Pritesh Kumbhare

Roll No: 150349

HSS401A - Soft Skills and Personality Development

Individual Project
.

ALL HUMANS ARE ENTREPRENEURS

in
THE START-UP OF YOU

From the co-founder and chairman of LinkedIn and author Ben Casnocha

How is your life going?

The very common and usual question faced by all of us to which we unconsciously or involuntarily
answer Fine, Well, etc. It is because we think that the problem we are facing are none of
someone elses business. The career escalator is jammed at every level. Unemployment rates are
sky-high. Creative disruption is shaking every industry. Global competition for jobs is fierce. The
employer-employee pact is over and traditional job security is a thing of the past. Almost all of the
problems we face in our day-to-day life is centralised to financial problems. But how do you
survive and thrive in this fiercely competitive economy?

What happened? Were the companies supposed to guarantee jobs for life? Was the government
supposed to rescue everyone? Were universities supposed to grant degrees than granted unlimited
opportunities? World has changed. There is plenty of blame to go around but the solution is
within you. All Humans were born entrepreneurs and that entrepreneurial spirit is something to be
rediscovered. Look in within yourself to take control of your career. Build the future, we want. We
do this by looking at the lessons of todays entrepreneurs and applying them to our lives. How we
adapt, how we develop a competitive edge, how we take smart risks, how to use our networks.
Todays challenges actually present enormous opportunities. We remain to survive almost
anything. You can invent yourself and invent the future. THE START-UP IS YOU.

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The theme
The Start-Up of You by Reid Hoffman encourages us to view our career paths essentially as
startups in themselves, always remaining in permanent beta. As I read through the book, one
paragraph stood out amongst the rest to pretty much define the mantra of the book: We are all
works in progress. Each day presents an opportunity to learn more, do more, be more, grow more
in our lives and careers. Keeping your career in permanent beta forces you to acknowledge that
you have bugs, that theres new development to do on yourself, that you will need to adapt and
evolve. But its still a mind-set brimming with optimism because it celebrates the fact that you
have the power to improve yourself and, as important, improve the world around you.

Another theme throughout the book is known as ABZ planning. That is, you are currently
pursuing plan A, with a plan B in the back of your mind if plan A doesnt work. Plan Z is what
you call on when all else fails, the thing that keeps you off of the streets. This could be relying
solely on a spouses income, working at a convenience store, or moving in with your parents. Plan
Z isnt really something that you want to happen, but knowing that its there allows you to take
on more risks with Plans A and B. There should never be a plan C because then youre not
focusing hard enough on Plan A if you are thinking about that many contingency plans.

Theoretical Aspects
About the novel:
From the co-founder and chairman of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman and author Ben Casnocha comes a
revolutionary book on how to apply the strategies of successful entrepreneurship to your life and
career: in other words, how to run the start-up of you. In a world where wages are virtually
stagnant, creative disruption is rocking every industry, global competition for jobs is fierce, and job
security is a thing of the past, were all on our own when it comes to our careers. In the face of
such uncertainty, the key to success is to think and act like an entrepreneur: to be nimble and
self-reliant, to be innovative, and to know how to network and stand out from the crowd. And this
is precisely what Hoffman and Casnocha show us how to do in a inspirational and supremely
practical way. Here, LinkedIn cofounder and chairman Reid Hoffman and author Ben Casnocha
show how to accelerate your career in todays competitive world. The key is to manage your career
as if it were a start-up business: a living, breathing, growing start-up of you. Just as LinkedIn is
the one online community that no professional can afford not to belong to, his ideas are such, that
no professional can afford to be without.

About the Author

REID HOFFMAN is a world-renowned entrepreneur and investor. He is cofounder and executive
chairman of LinkedIn, the worlds largest professional business-oriented network with 100+ million
members. Previously he was executive vice president and on the founding board of directors of
PayPal. He is also a partner at Greylock, a leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm. He is an
early investor in over 100 technology companies, including Facebook and Zynga.

