This transcript is generated with the help of AI and is lightly edited for clarity.
REID:
I’m Reid Hoffman.
ARIA:
And I’m Aria Finger.
REID:
We want to know what happens if, in the future, everything breaks humanity’s way.
ARIA:
Typically, we ask our guests for their outlook on the best possible future. But now, every other week, I get to ask Reid for his take.
REID:
This is Possible.
ARIA:
This week we’re talking about creativity, the creative process, and the future of food. We had such a great conversation with Massimo Bottura about these topics, and I’m excited to get Reid’s takes. So we often talk about creativity, and we also talk about execution. And so I want to talk to you about: how do you bridge that? You’re dreaming, you’re thinking of a new company, you’re thinking of a new app. How do you go from thinking about the thing to putting it into reality? With LinkedIn, you had a vision for this new network that would provide skills and jobs and opportunity to all these people. How do you get to execution from the idea?
REID:
So one of the things I love about entrepreneurship is it’s kind of—to do it well, you’re always blending dualities. So it’s kind of like you’re long-term focused, but you’re solving the immediate short-term. You’re having a vision that you’re kind of struggling to get to in the future, but you’re being flexible, and you’re adapting, and you’re learning, and you’re changing what you’re doing. And that is an important part of the creativity, because the notion that, you know, you sit in a room—a garage, canonically—and you like, you go, “oh, I know exactly what to do,” that’s not what happened. You know, when, when Bill Gates was creating MS-DOS, he was not thinking Microsoft Office. Right? You know, it’s the, “okay, I, I start here and I understand that I’m trying to go there.” Like a computer on every desk and software running it and Microsoft providing that software.
REID:
But the way that you learn and you realize and you adjust and that kind of synthetic—you know, whether it’s a yin and a yang, or kind of, you know, a thesis and antithesis and the synthesis or, you know, a blend of opposites or, you know, oxymorons or whatever, it’s the whole thing of that, that creative balance, which is a combination of art and science, which is one of the things that’s really important about the creativity, the judgment, the vision, the dynamism, the flexibility that goes into entrepreneurship. And it’s one of the things where—it’s one of the reasons I kind of, you know, always tend to be somewhat deflationary on the, you know, “here are the four things you really need to understand as an entrepreneur.” It doesn’t have to say that those aren’t good things to have in the mix. But part of it is you’re navigating, like the, the best parallel, if you said, “okay, what, what word would you use if it wasn’t entrepreneur?” would be “pioneer.” Because you’re kind of going into an unknown space and you’re adjusting to it and you’ve brought some stuff with you and you’re discovering some new stuff, and you have a team and you’re figuring that out as you go. And so that dynamism and flexibility and frankly, creativity—which does involve skills you learned and things that are part of it—but also is the creation of the new.
ARIA:
When you were creating LinkedIn, was there a specific moment when you were like, let’s flip the switch? Or not, or you were like, “let’s wait a week, or let’s do it a week early”—like when did you decide like this is ready for prime time? Because you famously have said, “if you’re not embarrassed by your first product, you launched too late.” So how did you know in that moment what came?
REID:
So the first thing is, by the way, that is a, you know, famous—infamous—saying that, you know, applies to software and especially consumer internet software. If you were launching a hardware product and you’re embarrassed, you’re probably dead, right? So it’s kind of it—but the idea was to show that in, especially in kind of internet software, mobile software now—what you’re trying to do is you’re trying not to overly think the whole future. You’re trying to get out frequently described as minimum viable product to get product market fit and blah, blah, blah. But the—but you’re trying to get out the most basic thing you can to start learning. To not overly presume. And obviously there are geniuses, you know, Steve Jobs with the iPhone and so forth. And it does happen. And that’s like the .00001% case.
REID:
So for the rest of us mere mortals, it’s better to get something out there, be learning from it and adjusting even as you maintain a true north. And so, for example, when we launched LinkedIn on, you know, kind of May 5th, basically my whole team didn’t want to launch, right? And they were like, “there’s not enough, there’s not features yet. There’s not enough to do. It’s not really fully usable.” And it was—there was a feature that they had really wanted to include called contact finder, which is an ability to say to your network, “I’m looking for, you know, a person who can help me edit a podcast” or something, or “I’m looking for expertise on financing to consult with.” And I kind of go through my network or you know, “I’m looking for a business deal.
