Narrative · Global & US
Masters of Scale
with Reid Hoffman
A venture investor and LinkedIn co-founder testing a specific theory of company-building against the experience of people who have done it.
Why an angel should listen
Each episode is built around a thesis about scaling — a counterintuitive claim the host advances and then examines through a guest's experience. The structure makes it more argumentative than a straight interview show and considerably more memorable.
The recurring subject is the transition from small to large, which is exactly the period an angel is betting on. A company you back at pre-seed either navigates that transition or does not, and the show is a long catalogue of how it goes wrong.
Read the theses sceptically. They are drawn from a particular slice of Silicon Valley experience, and the pattern that produced a handful of enormous network-effect businesses is not a general theory of company building.
Where to begin
Start with these
- Episodes about the transition from founder-led sales to a real sales organisation.
- Anything on hiring the first executives — the most common place a good seed company stalls.
- The episodes where the guest pushes back on the host's thesis.