BEN CASNOCHA is a Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur, author, and executive. He is coauthor of

the management book The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age (with LinkedIn
chairman Reid Hoffman and entrepreneur Chris Yeh). He has written for Newsweek and public

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radios Marketplace and appeared on CNN, the CBS Early Show, and CNBC. BusinessWeek has
named him one of Americas best young entrepreneurs. He has spoken to more than ten thousand
students and businesspeople in countries around the world.

Illustrations from the book

In the todays world, which suffers from fiercely growing economy, one of the most important
things I learnt is that in order to survive and thrive all you need is a whole new entrepreneurial
mindset and skill set. One of my famous thought in the book is Your identity doesnt gets found,
it emerges. The problem that many people face in almost every problem is the attitude towards it
i.e. they underestimate their ability towards the problem. When you dont have a specialization,
dont find it, instead make it. If you work in marketing and are really interested in the field, you
could also write a blog, create your own podcast, do public speaking gigs, or become a certified
trainer in that subject. These will help you create a brand of yourself and people will get to know
you. Surround yourself with the people that youd like to become like. If you lack people skills,
your chances diminish a lot. Its no longer just about diplomas and qualifications. You need
interpersonal skills, emotional intelligence, and other soft skills in order to build a strong career.
There are dimensions to your career. Most of the people prefer jobs which pay less, perform
repetitive tasks and pay just over something by which the basic needs of the family can be
accomplished. We can call these people that have a single dimensional career. Either they promote
in their field or demote. These people have very less options in life. In India, government jobs can
be classified into such field. In contrast to it, a person having multi-dimensional career finds new
ways to explore and make use of his talents and passions in a good way. A student interested in
research pursue a career in research is something what we can relate to as Living ones own
passion. They can develop the start-up by applying entrepreneurial skills to everything they do.
They make every decision in life based on these skills and develop an entrepreneurial mind-set that
will help in the long run. Why? Start-ups - and the entrepreneurs who run them - are nimble.
They invest in themselves. They build their professional networks. They take intelligent risks.
They make uncertainty and volatility work to their advantage. These are the very same skills
professionals need to get ahead today.

Theme and Illustrations

1. All Humans are Entrepreneurs
According to Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and micro-finance pioneer, ALL
HUMAN BEINGS ARE ENTREPRENEURS. When we were in the caves, we were all self
employed, finding out food, feeding ourselves, inventing new rules of living. As civilisation came,
we suppressed it.We became labour and we forgot that we are entrepreneurs. Our education system
trains us to memorize facts, stored in textbooks and then regurgitate them on an exam. But as
modern professionals, you cannot acquire knowledge this way, because the knowledge you need
isnt static, it is always changing. Teacher expects us that accurate repetition will be rewarded. In
contrast, acquiring knowledge this way does not work for modern professionals. In the world of
work, every day is an exam day. Every day brings new, unpredictable challenges and decisions.

In the world of work, every day is an exam day, every day brings a new challenges and decisions.
To adapt to the challenges of professional life today, we need to rediscover our entrepreneurial

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instincts, and use them to forge new sorts of careers. Reid Hoffman, co-founder and chairman of
LinkedIn, drew patterns between the trajectories of highly successful professionals, and highly
successful start-ups in silicon valley. According to him, a working professional like you must
consider yourself as a work in progress therefore you must invest yourself to acquire entrepreneurial
and adaptive skill sets, required for a global economy every single day.

