public life
the kind of classic has an offer of essays and books I realize that thats
dozens guns and old-school form of media which is a there's other forms of media
and media is the designer the form that public intellectuals can operate in and
said well actually softwares transforming the world and there is all
kinds of different ways that software affects how we think of ourselves how we
communicate how we form an image of how the world works and how we connect with
each other as I well I never really thought about being a business person
and by the way even being an entrepreneur at that time you will be
entrepreneurial oh I guess it was only years after I'd started I was startling
den which is covered third start up those IOU's entrepreneurs a word that
describes me like I understand that that's a word that applies to me but it
wasn't like my goal is to be a hard boner what I realize is that actually
creating software products could actually have the similar kind of public
intellectual impact and if it didn't have as much of an impact as I'd like
maybe I can make enough money that I could then not need to find myself
through I could have the money to sour in so therefore I could become a public
intellectual writing myself and so it's kind of a plan a and Plan B so I came
back from Oxford first time since maybe since I was in junior high and how it's
structured strategic planning that I knew exactly how do I need to come
figure out this software thing in Silicon Valley and so I came back
without any concrete plans and had my second week of living in my dad's house
is ok so you gonna go get a job now I'm like well I was gonna research Eliza why
don't you research while you get a job and so high
I was fortunate this is one of the things where I had some of the theory
pieces of the fact that we live and work in a networked age now and maybe it's
good instincts matter but I just took on your friends and saying okay where's
where's a good place to work and one of my close friends
Germany's Stefan hack his roommate Jesse Eisenberg and I was working at Apple
time he said oh well as long as a great company and so stubborn but yes I'm
touch with each other and my first job and it being an apple computer
the year old group most people think that means for electronic world actually
was employee world cuz it was it was originally funded for the replacement of
a very innovative early programmable called Apple Inc and then they soon
realized was an online revolution so they pivoted but they pivoted
essentially without a lot of strong backing from the company the company
really wanted a replacement for Apple and they weren't really had made a
decision to engage in online services and so it can't hurt me that if you
didn't have the right coherent strategy that at least you knew what you were
going to even if you're pivoting and changing you had a bye into that he
would lead to a lot of artifacts would cause the project to fail and this is
actually one of IndyCar's lot of big company projects to fail because they
don't have a potential enough of a mandate to both have the initial
strategic target and the changes and permits that need to happen along with
it usually those projects fail I'm pretty badly and E-world was basically a
failure although because I meant to remind their James Isaacs had during the
negotiations said ok well that's where they license the america online platform
has a look let's throw in this term that we're not we don't really interested in
because will allow it to be negotiated outcome when the negotiation tactics is
throwing a set of terms are you can you can remove them in order to get things
that you want to ask for 5% warrants in america online as it turned out that
that that condition stock and they want america online and become so valuable
that there was more valuable than the entire cost of the world project so at
the end of the day even though Apple shut it down there she made money on the
project
Oxford I realized that software might be an interesting medium for pursuing
public intellectual I knew that when I was interested in software was
essentially how we can understand ourselves and our identity how
interested other people interested our relationship how we shape the world how
we communicate with people who we collaborated with people and had
exposure to the internet from Stanford because I'd interned at the Center for
study of language and information i dun the computational course with smoke
systems now it was just before the commercialization of the internet and so
when I came out I originally was thinking I was going to design this is
an old school term personal information managers to work on those sorts of
products are we doing this
within about a month to being here I realize america online is growing
compuserve was beginning to be paid attention to prodigy
young people today would be a no idea what i'm talking bout with anything
other than maybe america online and I realized the online revolution was the
area that would want to participate in particular is because when you thought
about me interest in network error with a we are on a network together and what
becomes possible was precisely the kind of thing that I wanted to help shape and
I had a whole stack of ideas on it I was young and novice and experienced the
businessperson or as an entrepreneur and so how do you for a business like what
product of years that was relatively straightforward although there was still
a lot of learning there but how do you started company how do you get financing
a business model now the fortunate thing about early consumer and is that
everyone was fairly novice in this because there were different business
rules are different ways you did customer acquisition there were
different technologies of play and so anyway I had realized that the way the
capital markets work is there any other kind of
open for specific sector in which case as a first-time entrepreneur you get
financing weather closed which case it's very difficult to make sure you have
some very deep seasoned experienced and so I went to work through my job at
Apple very quickly through my judgment it's a very quickly as I realized that I
didn't know how long the capital markets they open and I needed to go and try to
start a company and get some new product ideas out and so I quit my job at
Fujitsu in July 27 my first company social was financed in November 1997 was
called social relationships don't have the time and I later renamed it The
Social Network I realized I wanted something was more broad than just a
dating service in terms of concept
part of what happens to the Paypal storytelling tennis fun because in
August of 2000 paper how burned twelve million dollars in one month it didn't
really have a dime of revenue in the expert the cost curve is exponentially
ending so Peter Max and I did a offside for Labor Day weekend I think it was one
of the weekends in September where we spent three days first day was what's
