Founder of LinkedIn: How do you do a founder

Absrtact: This is the 13th lesson notes of YC pioneering course. We can go to YC entrepreneurship class Chinese community to watch this lesson Chinese video. What qualities and skills should a good founder have? How do you think you're ready or are you going to be a

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This is the 13th lesson of YC Entrepreneurship class notes. We can go to YC entrepreneurship class Chinese community to watch this lesson Chinese video.

What qualities and skills should a good founder have? How do you think you're ready or are you ready to be a good founder?

YC Entrepreneurship Class 13th class invited Reid Hoffman, who is the co-founder and CEO of the business social networking site LinkedIn, and the founder and senior vice president of online payment platform PayPal, and became a powerful venture capital company Greylock Partner As a director of well-known internet companies such as Mozilla and Zynga. As a very successful entrepreneur, Reid, known as Silicon Valley's "well-connected", is also active in the Silicon Valley Angel Investment Circle, helping and investing more than 60 startups, including but not limited to Facebook, Aviary.

In most people's minds, founders seem to be as proficient in all skills as Superman, able to easily navigate product positioning, product design and construction, business strategy deployment, management operations, and financing. Some even think Bill Gates is smarter than Einstein, though Bill Gates himself may disagree. In fact, no one is really omnipotent, the founder is only able to deal with a variety of different problems.

Reid puts forward a few of the skills and qualifications that a good founder needs:

(a) founding team

composition: Two to three founders are best compared to single founders.

Unlike the legend of Superman's single founder, two or three founders are normally the best choice for startups. From an investor's point of view, Reid pointed out that because the founder needs to have a lot of skills, but nobody is perfect, everyone has a shortage of places. So having two to three founders ensures that you can make up for each other's shortcomings and offer a variety of solutions to different problems.

co-founder of the choice: sincerely willing to have the co-founder and give Absolute Trust.

Reid suggests that when the founders are looking for a founding team, they must be genuinely willing to recruit the founders and give them absolute trust. Because it's common for startups to have founders working together in less than a year, it's often fatal for startups.

(ii) Location

Reid proposed that judging a founder is not good depends on whether he or she will pick the location of the company. A good founder needs to find a place that has the most valuable network of relationships with the business models involved in the company, and they realize that they are not superhuman and can run a company anywhere.

Reid stressed that Silicon Valley is not suitable for all entrepreneurial projects, and he cites two examples to prove it:

The first is Groupon. Even though Groupon is a software company, it cannot be a startup in Silicon Valley. It's clear that Silicon Valley has a lot of quality networks and will use mobile terminals based on internet technology. But early Groupon needed a huge number of sales teams, a model that would not only be neglected in Silicon Valley, but would not be able to recruit talent, but would be challenged. So Groupon chose to start his own business in Chicago, where its operating model was well supported. This case proves that software companies can also be successful outside Silicon Valley.

For example, if you want to start a new fashion company, going to Silicon Valley will not be a good idea. It may be a good idea to start a fashion company, but you still need network resources that can provide support for your business model, which is not the ideal place to be.

Reid used a metaphor to describe entrepreneurship, which is like jumping from a cliff and assembling a plane, essentially the default dying mode. So you have to use every possible means to win. That is why Reid believes that the best founders will move in any case to have a network and resources in place to do their best to improve the company's survival.

(iii) Reverse thinking

It is very simple to have converse thinking, but it is difficult to have correct reverse thinking. Reid talks about reverse thinking is relative to the audience, to have the right reverse thinking, the founder must find an absolutely intelligent and relevant field of experts to explore entrepreneurial ideas. If even the experts think the idea is a serious challenge, then the idea is enough to reverse. At the same time the founders have to think positively about what information other experts do not know, but the founders know. This is the key to deciding whether the idea of reverse thinking is right.