2. Develop a Competitive Advantage

In todays world, a million people can do your job and hence, its important to ask yourself, What
sets you apart? and What are the unique skills and the combinations of skill sets?, that you
have and can stand out and flourish. If you dont have any, dont worry, remember You are
always a work in progress. By weighing your current assets, including your soft assets like
knowledge, skills, network, etc and hard assets like cash in bank, you will get an idea of where you
stand against your competition. Identify your market realities on how much is your worth to earn
in the current scenario i.e. what people will actually pay you for. Finally chart out your
aspirations and values as to what you want to achieve. These three should be balanced at any
point of time. One without the others doesnt work. Skills that dont earn money but are like
follow your aspirations are no good in a long run. Following your aspirations, but not being very
good at it wont be too blissful after long. Similarly, being slave to a market that doesnt match
your passion and likes isnt sustainable.

Search and upgrade your skills in such a way that you are valued in a market and you follow your
aspirations. You can become competitive by changing the environment you play in. For example,
some American basketball players who werent good enough to play in the NBA, play successfully
in Europe. Because their skills dont change but the market does. The key to entrepreneurial
strategy is picking a market niche where you are better than the competition.

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Developing a competitive advantage is something all successful tech companies know
automatically, otherwise it would not have been successful. What value do you bring to the table.
What specific skills are inside you and that are unique. In the business world, this is known as
your unique value proposition. You need to build it for yourself. This is true if you are planning to
start a business or work for a company. People need differentiation. To beat differentiation,
companies develop a clear reason why a customer should pick them instead of others. Zappos.com
can serve a very good example for this. Zappos offered free shipping both ways and providing a
24/7 service via a locally staffed number and hence massively differentiated itself from other
e-commerce website. If you look at your work, you would notice that a million people can do it.
Thus, chart a career path that sets you apart from other professionals by thinking in some other
dimension. I would like to share my example. I am a student of IIT Kanpur and hence I expect
that I should at least maintain my good grades. But apart from that, I am interested in
Competitive Programming also. It doesnt mean that I should qualify for the World Finals of the
Programming. You dont need to be better than all professionals.

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3. Plan to Adapt
You might have read of many career planning advices which says what you want to be after 10
years and then develop a plan for getting there. It says that you should find your passion and then
pursue it. May these philosophies have serious strengths, but also have huge drawbacks. These
philosophies presume in a static world, because as you change, the competition changes and the
world changes. They presume that accurate knowledge can be attained through introspection, but
in reality your identity emerges through experimentation. Make explicit hypothesis and
assumptions in your plan. Planning can never achieve full certainty. Identify the assumptions in
your plan, and make plans to fill these gaps. Always give priority to learning. Start-ups in the
early days prioritize learning over profitability. Similarly, you should prioritize learning(soft assets)
over salary(hard assets) for most of the part of your career because in a long run youll likely lead
a meaningful life as well as make more money. The best way to learn is through actions and by
constantly thinking two steps ahead,you should always have a set Plan A, which you should be
doing. It is your current implementation of your competitive advantage.

If it isnt working out for you, or you discover a better plan, shift to Plan B. Always have a backup
plan Z if something goes seriously wrong and none of your plans work. Its the lifeboat you can
jump in if your plan fails and you need to reload before getting back in the game. This flexibility
to adapt, along with your persistence will help you surge-up. Flickr started out as a multiplayer
online game. Paypal started out as a digital wallet for storage only. Jerry Springer was a mayor
of Cincinnati. Sheryl Sandberg began her career in India. There she worked on public health
projects for the World Bank. Hence, an experimental Plan A. an alternative Plan B, and an
unchanging, certain Plan Z. This is ABZ Planning.

4. It Takes a Network
It is people who control resources, opportunities, information and the like. So building a network
of relationships is the key to unlocking the professional growth.Relationships matter a lot to your
career. It doesnt matter that in which organization you are working or your level of seniority,
ultimately every job boils down to interacting with people. People control information, resources,
opportunities and the like. Consult and proactively collaborate with your alias, who are your
closest professional relations and at the same time, embrace your weaker ties, since they bring
diversity into your network.

