Reid Hoffman: recommendation

Transcript context

…But everyone will look for that, right? What’s the unique element? No, no. But you want table stakes, so you have to have the table stakes. The next thing would be, what are the ways that you realize that the table stakes can mislead you and be wrong? Where you can find really startlingly good talent, where the traditional mechanisms don’t work? So it’s a little bit of the contrarian question, where you say, “Hey, actually, looking for the person who dropped out of school because school was boring, and they wanted to achieve something really interesting, but they were still driven by curiosity and interest and these sorts of things,” is a way of doing it. Where people would be not counting their work in a good way because they just hadn’t achieved success yet, because people tend to proxy to success versus the capability of the work. Those kinds of things in the second category. And then the third one is, how do you do it differentially well? What is the way that you say — and that’s obviously part of the second category — but what is the way that you spot talent in a way that you have an active theory that you’re improving about why you’re differentially good? So you look for people with a good active theory?…

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