Every entrepreneur and investor should listen to this podcast with Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn) and Ev Williams. From Reid on Ev:
For this week’s show, I had a very free-flowing conversation with Ev Williams, who founded (in order) Blogger, Twitter and Medium. His career has had such an over-arching impact on how we communicate online that it’s like a history of the entire medium (no pun intended). Any time you share an idea online, chances are Ev helped you express it.
This from Reid on asking yourself the big question is fantastic:
Ev and I have a lot in common. We’re both serial entrepreneurs who’ve paradoxically spent our careers in an almost single-minded pursuit of a single idea. When you look at the companies we’ve founded or invested in, it’s clear that both of us have a fundamental question we’re trying to answer. For Ev, it’s: “How do we connect all the world’s brains into one idea-sharing machine?” For me, it’s: “How do you build social and professional networks that enable us to help each other?”
If you ask this type of sweeping question at the beginning of your career — and if you happen to be riding a wave of massive social and technological change — you’d be surprised by just how long you can keep riding it, without ever getting bored.
Reid is summing up how I felt and continue to feel about financial services and financial media.
In 2006, I did not love my life as a money manager, hated CNBC and The Wall Street Journal and could not afford a Bloomberg. When YouTube and Twitter hit my radar I felt the massive social and technological change coming to the financial industry was something I could ride. The smartphone only made the wave bigger and stronger.
Twelve years later and there is still so much to build and companies to be started.