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The person you are today and the person you aspire to be tomorrow depends on the person you
spend your time with. All these friends will have friends and friends of friends, which makes your
network pretty strong and you need to find ways to leverage this by asking for and giving
introductions and strengthening the relationships by sending articles, collaborating on projects and
staying in touch. Your network is bigger than you think. You wont be fully leveraging your
network, if you arent asking for or giving introductions to these second degree or third degree
connections. Finally, remember that relationships are like any living thing. If you are not getting
stronger, they are getting weaker. Consider creating an interesting people fund to which you
automatically funnel a certain percentage of your paycheck. Use it to pay coffees, lunches and an
occasional plane ticket to meet new people and shore up existing relationships. Be in the move
always and embrace selective randomness through random ideas and collaborating with the new
ideas of people in your network.

Creativity is required to get in and passion, work ethic and desire for excellence will keep you
there. I to the power of WE. This signifies the strength of your network. An individuals power is
raised exponentially with the help of a team or a network. There are people you know in a
personal context, and some in professional context. Generally, people keep these two lives separate
for reasons of etiquette and potential conflict of loyalties. Sometimes you are personal friends with
a professional colleague. Your network consists of strong links and weak links and both are very
important. In LinkedIn, if you are connected to a couple hundred people on Linkedin, you are
actually at the center of an extended network of more than two million people strong. This is very
important, specially when you are looking new opportunities over specific expertees to advance
yourself. The power of who you know makes all the difference as it can shed off years of your 10
year goals. Metcalfes law states that your networks value is the square of the number of members.
In lay terms, this is why Facebook is worth billions. The have over 1.5 billion members and that
makes the network strong. There are more people on Facebook that the total population of the
United States.

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5. Pursue Breakout Opportunities
This one is straightforward, but sometimes hard to execute. The products in the past had very
little market. This is not recommended. This lesson causes years of time and lot of waste of money.

The trajectories of remarkable career are not slow and steady up and to the right. Rather they are
marked out by breakout opportunities -career experiences that lead to unusual rapid games It is
these breakout opportunities, that lead to unusual rapid games. You can develop habits of
behaviour that increase the likelihood you find great career opportunities. Be in motion and court
selective randomness. When you do something, you stir the pot and introduce the possibility that
seemingly random ideas, people and places will collide and form new combinations and
opportunities.

Opportunities are not the clouds that float in the sky. They are attached to people. If you are
looking for an opportunity, including one that has financial payoff, you are really looking for a
person. There will be times when your backs against the wall, when you are low on resources and
time, and when you will have to get hustle and creepy for opportunities. Constraints can be a
blessing or a disguise: its amazing how resourceful one can get when one has no choice but to be
resourceful. The founders of Airbnb were running out of cash, but they still believed in their idea.
To buy more time to figure out a way to scale their business, they did what any hustling
entrepreneur would do...They sold cereal. Riding presidential election fever they developed
custom-designed cereal boxes for the candidates. And the extra cash, 20000 dollars in profit,
bought them enough time to figure out how to turn a consistent profit.

6. Take Intelligent Risks

Risk is part and parcel of life. They tends to get a bad rap. Be proactively intelligent about risks.
Many of us associate risks with things like losing money in the stock market or riding a motorcycle
without a helmet. We are wired for evolutionary reasons to over-estimate risks. If you can tolerate
the worst case outcome, then be open to the risk and never confuse on certainty with risks. If the
worst case outcome means death, homelessness or being permanently unemployed, avoid it. Dont
conflate uncertainty with risk. There will always be unknowns but that does not mean it is risky.
You can never predict, how or when ill-fortune will strike. Instead of placing faith in your ability
to anticipate all that could go wrong, build up resilience to unimaginable blowup. But risk isnt
the enemy -its a permanent part of life. In fact, being proactively intelligent about risk is a
prerequisite for seizing those breakout opportunities. There will always be unknowns, and it need
not necessarily mean risk. Build resilience towards risk by introducing small risks into your
day-to-day operations consistently.

