Why the future needs re-founders

Copy LinkIntroducing Jeff Berman as a Masters of Scale host

REID HOFFMAN: Hey listeners, if you’ve been immersed in Masters of Scale for a while, you’ve likely heard me talk about the concept of re-founding. Re-founding means joining an organization not only as a new leader, but as a catalyst for evolving its culture, roadmap, and strategy. It means honoring the valuable building blocks of the business, while breathing new life into its everyday work and inspiring teams to take risks.

And today, I’ll be talking more about that with a re-founder I know quite well, Jeff Berman. You may have heard him talking with me about AI on this podcast. And he is in fact the re-founder behind this very show. He’s taken on the role of CEO at WaitWhat, the media company that brings Masters of Scale to life.

I met Jeff about 17 years ago when he had already had the vision for the evolution of media through technology, coming up to Silicon Valley to bridge the worlds between LA and Silicon Valley. To think about what kinds of new experiences, what kinds of learnings could actually in fact transform the experience for consumers of media. 

He comes from a background in the courtroom as a trial lawyer. He’s advised government leaders on policy matters at the highest levels. He’s played major roles across media and culture, from advertising at Myspace to digital media for the National Football League. And startups focused on women’s sports and podcasting.

Jeff has also been an executive in residence at my VC firm, Greylock Partners, where he helped many different founders scale.

All of this makes him an excellent broker for fascinating conversations about scaling your business. And that’s why I’m so pleased to have Jeff Berman join me as a host of Masters of Scale.

You’ll hear him in upcoming episodes with founders from areas like tech incubation, sports, and the retail food business. And I can’t wait for you to get all the impactful lessons he and his guests have to share. 

Jeff, I don’t have an actual chair to pass to you, but I’m thrilled to have you in the seat as host for a stint starting today with me for this important conversation about re-founding.

JEFF BERMAN: Reid, it’s such an honor to be here, joining you as a host of Masters of Scale. Other leaders such as Will.i.am and Angela Ahrendts, have shared this chair and it’s an incredibly special role. I’m so honored to be here.

I’m also here as a re-founder which is the focus of today’s special episode. Reid and I will be talking about our own experiences with re-founding, and mining the rich Masters of Scale archives on this topic. So, let’s get to it. 

[THEME MUSIC]

Copy LinkInside the re-founder mindset

BERMAN: Reid, it is great to see you. Thank you for making time to chat. Can you unpack a little bit how you view the difference between being a re-founder and just coming in to take over?

HOFFMAN: One of the fundamental differences in a founder’s mindset is there’s a set of risks you have to take that, if you don’t take those risks, nothing happens. You die, right? It’s part of the reason why I use the metaphor of starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and assembling the plane on the way down is like, well, if you don’t get the plane assembled, you hit the ground. Um, so making a set of those calls that are not just kind of straightforward, like, what tends to be taught in more simplistic business school classes ‘well, what do your customers say? They ask for this feature, provide ’em that feature!’ versus the “well, what is the set of things that you need to do that are not, accounting like strategic decisions, but more like macro sheet, like, our market, our industry is changing in the following way, and here’s how we go to where the puck is going versus where the puck has been, let alone where it is right now”.

And that’s part of why I think the founding mindset, the re-founding mindset is important. Now, I think part of the difference is you can be a very credible CEO and say ‘what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna recognize, is the executive team playing well together? Are the right kinds of people in the job? Are they executing against the tasks that need to happen for this quarter, for this year?’ Like all of that stuff is within, kind of, classical skillset of the CEO job. 

The re-founding part of it is, what is the set of things that in my doing them, maybe I have a very long tenure here and I’ll be benefiting from, but it’s almost that the risks that I’m taking, are gonna be much more beneficial to whoever the next CEO is. ‘Cause of the founding mindset, you’re trying to create something that’s gonna survive you. That’s going to be an enduring institution. 

If you said, well, I could have a CEO who’s a little less proven, but has the re-founding mindset. Or I could have a CEO who’s proven but doesn’t have the re-founding mindset. Personally, I would always opt for the re-founding mindset. Now, it’s also partially because, the way that technology changes industries, companies, societies is if you look over the last 300 years, is an accelerating time scope. And that accelerating time scope means that almost always as a company, you need to be changing up the game some. And the ‘hey, we just keep continue to run the way that we were running 30 years ago’ seems much less likely to be the right answer. 

