Reid: Then, yes. Well, I came back and I decided I wanted to be an entrepreneur and networked my way to some venture capitalist who said, “Have you ever had experience shipping products?” And I was like, not yet and they were like, “Ok, go work in a company; learn how to ship a product then come back and talk to us and that’s actually what I did. I worked for Apple and then Fujitsu and then started a company immediately after that.
Kamla: What advice would you have to give or share to young people around the world who want to be entrepreneurs and who can use LinkedIn actually?
Reid: So the key thing is to make sure that is many entrepreneurial efforts- there is kind of three basis on which they can fail. One is you don’t have a good idea. Usually you need to have some experience while evaluating ideas because frequently many ideas seem good at 50,000 foot level but don’t get to the 20,000 foot level. One way of leveraging your network is find other people who are good advisors or intelligent commentators or people who can give you good advice.
Second thing is to make sure you have adequate resources and this is everything from finance to co-founders, early employees, things that you can pull together and you don’t just put in years of your life to zero input because of lack of resources. Now again, your network is useful for that. Do you know people; do you know people who have the finance, technical background, and the managerial skills to pull yourself together? That is leverage.
The third is to make sure that you yourself have the relevant skills. Frequently with entrepreneurs you are creating something new and so you create a skill set as you go but make sure that you’re deploying the kind of best, the most advanced techniques you have to do your business. And this one is a little bit more individual but you can cross check with the people you know. For example, what is the right technology base to build a new consumer Internet? Is it PHP and LAMP stack or should I be using Ruby on Rails or so forth. So you again go and find that set of people who can help you make that decision because you can’t have it all yourself is useful and another good use of the network.
Kamla: What does technology mean to you?
Reid: I have a very broad definition of technology. Frequently people mean hard science. What I basically mean is everything from hard science to a kind of a pattern of interaction between people. So, I actually think capitalism is really a good technology as in both a social technology, as opposed to computer technology or IT technology or a science technology. Technology is almost the science or the process with which we improve how artifacts and how we ourselves work.
Kamla: What values do you think technology can help spread?