Self-made billionaire Reid Hoffman knows what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur.
The 57-year-old co-founded LinkedIn in his living room in 2002, and served as its CEO for most of the following decade. His professional networking platform now has a user base of more than 1 billion, and was bought by Microsoft in 2016 for $26.2 billion.
Hoffman has also been a board member at tech companies like PayPal, Airbnb and Microsoft. He co-founded Inflection AI, a machine intelligence company, in 2022. His experience has taught him that three traits stand out the most in a business owner with promise, he said in a recent podcast episode of “The Diary Of A CEO”: ambition, resilience, and awareness.
“Insanely great ambition” particularly stands out, Hoffman said. When choosing a founder to invest in, he’s drawn to someone with the mindset of “I’m shooting for the moon” and “If I’m successful, I will transform the industry.”
Such ambition can indicate that you’re willing to put forth relentless effort to make your ideas take off, even in the face of adversity. It can also mean you’re willing to exhaust all other options when your original plan doesn’t pan out, entrepreneur and investor Barbara Corcoran said on a 2023 episode of Barstool’s “Chicks in the Office” podcast.
It’s the first thing she looks for when contestants pitch her on ABC’s “Shark Tank,” she said.
