20VC: Reid Hoffman on Investing in Airbnb and Passing on Stripe, The Different Styles of Truly Great Leaders, How To Think Through Ownership and Price in Venture & How To Ensure Venture Partnerships Always Have Trust and a Learning Mindset

When you have something that's a weakness, you have to think about it and say 'Okay, is this critical weakness really important in the goals that I want to do and what I want to become?' Because you can't fix many of your weaknesses—you can fix maybe one or two ... A lot of weaknesses are the flip side of strengths. So, the thing that you're super strong at also leads [to] the thing that you're more weak at.

I think one of the really important things in leaderships goes all the way back to Socrates, which is to pay a lot of attention to knowing what you don't know.

Everyone should think about their life as the entrepreneurship of themself. It doesn't mean they should start companies, but the modern pattern of life is an entrepreneuring path, not a career escalator, not a career ladder, but this kind of pattern of invention and reinvention—it's more like a jungle gym for life.

When you're venture investing, it's not about picking things that have a 90% chance of success; it's about picking things that have some more risk and that [don't have a] 90% chance of success, but when they work, they're magical. When they work, they change the industry; they change the world; they change the human experience.

Most often, in a startup project, you have to move very fast. You don't have lots of time to communicate everything. And by the way, in startups, you should not slow down. Startups are one of those things where speed is one of your very few strengths.

Trust is an extremely important part of life and an extremely important part of work, and it's worthy of being conscientious in how you're building it in every time that you're interacting with your colleagues, your friends, your allies.

I didn't set out saying 'I want to be an entrepreneur' ... I said, 'Here [are] the impacts that I want to have on the world. Here [are] the ways that I want to contribute. Oh look, that path happens to be an entrepreneurial path.'

Look at every interaction and everything that you're doing together as also an opportunity for building trust.