And so if that’s the case, then what does these new technologies mean for the way that we operate our entire company? And all of that will bring much more of the founding and re-founding mindset to how you lead. 

Copy LinkHow Reid prepared Jeff Weiner as LinkedIn’s re-founder

BERMAN: You don’t need to be new to an organization to embrace a re-founder’s mindset. Think about the widespread adoption of Artificial Intelligence. To harness its power and adapt effectively, leaders everywhere will need a fresh perspective. 

Let’s dive into some of the sharpest insights from Masters of Scale on re-founding. We’ll start with an episode that tracks Reid’s own scale story. In late 2008, Reid onboarded Jeff Weiner to take the helm at LinkedIn and embrace the role of re-founder. So when Reid refers to “Jeff”, that’s Jeff Weiner — not me. Alright, let’s listen. 

JEFF WEINER: Before I started, I called him, and I said, “how would you like this to work? 

What decisions would you like me to make, what do you want to make? And he said, that’s easy, it’s your ball, you run with it. 

HOFFMAN: You get the whole organization to adjust to Jeff being the CEO. 

WEINER: He said it’s really important when bringing somebody in from the outside to make sure that everyone understands that that person will be responsible for the decisions. Reid took it a step further. Reid recognized that people would still come back with muscle memory and go directly to Reid on decisions. 

HOFFMAN: I get calls from people saying, “Oh, X is broken, you need to solve it”. 

WEINER: He planned about six to eight weeks of time outside of the office over the course of my first ten weeks at LinkedIn. 

HOFFMAN: I was accepting any speaking engagement. It’s the only time in my life the Weaver’s Society of Canada asked me to speak. I would go speak to the Weaver’s Society of Canada. I would get back, I would see is it solved or not. 

WEINER: People had to reestablish connective tissue with the new guy. 

HOFFMAN: More than half the time, the person would get impatient, go solve it with Jeff and other people and say, “we got it solved”. 

I didn’t allow any exceptions. Jeff’s the CEO. You got to work for Jeff. 

WEINER: I don’t think I can overstate the importance of how this was set up. 

HOFFMAN: It was like, Oh, right. Actually, Jeff’s great. We can work together on this. This really, really works. But it required that rewiring. 

WEINER: Without a foundation like that where you have clarity in terms of leadership and who’s responsible for what, it’s going to be really challenging to scale.

Copy LinkWhat Reid learned from Dan Nye’s CEO stint at LinkedIn

BERMAN: Reid, a couple of years before Jeff Weiner came in to re-found LinkedIn, you’d hired Dan Nye to take over as CEO. What did you learn from that first attempt to pass on the mantle that ultimately helped Jeff’s transition to succeed later on?  

HOFFMAN: The first part of that was, how do we hand over the brain surgery, that is a CEO transition? I’d hired a CEO in LinkedIn, Dan Nye, a very good guy but I hadn’t actually figured out how you would ultimately really rewire the company. ‘Cause in the rewiring, problems are hit.

People don’t believe the new CEO’s direction. They have a question of uncertainty. They wanna know if the old plan was still going or how the new organization works. And what people typically do, is they go to the former CEO and it was essentially undermining Dan because I wasn’t allowing those neural pathways to reconnect. And that’s part of the reason I think, I didn’t set up Dan to succeed in the first CEO position.

Now when we brought in Jeff, I was like, I brought it in, with that experience and I was like, look, well, one of the things we really need to do is we need to make sure that the entire organization is refocused on Jeff is the CEO, And even though Reid is still closely involved I’m not gonna immediately, anytime I hit the littlest bump go to Reid in order to solve the problem. ‘Cause you have to reform the neural connectivity. 

Now the re-founder part of it, you wanna give the opportunity to step into the kind of the moral authority of the re-founding. And you want the person to step up and take it. That moment with Jeff was Jeff sitting down with me on a strategy. He’s like, well, what do you think we should do here? And I was like, well actually, in fact, you are the CEO. So you should be telling me what you think should do, and I’ll help. 

BERMAN: I can imagine Jeff Weiner sitting there and saying, you know, I’m not sure what to do. I want some counsel on this, much as Jeff might go to a board member or an advisor. Why did you feel he shouldn’t come to you for the advice that he should actually be saying, I want to do it this way, and then bouncing it off of you, rather than kind of getting in the kitchen and cooking together on it.