REID:
I’m looking for a company that does this,” you know, that kind of like, who would be the person that you might know that I would forward to you? And so I gathered the whole team, and I said, “okay, we may very well discover that after we launch that the thing that we most need to build is contact finder. And if on May 6th and May 7th, that’s the thing we decide, then we’ll be building it and we’ll be adding it in. That’s exactly what we’ll be doing.” The whole point of this principle is to not overly presume that we know exactly what we need to do, but be learning from engagement with our customers, with our members, with the market, and seeing what’s going on. And today, 20 years later, we still haven’t built contact finder. And that’s the—that’s the point of that launch and go and learn as a, as a way of going. Now you had to have, of course, a website that worked. You had to be able to invite people. You had to be able to do searches, you had to be able to communicate with the people you’re connected to. Because obviously if you just kind of said, “I put up a blank webpage—look, I’ve launched, I’m embarrassed,” yeah but, you’re not learning anything from it. Because the whole thing is that speed of learning towards a thing that could make a real difference for your customers.
ARIA:
So we know AI is going to affect everything. And obviously we’ve been talking about creativity. People are talking about copyright and newspapers and text-to-speech. Actually not a lot of people are talking about how AI and technology are going to affect the future of food. Do you have thoughts—how it will change?
REID:
I think AI is going to affect everything, just as you say. And I think there will be an effect on food on multiple levels. So there is obviously, at the baseline, what you could already do today with Pi and other things, which is: “I have these ingredients in my fridge. What can I make?” Right? And so it’s here now. It’s not like, “oh, in the future” and so forth. It’s here now. It could be the, you know, like you could feed in a recipe and you could say, “I’d like this to be healthy,” or “I’d like this to be gluten-free,” or “my friend’s vegan, what should I do?” All of that is there now. And so there’s that. There’s the questions on, for example, again, as kind of the personal intelligence, the Pi—and Pi can do this well.
REID:
Like, say for example, I’m making food, I might be saying like, OK, I’m a farmer, I’m a rancher. I’m like, okay, how do I navigate this thing with the chickens, the pigs? You know, like one of the things that—you know, I actually was talking to a friend of mine who was visiting a farm, and he was like, “the ravens were getting into the hen coop and killing the chickens trying to get the eggs.” And it was like, okay, well what would you do about that? And how would you navigate that? So that personal intelligence, that co-pilot, will affect all the human roles around this. Now obviously the science fiction thing tends to be the, “Oh, you’re going to have a robot waiter and a robot chef and a robot—”…
REID:
And you will have some of those things in various ways. And, you know, there have been some start-ups already, like, you know, your food is made in a little cubicle that you open up. And so there’s a role for that. There’s value there. But what I think that people frequently forget in these things, in technological development, is something that I learned from John Naisbitt with Megatrends, which is: “high tech/high touch.” Yes, the tech continues to grow and amplify our lives in various ways, but then we adjust to it. And it’s important to us as human beings to also have high touch—the human touch, the tactile experience, the humanity in the loop for this. And so yes, we will have all those things, but it’s not—you know, and if it was Black Mirror, that would be the dystopia of the robot waiter gone wild, you know, like force-feeding you food or something like that.
REID:
But we’ll actually, in fact, have various elements of where—and which elements are, how humans will be in the loop will be different at different times, at different circumstances as we evolve. And so I think that food won’t become a completely non-human thing. Obviously we have to eat. We have to experience, we’re connecting with other people. You know, part of the thing that is, I think, you know, all of human history is we break bread together. We’re companions. We have, you know, we have breakfast together because we break our fast. And that social connectivity, what makes us human, will still be there. Will still be the high-touch part of it as we’re navigating. And I frankly think like people go, “Oh my God, I fear change. I fear what technology will do.” And so they create these horror shows, and you know, well actually, in fact, it’s pretty easy to navigate. It’s not difficult to say, well, how do we keep, you know, just keep bringing humanity back to it. And that’s part of the reason why like the, you know, gave the speech in Bologna about, you know, remembering the renaissance, remembering humanism. Because we only need to be thinking about it, even in small ways, as we shape our human future.
REID:
Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network. It’s hosted by Aria Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Shaun Young. Possible is produced by Katie Sanders, Edie Allard, Sara Schleede, Adrien Behn, and Paloma Moreno Jiménez. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.
ARIA:
Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapieva, Ian Alas, Greg Beato, Ben Relles, Parth Patil, and Little Monster Media Company.