LinkedIn Founder: Double Your Income With AI Before It's Too Late | Reid Hoffman

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0:40We're the Hartford, with decades of experience insuring millions of unique small businesses. When it comes to your small business insurance, one size absolutely does not fit all. Get a quote or find an agent today at thehartford.com slash smallbusiness. We've seen Claude releasing this 200-line code that brought the B2B market down. We lost$300 billion of market value. All of that is literally just beginning, but it's all line of sight. This is Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, legendary investor who was among the first to see every major tech wave coming. And what he's saying now should concern anyone with a career.

1:21There aren't individual contributing workers anymore that we all deploy with a set of AIs. So what do I do? What do people like me do? Even most people who say, oh yeah, I'm using AI are not using it seriously enough. You've been mentioning this a lot. Everyone will have a set of agents working for them. Is it possible now or we're still not quite there yet? It's totally possible now. So for someone who has a nine to five job, what's the first thing they should do to double their income this year? Oh, that's interesting. Maybe the simplest one is... And I'm super excited that we're talking again a year later so we can revisit some of the things that you said last year.

1:56It's been a crazy year. Yeah. And I see Chad GPT everywhere. People are using different tools to build their own things. Is this the AI boom or is it like 10 % of what we're going to see? Maybe 5%. 5%. Yeah. Obviously, the last couple of years, people have been talking about it a lot. And one of the things we should get you and we'll figure out how to get to you. But like I actually made an AI Christmas record, you know, kind of AI music I'd want to see around Christmas. And it's just beginning to scratch what these kind of possibilities are because, by the way, I'm not qualified to make a record.

2:32You know, I have none of the skills, but with AI you can do that. And so what I think people are under tracking is they're seeing, of course, the general discussion of codecs and cloud code and other things. and they're not realizing how that spreads out to every portion of kind of human work and creativity. That it isn't just, oh, we all have a software agent as our co-pilot doing stuff for us. Yes, that'll be true too. But that the coding capabilities are like generalized reasoning capabilities that then enable a bunch of things. They enable you to say, well, you know what I've always wanted for someone working with me as a travel agent, as someone who really understood, you know, my love of particular kinds of archaeology, could you then be the travel agent that figured out like where and what and could possibly book things and all that?

3:23Like all of that is literally just beginning, but it's all line of sight. So I think we're literally like, for example, we're small in number of years by which we realize something I've been saying for the last couple, which is there aren't individual contributing workers anymore that we all deploy with a set of AIs. Like, for example, almost for sure when we're doing this conversation, let's just project next year since we did last year. Yeah. We'll have, like, your tablet will have an AI agent that's going, oh, ask him about this. Or when he said this, do this. Or, you know, like that kind of thing will be amongst what we're doing.

4:05That's the reason why I'm like, not 10%, maybe 5%, maybe 2%. Yeah. And you said in our last interview that we have around two years to adapt. So as someone non-technical, I want to start adapting. So what do I do? If I'm a creator, a salesperson, a marketer, what are the steps that I can take today? Well, table stakes is if you're not already interacting with, you know, call it the easy AI agents, the chatbots today, and in a substantive way. I don't just mean that as a substantive way of like, so for example, you're thinking, okay, how do I take my podcast and kind of media to the next level?

4:44What are the things I should consider? What are the different kinds of ideas for it? Or I'm traveling to this fun place. What should I do there? All this stuff. But like, for example, what I mean by basics is in prompting, you don't just go, oh, I type in seven words and see what I get. One of the things I think is key now is being voice build, which is speak to it. We speak a lot faster. And it's actually much, much better if you just throw out lots of things. But even in speaking to it, like one of the things that I'll do when I'm interacting with various AI agents is I'll say, really interested in what are the prospects of fusion technology?

5:22Which company is doing really interesting things? Have new things come from labs? Now, write me the right prompt to do all the research for that. even when I do voice fill it. Because then it comes back with a two-page prompt and I run the two-page prompt and then I get something very interesting. So that's what I mean. That I describe as basic. Okay, this is basic. That's basic. Talk to me about advanced but without coding. Like one of the things that as you begin to get experience with this, you realize that these chatbot agents are very good at ascribing roles. So you might have an idea, but you say, hey, I have an interest in, let's just continue the fusion example.