Ideally your day job has volatility built-in. Those who regularly deal with small risks will never
starve as they will never be engulfed by big risks. Theres a competition for good opportunities.
And because of that, if you can intelligently take on risk, you will find opportunities others miss
i.e. when others see a red light you will see green. Every possible career move contains risk. If you
dont have to seriously think about the risk involved in a career opportunity, its probably not the
breakout opportunity you are looking for. The ability to access information when you need it is
the best way to deal with the challenges of todays world and for your career, it is the network of
your relationships that will help you grow. So start tapping your network, start investing in skills,
start pursuing breakout opportunities and start taking intelligent risks. It is not easy to learn how

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to assess the level of risk accurately. Risks can be both personal and situational. It may be risky
for you and may not be for someone else. Overall, it is not as risky as you think.

7. Who You Know is What You Know

Bill gates said The most meaningful way to differentiate your company from your competition,
the best way to put distance between you and the crowd, is to do an outstanding job with
information. This could not be truer today. By talking to the people in your network, you get the
intelligence you need to make a good career. What you get when you tap into other peoples brain
is called network intelligence. But the way we have been socialized to think about information and
knowledge is radically insufficient. Piling more and more facts wont lead you anywhere. The thing
which will get you somewhere is being able to access the information when you need it. In order to
extract intelligence out of your network, you need to map your demand with your network i.e. you
know who knows what and then ask questions that elicit useful answers. How you gather, manage
and use information will determine whether you win or lose.

Why is this important to you? If you want to continuously improve, you have to be committed to
continuous learning. Lever continuous learning with the right association, and you will succeed in
your career. Entrepreneurship is required today because you dont want to build a time-line of
going to school, get a good job and retire and then dead. You need to put yourself in a position to
make sure you have security. You need to help yourself first and then you can help others. This is
not a selfish act. If you look at what Warren Buffet has done for charity, he created his fortune
first and helped it a much bigger way later in life.

Most of all start forging your own differentiated career plans. For life isnt permanent beta and the
trick is to never stop starting. THE START-UP IS YOU.

Critical Analysis
The basic premise of this book is the following: the entrepreneurial mindset and attitude are
essential for anyones career in todays economy. Thinking like an entrepreneur is not any more
reserved just for the ultra-ambitious, well-funded Silicon Valley types; in order to succeed in
todays job market everyone has to adopt many of the practices that successful entrepreneurs have
been employing for decades. This, in and of itself, seems like a great piece of advice.
Unfortunately, this book falls far short of delivering on how to implement such an approach in
most ordinarily career paths.
Its authors, Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha, seemed to have exactly the kinds of credentials that
would lend itself to revealing interesting and fact-based insights that are otherwise hard to find.
The book is filled with motivational-speak, with an incessant deluge of phrases that sound
meaningful and profound (at least to some people), but are in fact quite vacuous (Once you catch
curiosity, it is (luckily) hard to shake. Everyone is looking for an opportunity, even if they dont
know it.). It is hard to figure out how these pieces of advice can in fact contribute to advancing
anyones career. Granted, the book is written with the greatest possible audience in mind, but
even so it could have used a lot more concrete actionable advice.
Furthermore, almost all of the examples and insights in this book are in one way or another linked
with Silicon Valley. That is indeed a wonderful and exciting place, and I have been fortunate
enough that I had spent many years working and studying over there. However, Silicon Valley is

