Understanding Alpha Tendencies

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People have different leadership instincts about like, I must be in charge. And one of the things that when you're composing an organization, understanding where alpha tendencies are and how they will cause someone to behave is really important. Some of that is very strongly virtuous. Like as an investor, I look for people who have very strong big ambitions. But on the other hand, you have to look at it. If you're like, for example, someone has a really strong alpha tendencies and they're not kind of like working for the person they're working for, that could be disruptive. Then sometimes you're in a case where i call it repressed alpha, which is you the person doesn't

Few figures have shaped the way we think about business over the past 20 years more than Reid Hoffman. The co-founder of LinkedIn and former PayPal executive is also a wildly successful venture capitalist, author and podcaster, but he didn’t get to his place as a Silicon Valley giant without making plenty of crucial decisions. On this episode Hoffman discusses lessons learned from decades spent as a hands-on operator and investor, including what he knows about scaling that others miss, the three principles of decision making, how to constantly evolve your learning pattern, and why the best leaders adapt to the crisis at hand. Hoffman is perhaps best known for co-founding the professional networking site LinkedIn, which he started in 2003 and later sold for a reported $26.2 billion to Microsoft in 2016. Prior to founding LinkedIn, Hoffman was one of the first employees at PayPal, where he served as an executive vice president. He is also a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners, an investor in Airbnb, the author of a series of successful business books including Masters of Scale, and the host of the podcast of the same name.

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