100 Million People ~ Hoffman on Having Impact

LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman speaks now at the Media Lab on How to Benefit 100 Million People: Designing and Building Human Ecosystems for Networks and Marketplaces. Key themes...

• Public Intellectual Society -- How improve ourselves and society by designing, building, and improving human ecosystems;
• Impact at Scale -- How change world, elevate game for us all, meaning hundreds of millions of people;
• Media Enables -- Designing and building tools for linking humanity. Software and networks are incredibly powerful;
• Commerce is Good -- Economic engine drives growth and endures;
• Learning from Ventures -- First company begat better followers;
• Platforms, Networks, Marketplaces -- What to invest in and build;
• LinkedIn as Live-Case Study -- Most well-known exemplar of themes;
• as Platform: LinkedIn Skills -- App that's usefully enabled mashup;
• as Network: LinkedIn Today -- People w/ ID, connected, ultra-custom of professional relevance;
• as Marketplace -- Talent liquidity via transparency and reputation leads to tremendous productivity boost for society;
• Self Regulation Layers -- Explicit and implicit reputation, permission, empowerment;
• Career Ladder is Broken -- Old world metaphor, change too fast and different. Must be more adaptable. Everyone an entrepreneur!
• Startup of You -- Reid's new book, you need to operate as business of yourself!

Also interesting Q&A discussion with Media Lab Director Joi Ito plus audience, including connecting with polar-opposite Peter Thiel, that it's generally not a good idea to dropout of college, pros and cons of business-mindset and their monopolistic temptations, LinkedIn has has best-interest of professional customer centrally in mind, crafting a culture of collaboration, architecting for innovation, teaching "how to" collaborate in order to get high-performance, Google buying breakfast thus synchronizing group circadian rhythm, dealing with IPO and being public, Chomsky's Responsibilities of Intellectual, always speaking truth but not all truths, helping SME businesses better connect and find each other, timescales of change in IP patents vs IP internet, explaining away MBA and background in management consulting (ouch;-), data as Web 3.0, data-ownership, overhauling the global patent system, role of open vs closed systems, etc.