指尖阅读—你的生涯 你做主（五）

大家好，很高兴和大家再次见面，今天的指尖阅读我将继续和大家一起阅读原汁原味的英文读物。

WHY US?

I (Reid) cofoundered Linkedin in 2003 with the mission of connecting the world’s professionals to make them moreproductive and successful. More than 100 million members (at the time of the Linkedin IPO in May 2011) and nine years later, I’ve learned a tremendous amount about how professionals in every industry manage their careers; how they connect with trusted business contacts, find jobs, share information, and present their online identities. For example, from Linkedin’s massive professional engagement, my colleagues and I have gleaned insights about the most-sought-after skills, industry trends, and the career paths that lead to opportunities. I’ve gleaned insight about which approaches succeed and which fail; which tactics work and which fall flat. Along the way, I began to notice something utterly fascinating that related to my other passion:investing.

Anexecutive chairman, Linkedin is my primary day job, but I also invest in other start-ups. As an angel investor and now as partner at Greylock, I’ve invested in more than one hundred companies. This has given me an opportunity to help awesome entrepreneurs scale their businesses; be it brainstorming with Mark Pincus at Zynga on social gaming strategy, thinking through the future of the mobile Internet with Kevin Rose at Digg and Milk (his mobile apps firm), or collaborating with Matt Flannery to bring Kiva’s microloan model to all the world’s poor. Through these diverse experiences, I’ve developed an eye for the patterns of success and the patterns of failure in entrepreneurship.

Wearing these two hats – helping Linkedin enable more economic opportunity for our members as well as helping my other portfolio companies grow – led me to a revelation: The business strategies employed by highly successful start-ups and the career strategies employed by highly successful individuals are strikingly similar. Ever since, I’ve been distilling into strategic frameworks all that I’ve learned from twenty fortunate years in Silicon Valleyand applying them to the idea that every individual is a small business. I think about my own career in exactly this way: as a start-up.