#248: The 10 Commandments of Startup Success with Reid Hoffman
The Tim Ferriss Show
How to Scale a Subpar Experience
Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, considers this so-called 11 star experience a prerequisite to scale. The first thing you have to do is build a product that is so good people spontaneously want to use it and tell their friends about it. He offers a cautionary tale in the following clip: Stripe, Dropbox, Airbnb took a long time to get the product right but when they did, all their effort was on generating demand.
On this special episode, we're going to share with you the "10 Commandments for Startup Success." They're drawn from the new podcast Masters of Scale, which is hosted by my friend and today's guest Reid Hoffman (@reidhoffman). Reid has been on the show before, and you might remember him as the co-founder of LinkedIn, and the partner at Greylock who invested early in Facebook, Airbnb, Zynga, and a bunch of other startups that experience dramatic success. On this new podcast, Reid shares his theories on how companies scale from zero to a gazillion, and he tests them with famous founders like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Reed Hastings of Netflix. He and his team pulled together a special remix for us to use on today's show -- distilling the very best, most actionable advice from the first season of Masters of Scale into these 10 commandments. They've included a lot material that hasn't aired yet. So even if you're already a subscriber, you'll hear some new things here. Stick around after we count down the 10 commandments because Reid was kind enough to answer a few of my questions. Please enjoy! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Four Sigmatic. I reached out to these Finnish entrepreneurs after a very talented acrobat introduced me to one of their products, which blew my mind (in the best way possible). It is mushroom coffee featuring chaga. It tastes like coffee, but there are only 40 milligrams of caffeine, so it has less than half of what you would find in a regular cup of coffee. I do not get any jitters, acid reflux, or any type of stomach burn. It put me on fire for an entire day, and I only had half of the packet. People are always asking me what I use for cognitive enhancement right now -- this is the answer. You can try it right now by going to foursigmatic.com/tim and using the code Tim to get 20 percent off your first order. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you'll be disappointed. This podcast is also brought to you by Headspace, the world's most popular meditation app (with more than four million users). It's used in more than 150 countries, and many of my closest friends swear by it. Try Headspace's free Take10 program -- 10 minutes of guided meditation a day for 10 days. It's like a warm bath for your mind. Meditation doesn't need to be complicated or expensive, and it's had a huge impact on my life. Try Headspace for free for a few days and see what I mean.
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