6:02I have an interest in fusion for climate change and fusion for energy and what it's going to mean for AI. Let's ask that question and answer like, okay, what would a technologist say? What would a venture investor say? What would a government policy person say? What would a nuclear safety person say? And then you might even ask the AI, are there other roles that I haven't thought of? and then you ask it to adopt each role in giving you an answer because then you begin to realize that there's a whole lens of things and this thinking about ai is like a consummate like you know kind of role taker is useful because even in very simple things like you say well i i'd really like to argue this like when i'm writing i do this and i say well argue against me like what what's what's the thing that that's a simple role like be the contrarian be the the naysayer to what i'm By the way, you can also get the, and what are things I'm missing to argue for what I want to be arguing?

6:57That's a great exercise, by the way. Yes. So you do all that. But then it also gets interesting when you kind of go, all right. Like, for example, you say, well, hey, I'm thinking about how do I, what's the next generation of AI impacting social media, internet media? Like, even the question you're asking, it's a great question to go ask AI. It's like, no, you have to ask it in a way that you're prompting it to do web research. This is maybe a little bit more on the slightly more advanced question is what people don't realize is they think this is a deeply knowledgeable AI, which it is. They don't realize it's training run finished 18 months ago.

7:35So it's actually 18 months out of date in the use of AI tools. Right. So when you're asking a question like, oh, which AI tools? You actually have to ask it a research question. You have to say, go look at, pull a whole bunch of information. It's like GBD 5.2 thinking mode. Pull in information and give me a report on it. Because if you're relying on just the information on the model, its view of something that we're being 18 months out of date is a problem is a problem. Can you evaluate my setup? For example, I have an ocean where we have the whole operations have 35 people on my team. We log every episode.

8:12We have a transcript. And then we have cloud projects for every social media that we're running, which has access to performance data, scripts. It acts like a strategist. So we gave it instructions so it knows what our goals are. Do you think it's easy, medium, or advanced? I would say that's probably medium. Medium. Okay. So part of it is you've got cloud agents with assigned roles on a, you know, kind of constant, like, you know, an active part of the process, not one off. Yeah. So that takes you from easy to medium. Okay, great. Now, on advanced, you probably want to say, well, what are the additional skills and what pulls from other sorts of data might be useful?

8:55like should we have one that's kind of going for example talk to all the agents or all the projects and say is there through lines like what can we derive from what's working what's not working are there through lives that can give us good ideas for things we should be doing in the next month or two right like kind of doing almost like the meta of it would be one thing and meta both internal data but also external data like how other podcasters yes and you might go this This one did this really interesting thing with, and I'm just choosing a random one, CryptoPunks. And we could do something with that.

9:32Right. Like that kind of thing. Like, you know. Gathering ideas from other fields for you. Right. And that would be the, because again, part of it is think about the AI agents as intelligence that scales process information with basically the price of electricity. Right. The price of compute, but price of compute and electricity. Well, that means it's like in the vectors where you can give it instructions, you don't want it to spend infinitely. You could obviously easily spend$200 ,000 on AI processing that's not useful. That is not useful. But in anything where it's kind of bounded into a vector that's useful, you go, well, actually, in fact, spending even, call it$10 ,000 doing a bunch of compute could suddenly give you 15 different useful things.

10:21And that's easily valuable. Yeah. So for someone who's listening, who has a 905 job doing 80K and they're like, okay, how do I use it to double my income this year? What would you say? Oh, that's interesting.

10:38Doubling income is an interesting question. Partially because maybe the simplest one is everyone who is running businesses that they're investing in knows that they have a massive need for AI transformation and AI talent. So part of it is to start demonstrating your engagement and knowledge with AI in ways that you're easily findable. because, you know, whether it's through LinkedIn or through social media platforms or else, like literally people are like, we're looking for this because we know we need this transformation. And so I think the lucrative jobs won't just be the super high price, like, oh, we need AI researchers.

