Many professionals are turned off by the idea of “networking.” They think it’s about slimy glad-handing and using others to get ahead. But when pursued with an eye toward leveraging your skills and experiences to help other people succeed, building a professional network becomes something else entirely – a chance at authentic human connection that…
Risk tends to get a bad rap. We associate it with things like losing money in the stock market, or riding a motorcycle without a helmet. But risk isn’t the enemy—it’s a permanent, pervasive, unavoidable part of life. Risk is the flip side of every opportunity, every career move. When George Clooney aggressively auditioned and sold…
Interconnectedness feels good emotionally, but professionally it is limiting because the same information recycles through your local network of like-minded friends. If a close friend or ally knows about a job opportunity, you probably already do too. That’s why the breadth and reach of your network is valuable. When thinking about how to expand your…
Navigate Professional Challenges with Network Intelligence Our educational system trains us to memorize facts stored in textbooks and then regurgitate them on an exam. Better schools will “teach you how to learn,” but it’s still not learning by doing, and it’s still not a particularly social undertaking. You study for a test and you take…
Right now, your network is opening and closing certain doors that shape your future — sometimes without your even knowing it. The people who exert this influence on your life represent three distinct types of relationships that matter in a professional context. Professional Allies These are your friends who serve as important career sounding boards/advisors/advocates.…
Despite the fact that nothing important in life is done alone, we live in a hero-obsessed culture. If you survey the population, asking people how they think a company like Tesla skyrocketed to prominence, you’ll probably hear all about Elon Musk but not a peep about the team he built around him, which was essential…
In today’s world, the rules change — fast. Unexpected things happen: Strange shifts you couldn’t have imagined. Competition comes out of nowhere. Technologies disrupt the playing field. Jobs, even entire industries, disappear. The very fabric of the game changes, and whole new careers are born. In the early 2000s, if you told people that in…
Entrepreneurs must continually make choices in situations where they don’t have all the information they need. They have to make choices into the fog of the unknown. To meet this constant uncertainty, entrepreneurs use action-based trial and error to test specific hypotheses. They place small bets and respond to the outcomes. To grow and change…
As a Silicon Valley VC, I love to invest in internet franchises that possess strong “growth loops.” What’s a growth loop? It’s a feature of a business that yields compounding value—value that multiplies over time—rather than one-off gains. Think of a flywheel: You turn the flywheel once and it keeps spinning on its own. Momentum builds…
What do you do when it’s only the second quarter and you’re already out of chips? Or it’s Valentine’s Day and someone was expecting flowers three hours ago? Or you’ve got a Zoom pitch to a new client starting at noon and you haven’t shaved in a week because you haven’t shopped for razors in…
Today’s young people haven’t been ruined by social media. They’ve been equipped to unleash the power of a new technological era. The class of 2022 finds itself graduating into a surprisingly strong work environment, especially compared with its immediate predecessors. For the moment, employers are hiring again, and the labor market is relatively favorable even…
Make Market Realities Work for You No matter how much heart and hard work you throw into something, no matter how good your intentions, no matter how strong your convictions—if real customers don’t want what you’re offering, you’ll go out of business. In the immortal words of Alec Baldwin’s character in Glengarry Glen Ross, “Third…
Ten years ago, when Ben Casnocha and I published The Startup of You, we wrote that we have entered the Age of the Inconceivable, an era in which things we previously couldn’t even have imagined happen again and again and again. Now that we have updated and are re-releasing the book a decade later, this is…
When you hear a member of Congress talking about the tech industry these days, there’s a good chance it’s in a negative context. Republicans rail against the companies that have enabled everyday citizens to project their voices with a freedom and scope that even presidents could not have matched just a couple decades ago. Democrats rhapsodize about dismantling some…
I’ll be speaking with Michael Dell at a Village Global event later this week. The event is private, but since I was impressed by Michael’s latest book, Play Nice But Win, I want to share some of my thoughts about it with a wider audience. So here are five key takeaways that resonated with me from Michael’s highly entertaining…