HOFFMAN: Well look, this is very early. This was establishing the pattern. And I really wanted to get it into the re-founding moment. It’s like, it’s your ball, and we spent, over a decade, having meetings every week, hashing through uncertain issues. Like, what should we be doing around China? And, how should the mission of the organization evolve and what should be the ongoing role of other co-founders?

But in the very early part of it, what I was trying to make sure that Jeff understood: I am, of course, delighted to help as much as possible, and I’m of course, like I, I’m not sure what to do here. What should I do? That’s a different kind of question. Versus the “are you still in charge? Is this your call to make?” Right? And it’s like, no, no, I’m not in charge. You are in charge. 

And part of how the re-founder role grew is one of the things that was key in Jeff’s mission was professional education. And I of course think professional education’s a good thing. I think LinkedIn Learning is doing all kinds of great things. But like if I were choosing the short list about what I was doing when I was CEO about what M&A I would do, which places I would invest. 

‘Cause you know, part of what you’re doing as a CEO is you’re saying, I’m investing in things now that will start bearing fruit three to 10 years from now. You’re lucky as a CEO if you get to do one of them and that’s part of how you can tell like a re-founder. ‘Cause a re founder is doing that. It’s not just, oh, what are we doing for this quarter’s numbers. But it’s the things that we’re investing in such that whoever the CEO is five, 10 years from now, you’re investing in that future company because you’re thinking about: what does that company look like as an ongoing institution in the world?

And Jeff was focused on education. At that point we’d already had enough of an established relationship that I was like, look, this isn’t a thing I would choose to do. But if this is yours… This is the thing that is too often under described in MBA schools, which is: part of the mission of the organization, is the mission of the CEO, synergizing with the organization. And you can make education as part of the short list of LinkedIn’s mission. And that could be part of your being the re-founding CEO doing this. And by the way, you see that with AI and Satya, you see that, you know, kind of across the board in the re-founding CEOs. 

Copy LinkHow Satya Nadella evolved Microsoft’s mission and strategy

BERMAN: That synergy between a re-founder and the organization’s mission is critical. A re-founder should be unsatisfied with the status quo and energize the team to evolve the company in the face of new opportunities and new challenges.

Let’s hear a clip from Satya Nadella’s episode of Masters of Scale. When Satya became the CEO of Microsoft after years at the company, he wasn’t afraid to shake things up and lead in his very own way. 

SATYA NADELLA: The best advice I even got, just be yourself, right? I mean, you’re never going to be me, so therefore don’t try to fill my shoes. 

HOFFMAN: Satya knew he wanted to lead the company as himself, and he knew what he wanted to prioritize.

NADELLA: I felt like, oh, I just can’t be like, okay, here’s the third guy who just shows up and does what Bill and Steve did. It needs a full reset. And I felt the reset meant I needed to make both that sense of purpose, mission, and culture first class and my own.

HOFFMAN: Part of Satya’s re-founder mission has been to prioritize collaboration over exclusivity in moves that might have shocked the Microsoft of the late 1990s, like partnering to build AI applications with a non-profit company.

One of the things that I think is something you would do that neither Bill nor Steve would have done is the partnership with OpenAI and the focus on that being the play. And obviously we both have a hundred out of ten respect for both Bill and Steve, so this is not a criticism of them. It is simply a different ways of playing the game.

Say a little bit about how you thought about, like, this is why it’s important for Microsoft, this is why it’s important for the right outcomes in the world, and here is the kinds of things we’re doing by partnering with an external technological organization that is actually, in fact, a 501c3 about how we’re navigating these joint missions together.

NADELLA: If AI is going to be one of the most defining technologies, what is an organization that is going to do work? And then how are we then going to be able to partner with that organization to even further democratize it? 

I think of it as a continuation of how we stand for being that platform company, that developer tools company with a broad mission to democratize the most defining technologies. In fact, I say, if it was, oh, wow. The two companies in the world, or three companies in the world have AI, that’s not a world that any of us want to live in. 

Going back to sort of your fundamental thesis, at some point, if you’re successful, you will outlast your founders as a company. And if you are going to outlast that founder, that handoff is going to be super critical. 

HOFFMAN: Successful businesses are meant to outlast their founders, which is why re-founders need to be part of the design. So wherever you can, look for those re-founders and take on that founder mindset wherever in the company you are. 

BERMAN: I want to go back to Satya Nadella’s decision about the OpenAI investment, which he acknowledges might not have happened under the prior regime at Microsoft.