11:21But like we're literally now, I think this year is when we really begin to see more of the applications. And so like, how do I run my business better? How do I do my analysis of my supply chain or my financial analysis or my risk analysis or my marketing or my sales? How do I do any of that stuff better? And they're going to start looking at it. And sure, they'll go to some of their internal people. But everyone's going to start going, well, I've been doing this job and adopting the jumping to the totally new thing is hard for me. So part of it is like, OK, start jumping to the new thing. Love it.

11:56So basically the business idea or the doubling of idea, you get proficient in tools in some area and go help other companies. And demonstrate it. Yes. Yeah. And demonstrate it. Because I feel like we're also in a bubble, right? We're in Silicon Valley. Everyone's using AI. And then you travel abroad and be like, what? Yes. What GPT? Well, yes, with really interesting asterisks. So like, for example, I think it was about 18 months ago, I was talking to a friend of mine who was traveling in Morocco. And the taxi driver, who didn't speak English, was making their whole business work because they were just using ChatGBT as a translator.

12:29So literally, it was just like… People are figuring it out. Yes, exactly. It's just a beginner stage. Yes, yes, yes. But then you need to become medium and advanced. Talk to me as an entrepreneur. So I built a company, and I've been building this business since 2011, helping people learn languages, study abroad. But from what I'm seeing right now, with these systems getting more and more advanced, Codex can now do the taste thing, right, that we thought is irreplaceable. And then we've seen Claude releasing this 200-line code that brought the B2B market down. We lost$300 billion of market value.

13:02Is this the end of B2B software or, like, what's going on? What it was, markets tend to, over time, are very good measurement devices, but can do crazy short-term things. Short-term long, short-term low, short-term high. They can do both because they kind of don't know how to absorb something. And part of what the transformation of the kind of cult SaaS B2B software market is, the way it used to run is I would build something, you know, kind of valuable like Salesforce. and in building Salesforce, it would take, you know, ultimately I'd add in so many features because one feature for company one, one feature for company two, three features for company three, but having them all there that for someone who wanted to compete with me, they'd have to spend a billion dollars just to create the product to start the sales thing against me.

13:55And even then the problem is that sales is a very hard thing because what Salesforce says, we'll be here forever. Do you want to switch your mission critical system to the new provider who sure they said a billion dollars building a product but are they going to be still be here or not so it's very hard to do and that's the economics that created sass as a valuable business category because then salesforce because it was hard to get competition in could charge i don't know what their actual sales margin but let's call it 40 you know margins and that could allow them to kind of reinvest in their business and everything else now with ai coding it's like well actually in fact like i'm company four and they I had these two features that I didn't want all of them.

14:33Yeah. And there was another feature that wasn't in there or another two features weren't even in there that I really wanted. Now it might just be more economical for me to kind of maintain my own system in AI because generating and maintaining and evolving the software is so much cheaper. It is. Right. One counterpoint because everybody was like, oh, software engineers are getting out of jobs. No, they're not because they're going to be employed everywhere. Like the grocery store is going to be employing software engineers and these things. Like, you still need to think about this. Like, you say, I want to have a CRM system.

15:03You can't go to an AI and go, give me a CRM system. Not now. What about two years? Well, maybe eventually. But, like, for example, part of – I have confidence that for a number of years, and maybe it's a shorter than I would believe, the human plus the AI will be much better. Right? Like when you're understanding, like, for example, you know, Sarah or Bob is walking around and looking at how we use the CRM system and like, oh, but this would be a good idea. The AI doesn't really have that ability to walk around to do it. It'll have ability to do internet research and bring that in, which is really useful as per earlier comments.

15:39But that's the reason why I think the combo will be useful. And that's the reason why I think software engineers will have jobs for a while because it's a way of thinking about it. Now, how a software engineer operates is already starting to change. Like, as opposed to the, oh, I'm sitting down and typing code. It's like, well, actually, in fact, I've got 20 coding agents that I'm managing through voice going, generate this, generate this, cross-check this, do that. Like, I'm more of a conductor than I am a violin player or a piano player, right, is kind of the thing. And that is changing. People would be surprised at how much room there is in the business world for conductors.

