the startup of you it just came out I know that and so a question for you so it's easy for us and this for people like you and me and many of the people here to get quite exhilarated by the networked world and the potential of it but it's also important to look at some of the unintended consequences and there's some really interesting and important debates going on right now about privacy what does it mean that so many companies can know so deeply about our lives how do you think about that the flip side or the dark side of the networked world well I think the key thing is there's lots of different perspectives there's individual there's a company the government the key thing is to make sure when it's framed to us as oh there's this thing happening with information you don't know what it is it's always scary on that framing right right however when it's like oh this is how this service is being provided to you or this is what you're getting from it and this is how you're interacting with it you have a certain amount of transparency and openness about it it's a lot less scary and if you see actually decade by decade our notion about what's okay with privacy shifts it moves because we go oh that's okay and that's not scary and that's the that's how we chart through and the key thing for all three of these perspectives is to make sure that we continue doing the innovation realizing that the line will move to what's good for us mm-hmm and would you have any specific recommendations either for people who run companies who are making a lot of these decisions about what we're doing with actually let's start left you have any anything to say to the people who run companies who are collecting quite a lot of data about each one how should they be behaving don't think the world that we use internally that we started very early at LinkedIn was we obviously have a bunch of like you know plans and here's a building features and everything else but if you can't publish what we're doing on the front page of New York Times and hold up your head with your friends don't do it it's a good guideline I like it what about for the individual for the individual I think it is going up scary data well for the individual I think it's one of those things where do you trust yeah you have to figure out you trust the services and you know part of what there's at least a commercial alignment of interest because services get punished if they if they cross the line which is a good thing yes and so I think it comes down to you know making sure that you have a sense of what's going on and that also you know in terms of which space you're in is is the likely to be something threatening about this data so for example your location data a little scary in some circumstances which movies you like we can live with that all right Reid Hoffman thank you so much but it's right

Channel: TED Archive

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Keywords: TED, Archive

Id: 3h0wSWJGzYs

Length: 21min 23sec (1283 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 26 2018