In this episode of Influencers, Andy speaks with LinkedIn Co-Founder and Greylock Partner, Reid Hoffman, about the incoming Biden administration, big tech regulation, fighting misinformation on social media, and what's in store for U.S./China relations.

Video Transcript

ANDY SERWER: Who better to weigh in on the challenges of a life at home than billionaire venture capitalist Reid Hoffman? An original member of the tech industry's PayPal Mafia, Hoffman was an early believer in social media, creating one of the internet's first social networks before launching the business-focused site LinkedIn.

Over the years, he's made big bets on companies like Facebook and Airbnb, and now sits on the board of some of the fastest growing startups in Silicon Valley. In this episode of "Influencers," I'm joined by Reid Hoffman as we discuss the future of the tech sector, the outcome of the 2020 election, and where he's putting his money to work as we look toward the near year.

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to "Influencers." I'm Andy Serwer. And welcome to our guest Reid Hoffman, entrepreneur, investor, venture capitalist, partner at VC firm Greylock, and Co-founder of LinkedIn. Reid, great to see you.

REID HOFFMAN: Great to see you as well, even in these modern pandemic times as we do this over Skype.

ANDY SERWER: Yeah, exactly. And so much to talk about, Pandemic and the election. Let's start with the election, Reid. And you have supported the Democrats and Joe Biden, invested resources into ousting President Trump. What's the most important reason why Joe Biden won?

REID HOFFMAN: I think the most important reason is actually, in fact, a need to return to stability, to unity rather than division, right? And then to apply expertise to questions like the pandemic. Because even though there might be some politicization about how bad is the pandemic and how much a shutdown is necessary, we should apply public health knowledge. We should apply scientific knowledge. We should apply economic knowledge in order to actually do good governance on it.

And I think it's very much a referendum on, no, no, it's not a reality television show. Good governance matters. And I think that's one of the things where Biden, who's a lifelong centrist, who's part of the reason why his inaugural message was, I am here to govern for the entire country for everyone's well-being, not just the people who voted for me, in stark contrast, obviously, to President Trump.

ANDY SERWER: Reid, it's refreshing to hear you speaking out, whether or not I even happen to agree with you politically, because there are a lot of people who won't, business people who won't speak out. And again, either side of the aisle. How hard is it for you to do that? Because obviously, you're alienating some people.

REID HOFFMAN: Well, I definitely get grief. I get grief whether it's in a LinkedIn context or generally. And that's frustrating because most of the places where I try to speak out on this, I'm speaking out on a basis of rule of law, anti-corruption.

It's one of the reasons why I actually posted on LinkedIn recently, kind of like what is the-- and on Greylock, why CEOs should speak up in politics in some times. Because it isn't that speaking up on politics is necessarily being partisan.

If you're kind of like, look, what we want is we want stability, we want actionability to kind of work together, those kinds of things, that claim, if it is partisan, that it's partisan only on the side of goodness. Now, there are other times where I will also make some claims because there's a particular value that I like and many of those values are on the Democratic side.

But obviously, I'm very pro-business. And very pro-entrepreneurship. I'm very pro-technology. So there's a stack of things where I will articulate those. But as business people, if we want a centrist country, we want to not be run by the extremes of either the left or the right, you do need to speak up with the things that are the baseline centrism. Rule of law, count every vote, peaceful transition of power. These things matter for the health of our country and for the health of business.

ANDY SERWER: Well, let's talk about that a little bit more, then. I mean, President Trump has said, I didn't lose the election and is challenging and contesting the results in specific states that he's lost by even an excess of 100,000 votes. He's lost the popular vote by close to 5 million. How do you think this is going to play out?

REID HOFFMAN: Well, I think ultimately, we will see a transition of power. I think we will see sabotage from Trump and his administration on that transition. I think that sabotage is essentially anti-American. It's anti not just rule of law and process, but in good governance, for all of us as American citizens who live here.

And that's, I think, because President Trump has fundamentally more approached governance as a reality television show, including the COVID stuff. Like, I have a good feeling that it's going to go away. Hey, maybe you can inject bleach, right? Because, of course, you're not talking to actually medical experts and doctors on this.

