Lecture 13 - How to be a Great Founder (Reid Hoffman)

Thank you, Sam. So, when I look through the syllabus of this class and thought about what I could possibly add that would be useful in addition to the very skills, one of the things that I've been thinking about has been how do you think about yourself as a founder?

How do you think about what the skillset is, and what are the things that you should be thinking about in terms of, "Am I ready? How do I get ready? Is it the right thing for me?" These sorts of things. So let's start with the perception of what a great founder is. Classically, you know, this tends to be Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos.

And it's an image of founder as superwoman or Superman, right? Who has this, like, panopticon of skills. I can use the word panopticon because I'm here at Stanford. But it's things like, "I know how to do product market fit. I'm great at product. I'm great at strategy. I'm great at management. I can fundraise", right? I can do all of these different skills.

Part of what you're looking for in a great founder, in the kind of theory of the founder as super person, is I'm looking for someone who is awesome at all these things. They are well-rounded; they're diverse; they can bat on all skills. And you know, part of how I found this kind of emphasized in my own entrepreneurial journey is I remember reading an article that said, you know, Bill Gates, who is smarter than Einstein, right?

And you're like, "Well, look, Bill Gates is really smart and is very accomplished," but I'm not quite sure he's smarter than Einstein. Secretary phrase that even Bill would want to be actually next to. And it's partially because I think it's this image of founder as super person, which is that a great founder is someone who can do anything; you know, jump over tall, tall buildings in a single bound— all of these sorts of things.

And the reality, right, is a founder is someone who deals with a ton of different headaches. And no one is universally super-powered. Generally speaking, you hope to have a couple of superpowers, some things that are unique to you, some things that are unique to the problem you're trying to solve, some things that may help you give an edge.

Because actually competitive differentiation and competitive edge is super important. But it’s not—it's not actually, in fact, a function of genius. And matter of fact, frequently, it's very hard to tell the difference between madness and genius because usually, it's the results that play out. And sometimes when you're dealing with uncertain environments, you may even be a genius and later be thought to be a mad person, or you may be a mad person and you turn out to be lucky and you're later thought to be a genius.

So it's, it's actually kind of a challenging set of like how do you think about, you know, these sets? You know, what is the whole set of skills? And when us mere mortals, you know, come into this kind of battle, what is the right way to think about it?

And so, you know, when I thought about this question of how is one a great founder, you know, part of what you get to is, oh, and actually this is probably the slide that for people on this, this may have been a suboptimal choice for people on video, but it's like these are all skills that are super important, right? These are all things that you say, "Well, okay, this is really, really important to do," and you must, in fact, actually do this well.

And it begins to look like a superhuman task. And so what I did is I decided to take a subset of these and focus on some of the interesting things to think about. What is it that actually makes a great founder? Because it's actually not that you score 10 out of 10 in all these; you know, you'll be the entrepreneurial Olympiad, but you are actually the best at all of these things.

So let's start with team. So one way to kind of, I think, talk about exploding that kind of the myth of the super founder is that actually, in fact, usually it's best to have two or three people on a team rather than a solo founder. It's not to say solo founders don't actually play out, and they can successfully, but...