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exceptional in many ways, and the insights gained there do not translate well to the rest of the
country, and you are even worse off if you live overseas. Silicon Valleys entrepreneurial spirit has
tricked down to the lower professional and social circles. This, however, has not been the case with
the rest of the world, and its unlikely that it will happen any time soon. I still think that the
entrepreneurial attitude is worthwhile having; just dont expect any dramatic impact on your
career any time soon.
If you are relatively secure in your job and just want to gain a better perspective on managing
your career, then this book might hold some overall value. Even under such circumstances, though,
the information you get will almost certainly be very abstract and not readily applicable to your
career path. A deeper study bought me closer to the knowledge it wanted to convey. Being an
entrepreneur isnt really about starting a business. Its a way of looking at the world: seeing
opportunity where others see obstacles, taking risks when others take refuge. The Startup of You
describes how to take a start-up approach to building a life: start with an idea, and work over your
entire career to adapt it into something remarkable. It is not just a guide to solve financial issues
but also each and every aspect of human life. Since the Internet has fundamentally changed the
architecture of business and society, this terrific book shows you how to live, learn, and thrive in a
networked world. This book is crammed with insights and strategies to help each of us create the
work life we want. This book isnt about cover letters or resumes. Instead, I learnt the best
practices of Silicon Valley start-ups, and how to apply these entrepreneurial strategies to your
career. Entrepreneurship is really about taking control of your life, and you dont need a big
start-up to be an entrepreneur you need personal responsibility and intellectual exploration. The
Start-Up of You empowers you to become the CEO of your career and take control of your future.
I would like to share my take aways from the book with all of you:

1 The faster way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want
to be.
2 The Interesting People Fund concept. Set aside a bit of money for going out for coffee, lunch,
or flying to Boston for a meeting with interesting people. Its an investment in yourself.
3. The best way to make sure that lucky things happen is to make sure a lot of things happen.
4. (Talking about negativity bias) To keep our ancestors alive, Mother Nature evolved a brain
that routinely tricked them into making three mistakes:
overestimating threats, underestimating opportunities, and underestimating resources (for dealing
with threats and fulfilling opportunities). The result is that we are programmed to overestimate
the risk in any given situation. (Even when there is not much risk)
5. In any given situation, just ask yourself is the worst-case scenario of this decision tolerable or
intolerable? (Change is good, and usually tolerable!)
6. Youll never be fully certain. Dont conflate uncertainty with risk. They suggest this task:
reflect for a few minutes on risk in your life. Rank the projects youre involved in by risk, from
most to least risky. Then think about the downside and upside possibilities. Where there is
uncertainty are you mistakenly ascribing risk?
7. Permanent beta. Best phrase of the book. My goal is forever to be a work in progress, and to
always be starting.

Comparison with the novels and text dealt in lectures

In his first chapter, Parachute author Richard Bolles writes, It is important, before you enter the
job hunt, to decide exactly what you are looking for -whether you call it your passion, or your

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purpose in life or your mission . . . Passion first, job hunt later. Habit number two of Stephen
Coveys Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Begin with the end in mind: you should
produce a personal mission statement that pulls your goals in focus. Listen to your heart and
follow your passion. Find your true north, by filing out worksheets and engaging in deep,
thoughtful introspection. While you get out of your place, generally you know where you are
heading to. And you plan the route accordingly. Similarly in life, you need to plan the destination,
so that you can plan the journey accordingly. But how true is that in todays world? Reid
Hoffman (incidentally he is the co-founder of Linkedin, where you are reading this post) argues on
how difficult it is to predict the changes in technology landscape today. The skills that are in
vogue today would be useless tomorrow. As an individual and professional, we need to adapt
constantly with the moving times.
.
Its unwise, no matter your stage of life to try to pinpoint a single dream around which your
existence revolves - Hoffman and Casnocha
.

Acknowledgements
This is the first time I have been provided an opportunity to review a book. I loved this process of
reading and analysing the novel. I feel grateful to Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha for writing
The Start-Up of you. It gives you a feel of learning a lot about life. I would like to thank our
course instructor Prof. T. Ravichandran for giving me this opportunity to read and analyse a
book. I am inhabitual of reading novels or books, but this is the only opportunity I have been
provided which imbibes me with rich experiences.

References
1. Notes from http://www.thestartupofyou.com/about-the-book/
2. Images from http://images.google.com/
3. Notes from http://casnocha.com/about/
4. Text and novels dealt in class lectures.

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