And I think that's going to be a real problem and I think it's going to have a lasting impact on the divisions in the country. Because actually, in fact, we should be saying, hey, we should be coming together. We should be building our way out of the pandemic.

That should be-- you could just imagine the superstars on the Republican side, George W. Bush and other folks kind of going, OK, this is actually, in fact, we should be coming together as a country. This is essentially what we should be doing.

And I think this refusal to admit it, to treating it like it's a reality television star, of like, you know Donald Trump is on "The Apprentice" and refuses to be fired, is simply one more dismissive of the health of American society.

ANDY SERWER: Does this hurt the economy, Reid? And maybe in particular, Silicon Valley, and what's the conversation there like?

REID HOFFMAN: Well, I think it definitely hurts the economy, because people frequently associate business only with free flowing capital, lower taxes, and lower regulation. And there's lots of things that help actually affect business.

Like, for example, a stable society that's predictable, an environment that you can invest in, and successful use of talent, a healthy and thriving middle class that can buy goods and services. And so actually, in fact, there's a lot of different approaches that are being pro-business, and this kind of chaos is anti-business, because it--

Now, relative to Silicon Valley, which, obviously, we're fortunate that technology is what's driving a lot of the changes in industry and in the future. So a lot of Silicon Valley investors and businesses are all benefiting from this.

Even in COVID, where we see Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, said it very well. In the first two months of the pandemic, he said, in two months, we've seen two years of digital transformation where people are using the technologies and adopting them more quickly and more thoroughly because they need to in order to keep business running. So it's been good for all that. But instability is bad for all business, including technology.

ANDY SERWER: You mentioned the social media platforms of which you are so familiar. How do you think they performed and what's your assessment of what happened during this election cycle?

REID HOFFMAN: So I think we're on a learning curve, and it kind of is unfortunate that we get to experience the learning curve versus get a complete plan and release it at scale. Because I think a lot of what has happened, which both Facebook and Twitter did in the last month, is stuff you wish they'd been doing for five plus years of, hey, this is actually counter to the experts, counter to facts.

This is dangerous. This is an incitement to violence. And saying, look, we're going to frame that and we're going to make sure that people are aware of that. And I think those are the beginnings of the steps in the right direction for what should actually, in fact, be persistent.

Like, for example, you've seen some of it even drop off now. Because they said, oh, the election is over. It's been called, so release that. And you're like, well, actually, in fact, people calling for election theft, which is, by the way, all the experts, including all the Republican experts, look at this and say, look, you can challenge on some narrow states and recount the ballot, but it's not going to make a difference.

Because at these numbers and at the safety of our voting systems, including the vote by mail, those have all called it. And actually, there's one particular piece I just-- I feel like I'm compelled to say, which is there was this kind of constant Republican line of, you're adding in points after the game is called.

And you're like, OK. If we want to use a metaphor, it's like you scored a leading touchdown in the third quarter, the third quarter of the game, and you want to call the game end versus waiting for the fourth quarter, right?

Like, it is, actually, in fact, every state has a law to set its vote by mail and doing vote by mail. That's not calling the game early. That's calling the game on time. And promoting that is destructive to our democracy. People should understand that, actually, every vote does count.

And it's really important that as a democracy. Like, I treasure people who I disagree with, their ability to vote. It's super important that we are in this together. And that's the legitimacy of the election results.

ANDY SERWER: We're talking mostly here about Facebook, and Twitter, and YouTube. But what about LinkedIn, Reid? Is LinkedIn immune from misinformation?

REID HOFFMAN: Well, no social media platform is completely immune because part of what you enable is you enable everyone to have a voice and to put something on. And one of the things that's a little unfortunate about them modern media ecosystem, which includes social media, is it reminds me of a Winston Churchill quote which is, a lie travels around the world three times before the truth has a chance to put its boots on.

And truth is slow in the way that it kind of works, and that's one of the things I think we need to kind of figure out as we benefit from increasing speed in communication and so forth. And so I think even LinkedIn has challenges with it.

Where it's easier for us because people tie their professional reputation, the theming is things about business. And so you don't tend to get-- like, we had a little bit of QAnon stuff because of people who put it on. You don't tend to get as much of the lackey QAnon stuff.

But we also had to kind of go, OK, this is not according to LinkedIn terms of service, so we're pulling this off. And so it has a little, but not as much as the other platforms have to contend with.