16:15Okay. So I've heard this a lot on social media, and I feel like I'm kind of starting to believe it, that we only have a few years to make money as small business entrepreneurs because then it's going to be taken away by large models. Do you agree with that? Well, I do think that we're going to see a sea of content creation by AI. Yeah. And, you know, people say, well, but people don't want that. They'll want only human. It's like, well, there will be a persistent demand for human. That's good. By the way, just like there's elevator music, you know, music in elevators. And so, like, there's lots of things out there that people are not like, well, I'm really looking to make sure it's only a person.

17:01Does it fit my particular need and circumstances? Is it easily available? Is it free, cheap, not expensive, et cetera, et cetera? So there's going to be a flood of stuff. I do think that what that means for small business is, but it may be a feature of small business versus call it large businesses, which is small businesses usually tend to be able to be more adaptive because our large businesses are almost more on, call it, the industrial model, the Taylor models. Like we tuned our efficiency and we work really hard and we own these distribution channels. And we did like, you know, I love Disney, so I'm not picking on Disney, but like Disney is doing it.

17:40Small businesses adopt AI, I think, will have a lot of interesting, unique shots because of the platform transition. And so it'll be an advantage to them versus the large companies. The small businesses don't adopt AI, I think it's going to be very hard. What would be your advice then for entrepreneurs who are building a smaller AI business, AI-based business, and are afraid that two weeks somebody releases, like with SAT prep, because I'm in test prep. Yes. Gemini released SAT prep. I'm like, okay, my thing is TOEFL. When is TOEFL coming to Gemini? Probably very soon. But, you know, sorry to say.

18:16I just registered your specific question, but my guess is it's not. Very soon, right? Very soon. Months. So what do I do? What do people like me do? Well, I think what you do is you refactor to go, look, I realize I'm going to have to rebase my entire business on AI, and AI is a dynamic changing platform. So in as much as it's not tooled on AI, I got to retool. Now, part of it is, okay, TOEFL will be available on AI platforms for entrepreneurial or kind of call it people who want to pull it together themselves just as they were pulling together through Google searches or whatever else for free.

18:48So what's the things I can do that cause people to engage with me? Yeah, what's my value at? Right. Okay, build a personal brand. We're doing this. Yeah. Is there anything else? Well, that's definitely one. But it's also like you could imagine it's like, well, actually, in fact, most of these, you know, like Gemini, ChatGBT, Claude, et cetera, will be solo experiences for a number of years. They're going to be so focused on the solo experience. Well, maybe there's ways we can do group experiences. And the group experiences really work. And it doesn't mean that, you know, you can't inject, you know, ChatGBT into a group experience and have it, you know, be useful.

19:22but maybe like it's like what are the ways that we use this trajectory and then we're adding in something else because it's not going to be like for example you say well but it could do that itself or someone who says i want to do it myself sure but people don't want to do everything themselves yeah one they don't have the ideas two they don't have time i think ai prompting is only going to slowly like at human speeds grow as an like i even talk to people who are pretty expert and they go, oh, wait a minute. I was voice billed, but I wasn't doing it. Tell me the, write the prompt for me. Yeah.

19:56Off it. Yeah. Oh yeah. It takes you to the next level because the problem is like this. Yes. Right. That kind of thing. This is very interesting. If you're watching this, you are probably thinking about growing your own LinkedIn profile. Here's what we found. The people crushing it aren't guessing what to post. They have a system. That's why we built a free database of 300 post ideas. It's literally 300 ready-to-use post ideas you can use across your LinkedIn right now. We organize the ideas based on audience's segment, type of content to use, whether it's an image or text or video, frequency, because you can post one idea multiple times, and even time needed to create.

