The Start-Up of You by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha

Are you an entrepreneur? Yes you are, or should be thinking of yourself as an entrepreneur if not already doing so is the case that Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha make in their new book The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career.  Hoffman, a former employee of Google and Paypay, is more widely recognized as a co-founder to Linked-In, the largest professional social network on the internet. Ben Casnocha is an accomplished author and entrepreneur.

The authors open the book by describing how much the world of work has changed in the last generation. Because company pension plans are now rarer then unassisted triple plays, more and more senior employees are postponing retirement which ultimately results in fewer opportunities for managers to continue their climb up the corporate ladder. Additionally fewer companies are able to provide their employees with training they need to make them more marketable.


So what are we to do? Continually complain about how harsh companies have become? No, not at all Hoffman and Casnocha argue. Instead we need to all think and act like entrepreneurs and run our own careers like we would a start-up business and they have written a book to help us down this path to success.

The first step is to develop our competitive advantage. You will successfully develop a competitive advantage by combining three critical factors:

1) Your assets – both hard (money, property) and soft (skills, ideas)

2) Your aspirations – what you want to achieve, and your goals

3) Market realities – of course you need to offer something that others actually want or need!

The basic lesson is that we need to make our personal service offering unique and desirable and in addition we should view ourselves as continually in permanent beta mode so we remember to adapt accordingly to changing situations. These concepts of finding unique ways to differentiate ourselves are well aligned with Seth Godin’s recent books including Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?. As Godin has written, since it is almost impossible to develop anything substantially differentiating in terms of price and speed, we need to be creative with our product or service offerings. Speaking of adapting, the third section of the book addresses with how we need to plan for adapting within our careers.

In the ‘Plan to Adapt’ chapter, the authors introduce the need to develop the ‘ABZ’ plan approach to manage your career.  While Plan A contains the current career plan that you are executing, Plan B covers where you want to pivot your career to, in other words your next major career move.  Finally, Plan Z is your lifeboat, this is the plan you execute if Plans A and B fall apart and you need to keep afloat. These plans represent very pro-active approaches to continually managing and evolving our careers.

Within this section, Hoffman and Casnocha provide the case example of Flicker. Did you know Flicker started out as an on-line gaming site? Based on the popularity of their photo upload option and an eager market they made the decision to pivot over to the on-line photo sharing services.

It is in the next chapter ‘It Takes a Network’ that the authors begin to reinforce the need to create a strong network with both close associates and weak ties. Our weak ties can at times provide us with information that our close associates do not have since we tend to already know what our close associates know. The authors recommend we keep in touch with all of these contacts on a regular basis as opposed to showing up at their door when we need something from them. This can be accomplished by budgeting some of our funds or/and time to spend on continuing and growing these connections.

Not surprisingly one of the suggested tools to help maintain these connections is Linked-In. The authors did provide numerous tips in regards to using Linked-In, but I did not find their promotion of the site to be inappropriate or excessive.

The focus of the breakout opportunities section is that we need to be prepared to jump on new opportunities when they arise. A documented case in this chapter is how George Clooney was a struggling actor for twelve years in Hollywood until he heard about a new show called ER. We then learn how Clooney took risks to actively pursue and ultimately land this role which elevated his career to a new level. I believe looking at cases like Clooney’s can a bit misleading since we already know how the decisions to pursue these breakout opportunities turned out. Unfortunately there are risks with these decisions which need to be considers which just happened to be the subject of the book’s next section.

According to the authors the way to manage career risks is by taking intelligent risks. Basically this means making sure you understand the probabilities and potential impacts of the risks in question. As any good risk management process will stress, the key to minimizing risks is to gather as much information that is available. Before taking a potential breakout opportunity with a new company career, or industry do your research to understand more about the company, industry and people you will be joining. Of course you can use your professional network to help perform this research, see how nicely all these concepts fit together.

The culmination of the book is contained in the final section and is called ‘Who You Know is What You Know’. This section demonstrates how you can pull knowledge from your network. One of the key components is to frequently meet with members of your network in a casual setting to discuss business and career related interests. The authors make an insightful comparison between these informal network meetings and Benjamin Franklin’s much heralded Junto Clubs . I found this is to a very practical and realistic comparison. One can only wonder how Dr. Franklin would have taken advantage of the hi-tech networking tools that are available today.

Finally the authors provide addition information on the book’s official web site. If you are just starting your career or are new to the world of professional networking then I highly recommend this book for you.  If you are a veteran in this realm I believe you will find enough nuggets to make this quick read worth your investment. Go forth and begin your career anew as an entrepreneur in yourself!