ANDY SERWER: So as we go into the Biden era, I'm curious as to what you think the direction and tenor of Washington, DC's desire to perhaps rein in or regulate the big tech platforms, what path that's going to take.

Because it's not at all clear cut. You've got Ted Cruz, David Cicilline, now Joe Biden, Senator Warner, people with very different political perspectives who seem to share distrust and anxiety about the platforms. But that's where the common ground ends, right?

REID HOFFMAN: So look, roughly speaking, I'm a-- this is not a no regulation point of view, but I am a very strong believer that we've now moved to a multipolar world. China will be building more and more of the technology platforms that matter in the coming years.

And actually, to some degree, I hope that there's other places. Like, one of the Greylock investments we have is this incubator called Entrepreneur First, which is building tech communities in Europe and in Singapore. So I hope for more of this.

But what that means is you don't disable your own player, right? You don't go, hey, let's try to do that. What you want to do is you want to shape them. You want to say, look, these outcomes, misinformation. Here is our social mandate for how we change that so we have more truth in the media ecosystem. Those kinds of things are important.

But the classic notion of an antitrust or a breakup, I think those are, generally speaking, going to be actually, in fact, a counter American health and prosperity. And by the way, I say that as my primary thing as an investor, as new startups, as competing with these large tech companies.

So it's not like an embodied interest. But actually, in fact, I think where we have maybe five tech giants today, I think five years from now, we're going to have 10 tech giants. And those competition between those tech giants is what create lots of space for startups to either get their initial base, or to grow into being the 11th, or to be bought by one of them.

And so that's part of the reason why I think actually, in fact, the antitrust isn't the right thing, but figuring out how to contribute the right way to the health of our society and global society is the right thing.

ANDY SERWER: Well, two questions here. So first of all, when you're talking about going from five to 10, are you talking about the other five being in China? And then also, what specifically, though, short of antitrust and breaking things up, would be your remedies?

REID HOFFMAN: So on the first-- actually, in fact, if you're including China, you're like five going to 25, right? So it is much larger. I was actually just talking about kind of the growth of companies like Airbnb and others as they establish on the stage.

And obviously, there's a bunch right now around Netflix, and Salesforce, and other kinds of things. So I think there's a range of these companies to become multipart technology platforms. And with China, you're going to see a ton more.

And then I think in terms of-- it's one of the things that I've actually started working on in 2019 and then I got very concerned about the 2020 election, so I'm going to get back to it soon. But it's kind of the question of, how do we build the full-- what are the tools and sets we can do to build kind of regulation of the outcomes we want, but don't try to enshrine the past? Allow adaptation in the future.

I'll give you one kind of like, microcosm example. Like, say you said, look, we don't want to have video depictions of live streams of terrorist assaults, or murderers, or anything else. So you say, what's the way you would regulate that?

Well, a simple way, like, if I was going to try to regulate, if I was in charge of regulating that today, what I would say is, OK, here's our law. It's $10,000 fine purview. And the companies have to self report, but they have to self report through their auditors. Like, the auditors have to say, this was actually, in fact, done well.

And so they self report and then we say, OK, so we assess the fines and we take whatever dollar amount. I've kind of pulled a number out of air. But take whatever dollar amount you want. That's the right thing. Because trying to go to zero seems kind of crazy.

And, by the way, people do individually, accidentally, terrifyingly do see live murders. So one person saw it or people saw it is not actually, in fact, society destabilizing. It's unfortunate and terrible, but not that. And then you set it.

And then, by the way, it then becomes the tech company's ability to try to figure out, OK, what do we do? Do we have AI that's scanning for it? Do we have a 15 second or five minute delay or what all.

As opposed to mandating it, which is what enshrines the past against the future, you're saying, here is our economic incentive to you to continue to iterate and solve this problem in the right way, right? And then enable that to happen.

And that's, I think, the kind of pattern that you generally need to see happening with technology because it moves so fast and we want to build to the solutions of which is the better solutions are in the future.

ANDY SERWER: I know you're Mr. AI here, so obviously, you think AI is part of the solution. But it's also pretty clear, I bet you'd admit, that it's not the 100% solution. You obviously need human oversight, human intervention, human action.