20:38If it sounds good to you, we're giving it for free to my Inner Circle newsletter subscribers, which is again, it's free to subscribe. Link is in the comments. Grab it and you're set for the next year of content. So are there any industries that you think are more... So from what you're saying, like group experience, everything, I feel like offline is going to get way bigger. Just want to stay off our devices and do things. Any other markets? Well, offline for sure. I also think, like I said, we are social animals but that's the reason why the groups and not just you know being one of the earliest social network people linked in etc um but i think that will matter even as these ai systems get a lot of capability there still will be uncertainties and trust and part of the uncertainties and trust is the incentive of of the entity that's offering it versus others in And there's ways that we, and it kind of gets back to the personal brand, but the set of things that kind of get to, like, how is that trust established and maintained?

21:49We're both familiar from our Silicon Valley context. You know, there's obviously a whole bunch of people say everything that's done with bits is going to be completely done with AI and that's it. I'd be very surprised if that were true. Like, that would be surprising. what I think is it'll be massively transformed. So anything that's being done with bits in a particular way today will be very different in six months, 12 months, 18 months, 24 months, et cetera. And you have to adapt to it and adopt it. But I tend to think there's still, like, for example, it's like, oh, well, I shouldn't bother writing science fiction anymore.

22:23It's like, yeah, it's not clear to me. Like, I think writing science fiction could still work. But if your process of writing science fiction is, I disappear for three years into a cubicle, you know kind of typing on my yeah that's gonna work yeah okay do you think ai is the last human-driven revolution and all of the next revolutions will be ai created

22:52i think it's call it probability 60 to 70 percent that the future inventions over the next call it 50 to 100 years, who knows after that, will be human plus AI created. It doesn't mean that there won't, like every human doing an invention might not be actually, in fact, using AI to do it. I have some actually, you know, kind of, unfortunately, some things I can't talk about because they're confidential, but like they will be revealed the next month around like physicists working with AI to do stuff. And it's not, it's not, oh my God, we discovered what dark matter it is, but solving physics problems.

23:30But it's the human plus AI together. And I think that's - 60, 70%. Yeah. Then I think there is, of like inventions, and I think there's probably going to be, call it another 25%, 30%, depending on where it is exactly, that is actually, in fact, primarily AI driven, right, over time, in part because we'll begin to kind of get zones of, oh that's a much better problem for the ai to solve and there might be some human checking in but it won't even be that depth of being a conductor it'd be more like cross-checking the hey you know or does this make sense or can i spend 10 million dollars doing the compute to analyze fusion containment in the following way you're like well 10 million dollars a lot of money you know if it's in today's dollars you know let's cross-check it and then i think there will be still 5 % that's still the human Eureka, like without AI.

24:26Okay, only 5 % for AI. Yes. Well, unassisted, unassisted. Unassisted, unassisted. Okay. So, sounds good. Sounds positive. Okay, my last question. It is February 2026. If you could give one piece of advice to someone watching now, what is one thing they should do before February 2027 to not get left behind? Well, the very central thing, a little bit like where it echoes what we were talking about before is even most people who say, oh yeah, I'm using AI are not using it seriously enough, right? Which is like, I, in everything that I do, I think about how would I use, I don't always do it because you don't always have to, and certainly not now, but how would I use AI to help me do that or to make that happen?

25:15And it ranges everything from I'm planning a vacation in Rome to I am thinking about writing a piece or what's the way that I would analyze what's going on with multiple and the whole range. I think, okay, if I were going to try to use AI to really help with that, well, what might I do? And having that kind of always be a question and it, look, it could even be the, I'm going to have a difficult conversation with my mother okay think about how i could help with that like just get in the reflex think of it as kind of doing like just the like simple training yeah like before everything you do just think about how you could deploy ai yeah and you might go no i'm not going to do this one that's fine because you know limited time and all the rest but like be thinking about that because that is a reflex because literally my belief is today everything you do ai can be helpful doesn't mean And it's the answer.

26:12So, for example, I still wouldn't go, here's the money I'm investing in AI, just have an AI do it. I think that would be a way to lose money today. I'm still doing it myself. But I also, by the way, think about what new capabilities the AI is bringing to my ability to invest, including an AI. Absolutely love it. Thank you so much. And thank you from everyone who's posting on LinkedIn. I feel like 2025 was the year of LinkedIn when we all saw tremendous growth and so many great deals. So thank you so much for creating it. My pleasure. Great talking to you. The right window treatments change everything.