Blitzscaling Mindset

A great interview with Reid Hoffman at NYT;

There were two obsessions I had as a child that were pretty instrumental to the path I ultimately ended up taking. One was board games and fantasy role-playing games. It was a focus on strategy, and how tactics and strategy go together. Most people know Dungeons and Dragons. Not lions and tigers and bears, but dwarves, elves and dragons, oh my.

The second is that I was an obsessive science fiction reader. I would go to the public library and would just pull the next book off the science fiction shelf and read it. Part of science fiction is imagining the world as it could possibly be, thinking about it on a scale of the change of humanity, or the change of what it is to be human, and thinking about the impact of technology on those things.

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How did you get interested in technology?

At Stanford, my undergraduate major was called symbolic systems, which was artificial intelligence and cognitive science. The computer science majors would mockingly call it “C.S. light,” because you didn’t have to do the full C.S. major; you only had to do some of the introductory things. The pivot to working in tech was simply that the pay was better. I went, “O.K., if I go and do the tech internship, I’ll get paid more. I’ll go do that.” So I did a summer internship at Xerox PARC, where my job was building a simulator for a multiagent learning system. Then I did a summer internship at IBM on expert systems.

Why did you then go on to get a master’s in philosophy?

I was intensely interested in the questions of who are we as individuals in society, and who should we be. How do we think? How do we reason? How do we communicate? Philosophy doesn’t have a better understanding than anyone else. It’s still all unknown. But the thing that I learned from philosophy was an ability to articulate theories crisply, which led to an ability to express crisp theories of human nature, which aligns with some of the most interesting things around, like consumer internet and entrepreneurship. Philosophy enabled all that in a much more robust way than an M.B.A.

You can learn the technical skills, what a coding mind-set is, what data structures look like. But understanding — here is the way the world could be, here is the theory of human nature that you’re playing into in order to create that world, and here is that kind of combination of psychology, sociology and economics together with what’s possible in technology — that combination was enabled much more by philosophical thinking.

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