So I'm curious about your understanding, your thought process when it comes to mix and if you hire more people. I mean, Zuck has hired thousands, tens of thousands of more people to try to mitigate this, but then your margins go down. Although that hasn't seemed to impact those businesses much, right? How do you feel about that?

REID HOFFMAN: Well, so I think it's totally fine to hire a bunch more people. I mean, one of the things that we have is about these global businesses. This is, again, one of the reasons why the businesses that will succeed in this stuff tend to have a very large footprint, which is one of the reasons why I, again, tend to be not-- like, if you said you want these businesses to be American businesses, to not have an antitrust, like a breakup solution.

So yes, maybe you have to hire 10,000 people. But if you're serving up billions in the world, then actually, in fact, hiring 10,000 or 50,000 people, that actually, in fact, does work. And then, of course, again, as you're inventing in the future, one of the things that you tend to do is you say, well, how do we get AI tools that even make those people more efficient and more effective?

And by way, just on your AI point, it's actually, in fact, one of the things that I help stand up and I'm the chair of the advisory board is the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. Because precisely the whole question is, how do you have a AI that has very positive human impact? Whether it's jobs, whether it's equality, or kind of a fairness in society and all those things and make sure that we're doing all of those with these very complicated AI systems?

ANDY SERWER: That's a fascinating point there about the work you're doing at Stanford. I didn't know about that. That's really amazing. Interesting. I want to ask you about China a little bit more.

There are people who are suggesting that we're going to be entering a new Cold War with China and it's going to be based on a technology rivalry. I mean, not such a far fetched or crazy notion at all. I think it's really just a question of degree. In other words, how much coopetition will there be or how dystopian and fractured will the world be along these two ecosystems, if you will?

REID HOFFMAN: Well, I think this is one of the things that, again, kind of back to the politics, is great that we have a change in the White House. Because you both need competition, and Americans, winning, things that are important to us.

By the way, the spread of American platforms, the dying, the Chinese, those platforms are actually a terrible, bad idea. Because say, hey, buy American technology. We're going to be buying Chinese technology. We already are today.

IPhone is kind of a mixed. Designed in Cupertino, but built in China, as an example. And so I think that the important thing is to really focus on is coopetition. Unfortunately, a little bit of the kind of competitive rhetoric, the Chinese hawks, are like, they want China to fail.

China is an important part of the global economy. If China fails, we all fail. And so I think that that bridge building is really important, while still, of course, fiercely competing and making sure that China plays its fair and just role on the world stage.

Doesn't kind of pretend it's an emerging economy anymore, isn't allowed IP theft, that kind of thing, where it's like, no, no, you have to play. We have to have a collective set of rules that we all play together that allow the world to progress.

ANDY SERWER: Maybe just to drill down a little bit more here, Reid, but isn't a bifurcated technology, economic system sort of inevitable in the sense that you're going to have a situation where they're never going to let the US, say, social media platforms in?

I don't know what's going to happen with TikTok. That seems to have been forgotten now, which is fascinating. But when it comes to chips, when it comes to Huawei and competing, you know, against Ericsson and the Western companies, isn't that really going to get worse?

REID HOFFMAN: Well, I think it will get worse. But I think the important thing is to actually-- look, this is one of the things that I'm hopeful about in kind of a Biden administration An eternal thing is, have a technology strategy, right? Actually, in fact, be saying what are the things that we should be building to?

Because, for example, not giving up on the hardware and the chip side I think is super important. I think actually, in fact, doubling down on the things that where a lot of the deep tech AI platforms is happening over in China. The Chinese government wants to be in the lead in 2030.

Well, actually, in fact, the US ecosystems with universities, and the companies, and so forth, is in the lead today. Well, work on that. Try to maintain that. Try to make that happen. And I that's part of it. Now, I think what we'll see is we'll-- some stuff will be in China. Some stuff will be in the US. Some stuff will be in Europe.

That will be a good universe of interdependency because part of the whole-- what's awesome about capitalism, one of things is, make trade, not war. Like, as we have these interdependencies, those are actually very, very good for us in a stable world order.

And so I think we want that. But I do think that it's going to be-- look, it's going to be hard and there's going to be some definite collisions, fender benders, scratches, and it's going to take leadership to work through it.