our strategy for how we change course for paper we could chart the mushroom
cloud from the plowing into the side of the mountain we can almost charged by
the hour when we would blow up I would send a mass merchant fortunately for us
and for the world that turned out to be a good strategy network as we had one we
use a lot of Star Wars metaphors you know the Conrad estar and one shot in
the trench it was like we had one strategy we could play another that with
enough time
so they are the foundation of LinkedIn is the insight that every individual
where their student or Bill Gates having a public professional identity that
helps you navigate your world work what Europe particularly seeking do is
extremely helpful not helpful both on an inbound basis because one of the truth
about living and working in the network page is that you have to have a strategy
for how your found and then how the right signal gets through to you and
being found because there are millions of people out there who have to think
each CPU processor each agent each person had found by the right person the
right people and how do you do business with them and also how do you find the
right people how do you find expertise how do you find business opportunities
how do you find jobs how do you find how to invest in yourself and both of those
are through the network as a as a fabric has a foundation and so I realized my
time at social now at a computer and Max PayPal that this would be the one of the
fundamental ways to transform people's lives is to enrich their economic
opportunity to enrich their ability to either work to start companies to
navigate whatever economic life is important to them and then that would be
a worthy goal of 10 12 plus years of my life and still going on today most
people coming down don't really realize how strong the tools are his most people
think I look for work they go we have job listings are men claim they go and
look at the jobless tax perfectly valid thing to do but the really interesting
things said well who you know who is in our language of intent to degrees away
from you
who can help give you guidance who can say all this company is a good place to
work with his opportunity here goes all the way back to my work my business
career started with a call to us now for a friend whose roommate was working at
Apple how do you discovered those opportunities with that all comes from
work and so even today with you know well over 300 million people in like 10
people still have most people have yet to learn how to use their network in
order to to ally with your network in order to find the right economic
opportunities that some of the things that where I am so we're not we're still
working on the long ways to go still
one of the very good piece of advice that my freshman advisor at Stanford
gave me in order to figure out a major was to read through courses in the
crease and circle the courses ahead take before I left then figure out what the
coherent pattern was and what I realized my central interest was how we as people
as humans
speak reason communicate understand each other and so at Stanford that led me to
a major at those called symbolic systems which is this camp medley computer
science philosophy linguistics psychology some mathematical logic has
pretty much the set of it and while I was doing that I realized that we didn't
have very good models for what it was to think what it was to speak what was
understand each other and so I got more interested in philosophy has a
possibility for understanding how we know we can form images of the world how
it is possible we can communicate and that's where the specific kind of
scholarly interest and for us we came from now that all being said when I left
Stanford my primary thought was going to become an academic and the class that I
most wanted to teach was a meaning of life class and you could call it
philosophy as well although that's not what professional academic philosophers
would think of his philosophy but I also have a car brought interest in kuwait is
the human experience what is the meaning of human life
school I read a lot of science fiction so Frank Herbert's Dune and Orson Scott
Card in Ender's Game and his kind of imagination but what about what might
humanity evolved to what did you find to be humanity's cause the great science
fiction as awesome as a lot of not so good science fiction as well and then
once I got to Stanford and a another important reason isolated Stanford is a
program called structured liberal education which is this
two-thirds of your freshman year is spent studying a combination of
philosophy history art and in the movement that back when I was there was
called Western civilization of the socialization already had two world
civilization so you would read Chinese philosophers and a number of others and
at that point I started realizing that people are writing essays about what the
meaning of life is why how it is that we should live a good life and at that
point you know there's a there's a set of the classics there is you know
everything from Greek philosophers to chinese philosophers but perhaps the
most the book that most people were not heard of them had a very big impact on
me when I was a freshman was a media critic Neil Postman arabicon amusing
ourselves to death
public discourse in the age of television and I began to realize that
the structural means of communication structure means of the Marshall McLuhan
comedian is the message actually shaped identity shaped how we perceive the
world how we proceed to each other and how he came to judgments about what is
truth and that's where I started getting interested in how careful thought and
language were important how the way that we communicate in a medium by which we
communicated we
crafted messages was extremely important to a better life
still think
a long way to go and networks and marketplaces whether other payments
network social networks make some investments in Bitcoin has a really out
there kind of currency network and I'm a huge the marketplaces like Airbnb and
others
the sharing economy to sharing resources with the means for transport companies
like uber and left now there's still a ton more to come there are some very
interesting things I think coming in the intersection of of networks and biology
and computation whether its personalized medicine targeting health by genetics
being able to actually even modify genetics have you had a genetic
condition that was produced position to extreme ill health you may actually does
this technology called crisper that might be able to to both understand it
and also change it is I think a lot of transformation of Education coming
through networks you know you got everything from the Khan Academy 2010 my
investments moto as a social network for k-12 that's what I mean there's more
social networks and so I think there is a i think you know to use a baseball
metaphor it may very well be anyone still