You talked about ‘take the ball and run with it.’ There’s also a degree to which you at least have to be sensitive to, if not have some fidelity to the earlier mission of the company. And so I’m curious whether you think that should factor in at all. If so, to what extent? How would you advise them to think about that? 

HOFFMAN: You know, I think fundamentally there’s kind of like two mistakes. One mistake is we’re not evolving the mission at all. And the other mistake is, it’s now a blank page and entirely something different. It’s in between those two, and it can be closer to one and closer to the other, depending a little bit on what the circumstances of the company are, what the circumstances of the market are, what the circumstances of the competition are, ’cause sometimes, by the way, companies need to do pretty hard pivots and restarts and all the rest. So it could be much closer to the blank page, and sometimes it’s elaboration. 

Now, part of when we get to Satya Nadella, everyone would’ve said, well look, AI had been part of Microsoft’s thinking, but part of the re-founding moment for Satya was to say – look, the moment is now and it’s really important, and the organization that has most figured out that what you need is, attention transformers and scale is OpenAI. And I have a unique ability to get ahead of the entire world. And I have that ability to do it, but with an unusual partnership, so we will take a risk. We will do something new. 

Again, taking a risk, doing something new is part of what re-founders, more than just the kind of professional CEO’s willing to do. Because that’s the way that we realized the mission. 

BERMAN: Taking risks is perhaps the scariest thing about re-founding. Because when you re-found, you’re making a bet on the future. And if scale were easy, everyone would do it. It’s analyzing what are the right risks to take that put our team in the best position to realize our collective vision. 

After the break, Reid offers me some valuable advice as I continue my personal re-founding journey, and we explore how new leaders should assess what parts of an established culture to evolve, and what elements should to protect at all costs. We’ll be right back. 

[AD BREAK]

BERMAN: Before the break, Reid shared the importance of taking risks as a key to a re-founder’s mindset and leading with an eye to the future. 

As I begin my own re-founding journey at Wait What, I’m eager to find new ways to inspire our team and give them the room to run and reimagine what the company is capable of.  

This makes me think of a story from our episode with Marissa Mayer. Following her long tenure as an executive at Google, she was named Yahoo’s CEO. Marissa inherited a team that was hungry for change.

MARISSA MAYER: I remember when I first got there, like someone told like, lady, I don’t even know where you’re going to start. There’s a thousand, there are thousands of things that are wrong with this place. And I was like, that’s really daunting to be like, there’s thousands of things to fix.

HOFFMAN: But there were also signs that energy was bubbling beneath the surface.

MAYER: My first week at Yahoo, I made a point of going down to the cafeteria and just kind of hanging out for a long time. I was in the cafeteria and this guy came up and snapped his hand on my tray. And he was like, “Is it go time?” And I was like, please don’t leave. I’ve only been here for four days. Like we might do something actually like fun and cool. And he’s like, no, he’s like, I’m not talking about leaving. He’s like, is it go time? He’s like, there’s a whole bunch of us that have been here for like 5, 10, 15 years. Waiting for the leadership and the board to like figure itself out and he’s like, is it go time? Like, can we actually run, do stuff, build stuff? And I was like, yes, by all means, like run, go do like, don’t let me stop you. 

Copy LinkInside Jeff Berman’s experiences of re-founding WaitWhat

BERMAN: When I arrived at this company — like Marissa Mayer — I found it full of creative people ready to run. Reid knows me well enough to understand why I wanted the opportunity to lead at Wait What. And even though we’ve been friends and colleagues for more than a decade, we hadn’t talked about my experience here so far.

HOFFMAN: I think we were getting gray hairs counting the number of years we knew each other recently.

BERMAN: Yes

HOFFMAN: And so how has this re-founding moment been experienced by you?

BERMAN: I mean it’s different than anything I’ve experienced before. I mean, I think this is the fourth time in my career I’ve come into a company where part of the role has been to evolve, not necessarily reinvent, the mission, the culture, the systems processes, the ways of working. It’s the first time I’m doing it in a largely remote environment and doing so even with the perspective of serving the board of a not-for-profit that was built before COVID, uh, as a fully remote organization in Protect Democracy and having some insight into how to do that well. Boy, is it hard. It is hard to not feel people’s energy. 

And so, there are pressing needs in areas where thank goodness I’ve got, some relationships and some experience and I can dive in quickly and get going. But it’s been a fascinating process so far.

And to your point about evolving mission, when I came into the company, in September of 23, the mission was to elevate human potential. That is a profound and lofty and meaningful mission, and also extremely broad, right? That could be Peloton’s mission, that could be any number of companies’ mission. It could be LinkedIn’s mission. 