ANDY SERWER: Let's talk about COVID, and the pandemic, and this time that we're living in, which is so crazy. But what it's done, it's exacerbated the divisions in society, not the least of which, say, were the banks, and the tech stocks, and tech companies in Silicon Valley from the rest of the US economy, never mind the rest of society.

So you had this just incredible increase in valuation of these companies now maybe coming back to Earth because of a vaccine. I mean, so what is your sort of top line thinking? Then we can drill down a little bit more after that.

REID HOFFMAN: Well, my top line thinking is, obviously, this last year is the difference between kind of reasonable government and terrible government. Because we paid trillions of dollars of debt, millions of job losses, and hundreds of thousands of lives that we didn't need to pay.

And anyone who looks at the numbers, you kind of say, OK, 5x the cases and the fatalities of the average of the rest of the world. Now, we've got some glimmerings of greatness. The Gates Foundation and companies, private enterprise going out and building vaccines at a rapid pace and all the rest of that. That's great.

But I think we need to return to a belief in science, a belief in expertise, a belief in, like Dr. Fauci, who has served under both Democratic and Republican administrations, is a very credible expert who's just a truth teller. It's a super important place for us to be as Americans, and that should never be politicized in any particular way.

Now, I think what that's going to come to is we're going to have another year of turbulence. Because as we figure out the kinds of things of, look, wearing a mask is part of how I'm caring for my fellow Americans, not spreading disease to them. We're going to need that.

Even as we do vaccines, I fear that we'll begin to politicize take the vaccine or not, versus the, no, no, no, my way of-- because people don't quite usually understand vaccines. They think vaccine is I'm immune. And actually, it isn't that. It's harder for me to get it.

So a lot of us have to take it to eliminate it. It's like a superpowered mask to eliminate it from the viral spread, what the experts call R0 as the incense. And we're going to need to do that. And why do we want to do that?

Well, because our productivity will be hit so much worse than basically all of these other countries. Like, than China, which, for example, I think Shanghai hasn't had a new case in like, 250 days, right? There's more cases in the White House than there is in Shanghai.

If we want to get back to an American economy, we need to get to a place where we have the disease under control and it's super important. So we should be accelerating towards that. And hopefully, by assembling experts, like that Biden has already assembled a group of great people, including someone who was one of the early whistleblowers under Trump, and say, hey, this is what we're going to pull together in order to solve this disease both for health, but also for the economy.

ANDY SERWER: But isn't it the case that sort of perversely, Reid, that when this vaccine or vaccines are out there, that the valuations of these tech companies will go down?

REID HOFFMAN: Well, some of them, and that's fine. I mean, look, the valuation of these tech companies are already so high that that's not a problem. So you've got to-- like, if the ones where investors think, oh, the only reason that's being so used is because of the pandemic, fine, we'd much rather get back to everyone going to work. And the valuation will still be more than high enough for everyone's happiness, including investors.

ANDY SERWER: So my understanding is that the VC world has been robust during this time. Is that the case? And if so, why?

REID HOFFMAN: Well, it's kind of a surprise. When we've looked at earlier kind of collisions, things that happened, including 2008 and so forth, all of this-- the VC market, generally speaking, have kind of retrenched, reserve the portfolio for the current companies, using other recessions, the internet boss and other things as a model.

And in this case, part of what happened is partially because of the LP money into the venture funds, the wide set of venture funds. I think it's because a lot of capital also thinks, OK, technology is the future, so capital around the world is looking for technology investments.

So all of that flowed in and so everyone went, well, actually, in fact, I can make this work. I can talk through Skype. I can talk through Teams. I can talk through Zoom. And I'll tell you, we at Greylock have been making a whole set of investments with teams and people we've never met, right? They've only been this little box on the screen.

Now, of course we still do the reference checking, and we still do our due diligence, and calling customers, and all the rest. But we're like, oh, look, there's-- and I think, by the way, a bunch of people are going, OK, the entrepreneurs are still like, well, we're not waiting. We're not hanging around for the pandemic.

We're building, and we're creating new things, and new available products. And at Greylock, we've been doing a lot of enterprise most recently, because we've seen all kinds of new enterprise opportunities. But there's obviously a whole range.