Reid raised his own example of LinkedIn. In the early days of LinkedIn, Reid was interested in finding all the smart people he wanted to talk to about his ideas, and two-thirds of smart people thought Reid was stupid. And the reason they do this is because Reid says it's a social-networking product, and it's only worth it when a lot of people get involved, and that's 500,000 to 1 million, which sounds more like a myth. But what these commentators do not know is that Reid has come up with a series of methods that allow many people to endorse the vision of LinkedIn and become its early adopters, allowing LinkedIn to gradually expand its user base until it reaches the number that can produce real value.

So when an entrepreneur wants to have an idea of reverse thinking, he or she must know why the smart people disagree with the idea. If the entrepreneur knows more than anything other intelligent people do not know, then the idea is really reverse thinking.

Finally, Reid proposed that there are many ways to achieve reverse thinking. For example, an idea that is thought to be a small one is actually a big idea. For example, people will think that most customer-oriented startups can only succeed with high growth. But LinkedIn is a classic example of a combination of growing rules that has no high growth.

(iv) centralization, decentralization

For certain things, should the founder do it himself? Or should we be hiring?

Reid believes that the founders should take care of both, in a centralized mode of decentralization, and in different circumstances and time to give one of the same 100% of energy. In this case, a good founder is judged by whether he or she is capable of managing similar contradictory situations.

(v) Persistent and flexible

Entrepreneurs have a common vision and stand firm in the face of adversity. But at the same time, entrepreneurs will be able to pass the data and customer feedback appropriate adjustment of their ideas, that is, to adapt. Reid thinks that a good entrepreneur needs to be able to identify the circumstances under which they need to be rigid and where they need to be flexible.

Persistent

Sometimes entrepreneurs ' confidence can increase even in times of adversity, but when confidence is lowered it does not mean you have to jump out. Reid cited a few examples to show that in adversity, there is a solution to the frustration of confidence. PayPal, LinkedIn, and Airbnb have all experienced periods of helplessness. In 2000 of August, PayPal melted into 12 million dollars, but an exponential increase in spending, and a sustained 0 gain, constantly hit the team's confidence. However, the team decided to chop the horse, and immediately came up with a plan to solve the problem.

Flexible

Reid believes that a good founder must have a firm faith, but at the same time can be smart to listen to other people's criticism, negative evaluation and so on. A good founder needs both confidence and patience to be flexible enough to deal with things inside and outside the company. Founders may sometimes need to spend 90% of their energy dealing with something, depending on the status of the problem, at other times it may take 80% of energy.

In terms of flexibility, a good founder also needs to be able to adjust his vision based on the constant accumulation and change of data. Reid talked about early PayPal, where they designed a T-shirt with the word "new global currency". While in essence they are creating a global business payment electronic network, they wanted to build a banking model in the early days, and they wanted to build a debt model, but as the data accumulated, they gradually adjusted their vision to a popular business model to suit the needs of the market.

(vi) Adventure Spirit

In general, the founders are more willing to take risks than others, because the chances of a reverse thinking that even a wise man would not approve of are often accompanied by huge risks. On the other hand, founders need to master how to intelligently choose risk, how to focus on risk, and thus greatly improve the success rate. Of course, in addition to improving the success rate, Reid proposed that the founder can also by thinking about their investment theory will improve or reduce confidence, so as to control and reduce risk.

(vii) Long-term and short-term vision

A good founder needs to be able to focus on accomplishing short-term goals while having a long-term vision. If you lose the long-term direction completely, you will not get good results. But you will fail if you fail to solve your immediate problems. Excellent founders need to improve the product at the same time bearing in mind the long-term strategic direction, and coordinate the distribution of product channels, which is more than the basis for products.

In general, Reid points out that to be a good founder requires some "super power". Popular Point, if the founder of a good product people, to have good leadership skills, can dredge the relationship of resources, convince others, have a firm belief, and realize whether they are in the right direction. In fact, good founders can be diverse, can come from different backgrounds, and they usually have extraordinary talents in different fields. For example, Ma Yun was only an English teacher before he was an electric dealer. Putting aside all the qualities and skills mentioned above, Reid finally stressed that there is no fixed skill that a good founder needs to have at the outset, and that having extraordinary learning and adaptability is what good founders need.