So, you know, working to really refine what the mission is so that we have more clarity on what we say yes to, what we say no to, has taken a bit of work to, to get to a place where we’re starting finally, to orient the whole team around it.

I think in part because of just analyzing where the market is and the market’s going, and in part because we’re not sitting in an office together every day solving problems in person with each other. 

HOFFMAN: And what, what are the things that you would call your younger self now, what, five months into the job and say, do more of this and less of this in that moment? What would it be?

BERMAN: One of the things that the team had done an extraordinary job of, and this is a little bit of, first thing, don’t break what’s working, is not only a very thoughtful and intentional, three day a week morning standup, but a Thursday afternoon, highly programmed hour of sharing culture building, team building. And, we’re blessed to have a member of our team, one of the co-founders, Jai Punjabi who programs that hour for the entire company.

We get to know each other personally. We have individuals presenting, not so much what they’re working on, but, um, we have a team member who had her honeymoon in Japan recently, and she did a photo essay of her honeymoon. And, wow. And so, there’s so much to do, Reid, there’s so much work, and it would be so easy to spend all of our time doing the work and not spending time really getting to have a sense of who each other is as a human, what we are passionate about, and building those human connections that would otherwise have happened around a water cooler or on a walk to get a coffee. That’s been absolutely critical. 

And, and I have to say that, the culture that the team sustained my first thing was like, this is magic. Do not screw this up.

Copy LinkHow Dara Kosrowshahi focused on elevating Uber’s best qualities

It could be daunting to enter a new organization and determine what elements of the culture are helping or hindering what you’re doing there. It’s even more challenging to tackle this in the spotlight of public scrutiny. That’s something Dara Khosrowshahi discovered when he became Uber’s CEO.

HOFFMAN: Dara had just taken on the role of Uber CEO. He had walked into a situation surrounded by some very public controversy. 

So then you start and you already know that there’s a lot of things broken, broken relationships with governments, bro culture, you know, blog posts and all the rest happening outside.

There are critiques about being overly aggressive and not very ethical in terms of business practice. Um, what does the first week look like walking into that?

DARA KHOSROWSHAHI: I’m listening to you, I’m sweating because I’m remembering that that first week, you know, I think one of the wonderful surprises for me coming in was that the public perception of the company was so different from the people that I found at the company when I joined.

These are unbelievably smart people who can get another job at the drop of a hat, but the team that was there, they wanted to fight because they believed in the company. And that was one of the most delightful things when I got on, which was there’s a group of warriors who were fighting for the company.

HOFFMAN: He wanted a culture that would arise naturally out of the good people still at Uber. The people who recognize the difficult things about the company, but still believed in it.

KHOSROWSHAHI: I remember there was a Jeff Bezos letter a couple of years ago where he said that, you know, the culture of the company defines itself. In an ideal world, I could work at a company for two, three years, understand what the culture is, and not have culture be top down. I want the culture of the company to be X, because I said so, help the culture define itself. But we didn’t have time for that. 

HOFFMAN: Instead, Dara gathered his team of captains and they looked through the cultural suggestions from the entire crew. Before Dara, Uber’s cultural guidelines ranged from the sober likes of ‘be yourself’ to the full on brotastic maxims like ‘super pumped’ and ‘always be hustling’. It was time for a sweeping change. 

KHOSROWSHAHI: So we crowdsourced actually from our employees, what do you think should represent the culture of Uber going forward? There were some themes that came to the surface. As a team, then we got together and we picked the themes that we thought were the most relevant themes. And we created what we call our new cultural norms, the Uber 2.0 cultural norms. 

HOFFMAN:  Some of these were continuations of the old norms. Some were totally new. And some were squarely aimed at overcoming the earlier toxic culture. 

KHOSROWSHAHI: We celebrate differences. We want to be a different company, but we also celebrate differences in background, in where you come from, in religion, in sexuality, etc. And we believe that no matter what you bring to the table, you should be able to contribute to what we call Uber. 

HOFFMAN: I was expecting him to kind of say, “well, I rode in as the new sheriff in town,” and he was like, no, actually, in fact, like a bunch of really good, well-meaning people, there was a bunch of really good elements in the culture.

What I did is I took an approach and I think it was what everyone should do in all evolutions, Uber did have some real turnarounds that needed to happen, is to say we have some really good elements to our mission, our culture. When we evolve, we should refine and hold onto that. 

