Co-founder of Linkedin Reid Hoffman reveals that everyone told him that Linkedin was never going to work 🤯 Full clip on The Diary Of A CEO #podcast #podcastclips #ceo #reidhoffman #founder #business #businesstok #linkedin #diaryofaceo #story #interview #money #company #entrepreneur #entreneurship

In 2003, literally, everyone said to me, this won't work because you're individual focused. You need to be selling products to companies. And so I was like, no, no, I think I'm right about the way the world can and should be. I'm going to take that risk. And that's the contrarian risk. I'm going to take that risk and I'm going to play it forward. And if I'm right, I will create something that will transform the industry, that will be amazing for individuals, amazing for companies, et cetera. And we can go, obviously, whatever length you want to go through the LinkedIn journey, we can do it. I sat down with John. We had breakfast at a breakfast place in Silicon Valley and he said, you know, it's never going to work. Right. And I said, okay, well, why do you think it's never going to work? He said, well, look, you'll never grow the network. Like the first person who comes in, no one else in the network, not valuable for me. Why should I invite someone in? Okay. So you come into the network. Okay. There's two of us. We don't care. Until you have like, you know, I don't know, 500,000 people, a million people, there's no value in the network. So there's zero value. So it's never going to grow. You're never going to get anywhere. Right. And it was a very smart, perspicacious thought that was probably the key thing for starting LinkedIn was, how do you get to millions of people in the network? Because that's the only place where the value proposition kicks in. Right. And I knew that was a problem and John was super smart. So John said, okay. Right. This is the thing. And I said, okay, I have a plan for that. And the plan was, I knew that if you had 1,000 people come in, 900 of those people would be exactly like John. They'd go, eh, I don't see anyone else here in this network, et cetera. But I knew that some of them, somewhere between 10 and 100 of them would go, oh, I see what this could be and I kind of want to play with it. So you know, I'll invite Steven, I'll invite, you know, I'll invite some people in. And then as it very slowly starts going, then all of a sudden there's enough people in, it's interesting, it's curious, and you could grow to being valuable. So I knew that by persistence through those initial exploratory people, people who are curious, people who want to experiment with it, people who got the vision of it, you know, et cetera, et cetera, that all of that I could grow to your initial critical mass and then it would kick in.