ANDY SERWER: That's so crazy. So you do enough due diligence so that when you finally meet this person maybe next summer you'll say, I didn't know you were tall. Everything else about you, I knew--

REID HOFFMAN: Yes, exactly.

ANDY SERWER: --or that kind of thing.

REID HOFFMAN: Exactly.

ANDY SERWER: One thing we haven't touched on that much, you mentioned inequality a little bit. And I want to ask what you're doing and what venture can specifically do to address racial and social bias.

REID HOFFMAN: So racial and social bias is one of the things we have. It's a stain on our entire society, and especially some areas like obviously tech and investing are, just by the numbers, clearly retrograde in this.

And so it's one of those places where you have to look at yourself and say, if I'm not part of the solution, then I'm part of the problem. And so Greylock, for example, we looked at this and said, look, the key thing is to make sure there's a whole bunch of great people of color, minority, other kind of things, disadvantaged minority talent out there.

We just need to build a network connectivity so that they have connectivity to investment if they're founders to these early companies, if they're kind of professionals and executives. And so we did that. So we said, OK, let's dive deep.

And we did a partnership with Management Leaders of Tomorrow, which, founded and CO by John Rice, who is the brother of Susan Rice, who has already spent well over a decade building these pathways for how do you identify great talent.

And now we're going to try to help map that talent into the Silicon Valley tech ecosystem. And we're-- one of the things that we do at Greylock is we pride ourselves on being good partners with entrepreneurs, but even with other investors.

And we say, OK, let's try to make sure that that whole talent network is connected well throughout the entire Silicon Valley tech ecosystem. Because ultimately, that's how you get to kind of the fairness, to the justice.

Which is, you have those network pathways by which people can then find the right opportunities. And so that's one of n things that we're doing at Greylock in order to try to be kind of good protagonists of the future.

ANDY SERWER: I know you could probably talk about this for an hour or more. But what are a few things that you look for when you're trying to identify a successful startup, Reid?

REID HOFFMAN: So generally speaking, it can be different patterns. But the simple stuff is, oh my gosh, this could be an industry transforming company where the time is now. Sometimes because of technology change, sometimes because of market change, other kinds of things.

That the founder has enough of the raw knowledge to get moving, and is a learner, and has that raw kind of grit and adaptability to go through all of the different phases that these startups go through. Like, the example in my last book, "Blitzscaling," I kind of described those five phases of size.

And the rules change at each phase of size. Like, how you run the company, what management looks like, are you multithreaded, single threaded? And then you can do all that. And then where do you look at relative to competition?

Because one of the really fundamental things, which I just did in my most recent kind of "Greymatter" podcast and essay, was that competition, like, what does the competition look like, is really central to how you do it.

So that's the suite at which you look at. And then that suite, you kind of go, OK, and then it's art and science. You can't just kind of pencil the numbers. It isn't just do a DCS analysis. It's like, yeah, I think so.

ANDY SERWER: Right, right. Great. And finally, Reid, you have seen millions of profiles on LinkedIn. And so I'm curious, what advice do you have for people who are applying to jobs online right now amid COVID-19 and how do they stand out from the competition?

REID HOFFMAN: So I think that some of the things are put extra energy into it. Like, for example, one of the features, a small thing on LinkedIn is I like having references. Having, like-- but even if you're mailings say, hey, here's three people from-- like, you would say, here's three people who would be references for me and here's the link to their LinkedIn profile.

So people are, OK, showing that different thing. Like, another thing that I've kind of encouraged both companies individuals to do is while, generally speaking, I think recording a video interview of yourself in a normal thing is probably not that useful.

In this time of COVID, it is very useful, right? Because people are sitting, watching screens all the time. It's like, OK, watch another video. So record a little video about why you're interested in this job, who you are, and here's my link to my LinkedIn profile or wherever you're kind of storing your professional credentials. I think that's very helpful.

And then, of course, always try to use your network so that people understand that you are hardworking, collaborative, and other kinds of things which are the attributes you generally only get through references or network.

ANDY SERWER: Reid Hoffman, thank you so much for your time and best of luck to you.

REID HOFFMAN: Thank you, Andy. Always a pleasure.

ANDY SERWER: You've been watching "Influencers." I'm Andy Serwer. We'll see you next time.