Now, it wasn’t a complete democracy, it was like we threw everything in a pot. And then he highlighted the ones as the CEO that would be there. But it was a collaborative process. And so I think the way that you came in, is exactly the right thing to do.

BERMAN: Yeah. And, one of the things that I didn’t do, which I’ve subsequently questioned whether it was the right decision. I’m curious about your take on this. When Jeff Weiner came into the LinkedIn role, he talks about meeting with all 330 team members, and really going on a listening tour.

On the second day of our offsite, when I came into the company, Shira Ackerman from our team, asked me if I was going to do one-on-ones with everyone in the company. And I took a deep breath and I said, no. At least not yet. Because we have some really pressing priorities that I have to attend to, to make sure that we’re on the right track.

Um, but, what is your advice to incoming CEOs and or re-founders, where they may be small fires, but there are fires that have to be attended to. And balancing that against the need to really understand who the team is, where they are, what they need, et cetera.  

HOFFMAN: You do on the entrepreneurial journey, have to let fires burn, both as a CEO, as a re-founder, sometimes as an employee. ‘Cause it’s like, I can only, I focus on the triaging the most important one and then get to the other ones later. 

In, you know, my book, The Alliance, I kind of described these three tours of duty, which included the transformational one, which is I think is what, generally speaking, most modern jobs are. But there’s also a foundational tour of duty. And I think one of the things that you’re trying to do is you’re trying to get that spread of ownership of the problems, the fires, the challenges, the culture, the identity, more beyond just the individual. Because individuals can also be on foundational tours of duty. 

And I think part of it is not just solving the problems themselves, but also getting the team and the culture to kind of reformulate to, okay, we are problem solvers here. And sometimes by the way, that allows people to try to solve a problem and not do it so well, fail at it, do it partially, et cetera. But it’s more important to be building those muscles, building those mindsets, building that kind of mentality. 

BERMAN: Well, I think we may have coined a new term which is a re-foundational tour of duty. 

So Reid, I’m coming up on six months and we’ll have my second quarter board meeting and if you were sitting on our board with a re-founder here, beyond the financial metrics, how would you be gauging my success in this role? What should I be anticipating from the terrific board members that I’ll be meeting within a month or so?

HOFFMAN: Well, one of the paradoxes of entrepreneurship is the yin and yang of it. It’s like, you should both be long term and short term. You should both have a persistent vision, but you should be flexible to competition, market, other kinds of changes, technology changes.

And a little bit of it is the question of, yes, you have to be doing the, okay, what’s the financial state of the business? Are we executing against that? What are the things that we’re gonna need to accomplish in terms of revenue, fundraising, other kinds of things, as the organization kind of re-coalesced around you as a leader?

All of which, kind of baseline importance, but then also a little bit of the, what is frequently industry described as BHAG.

BERMAN: Big, hairy, audacious. Goals. Yeah. 

HOFFMAN: Exactly. But it’s like, here’s the big game that we’re playing that is that transformation and here is how you blend that yin and the yang of the, where we are now and also what we’re trying to get to. ‘Cause you know, frequently the way the board members ask this question most often is kinda like, everyone’s talking about artificial intelligence. How does that change our goals, our way of operating? How is it gonna change how our industry is gonna be? How do we become more of a leader? And what are the things that we’re doing? 

And to some degree, the board members will probably first wait for you to say something to see if you’re naturally triggering on that, and then ask questions about it is the pattern by which this will most typically happen.

BERMAN: Great. Super helpful. We’ll stick the landing on the board of meeting with that advice. 

Thank you so much, Reid. Deeply grateful for your time and wisdom and, um, thanks for helping me in my job as well.

HOFFMAN: Well, likewise, and I could not be more delighted than to be continuing down this path, partnering with you and the rest of the amazing Wait What organization.

BERMAN: Thanks Reid. Appreciate you.

BERMAN: As I approach the six month mark of my own re-founding experience, I’m struck by the incredible power of mentorship. There is no way we could have made the progress that we have made without the valuable insight of numerous leaders, thinkers and friends — conversations really like the one you just heard. To re-found any business, no matter your size, takes guts and gall. And like any route to scale, it’s not a solo endeavor. So don’t be afraid to lean on your network – and not just your mentors and friends, your team as well. Go in search of inspiration and wisdom more than ever. 

I’m Jeff Berman. Thanks for listening.