Legendary Entrepreneur and Investor Reid Hoffman Hosts New Podcast Masters of Scale
The original series unfolds like a music-infused detective story as Hoffman tests theories with iconic founders about how companies scale from zero to a gazillion.
NEW YORK, April 25, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- WaitWhat, a new content incubator founded by former TED executives June Cohen and Deron Triff, today announced Masters of Scale, an original podcast series hosted by LinkedIn Co-Founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman, launching May 3 on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and other audio streaming platforms. Created in association with Stitcher, the series features iconic entrepreneurs such as Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, Airbnb's Brian Chesky, Endeavor's Linda Rottenberg, Netflix's Reed Hastings, Crisis Text Line's Nancy Lublin, Alphabet's (Google's parent company) Eric Schmidt, Minted's Mariam Naficy, and Bill Gates, among others. Masters of Scale is the first American media program to commit to a 50-50 gender balance for featured guests.
Each episode of Masters of Scale begins with an unexpected story, setting the stage for Hoffman to reveal a theory about how organizations scale successfully. The show then unfolds like a detective story — scored with originally composed music — as he tests the idea with iconic entrepreneurs. Some of the counter-intuitive theories include: "If you aren't embarrassed by your first product release, you've released too late," "Successful entrepreneurs have to let fires burn — sometimes very large fires," and "In order to scale, you have to do things that don't scale."
"When you spend as much time as I have partnering with entrepreneurs to build great companies, you start to see patterns in what it takes to achieve massive scale," said Hoffman, who was an early investor in many companies that amassed more than 100 million users, including Airbnb, Facebook, LinkedIn and Zynga. "I love to mentor entrepreneurs to scale, and Masters of Scale lets me share insights and stories with millions of company builders. Additionally, I love that Masters of Scale itself is an original, entrepreneurial effort to scale business knowledge."
Masters of Scale is rooted in Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurship, but the show also jumps fields, connecting the dots between the stories of famous founders in different industries and regions. Unexpected guests make cameo appearances, sharing their own honest — and often funny — observations that lend further proof, or counterpoints, to Hoffman's theories. Cameo appearances range from Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman to Hall of Fame sportscaster Dick Stockton.
"Masters of Scale is like nothing you've heard before," said June Cohen, co-founder of WaitWhat and former executive producer of TED Media. "Each show aims to illuminate big concepts, as well as simple hacks that can change everything. We do it by combining humor, music and storytelling in a brand-new way — one that will appeal to creators everywhere who want to scale their ideas."
Through a series of innovative partnerships, Masters of Scale will serve as a springboard for entrepreneurs to test Hoffman's theories or share their own tales of scale. Entrepreneur Media, the official media partner of Masters of Scale, has created a microsite for the series, which will feature original articles and videos from contributors responding to Hoffman's ideas throughout the first season of the series. Additionally, LinkedIn will showcase prominent LinkedIn Influencers — such as business guru Guy Kawasaki, GE's Beth Comstock, and Craigslist's Craig Newmark, among others — writing a "first response" to an episode, and invite its community to weigh in on Hoffman's theories. In the coming months, Masters of Scale will also be offered to public radio stations for broadcast in collaboration with PRI, to major airlines as in-flight entertainment, and adapted into educational formats.
The first episode of Masters of Scale, "Handcrafted" — featuring Airbnb Co-Founder and CEO Brian Chesky — will launch on May 3 on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and other audio streaming platforms. The first season encompasses 10 episodes with new episodes released weekly.
The schedule for season one — along with transcripts of each episode — is available at www.MastersofScale.com. Additional insights and practical lessons based on Hoffman's theories are offered at www.Entrepreneur.com/MastersofScale. Updates and news are offered on Twitter at @mastersofscale. Listeners can share their own tales of scale using the hashtag #mastersofscale.
About Reid Hoffman
Reid Hoffman is a partner at Greylock Partners. He co-founded LinkedIn in 2003 in his living room; it now has nearly 500 million members in 200 countries and territories around the world. He serves on the boards of Airbnb, Convoy, Edmodo, and Microsoft, in addition to some as yet unannounced start-ups. He leads the Greylock Discovery Fund, which invests in seed-stage entrepreneurs and companies; the fund is an extension of his prior angel investing, which included Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, and Zynga. Prior to LinkedIn and Greylock, he served as executive vice president at PayPal, where he was a founding board member. He believes strongly in the ability of entrepreneurship and technology to improve the world, and serves on the boards of Biohub, Kiva, Endeavor, and DoSomething.org. He co-authored the best-selling books The Startup of You and The Alliance. He earned his master's degree in philosophy from Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar, and his bachelor's degree with distinction in symbolic systems from Stanford University.
About WaitWhat
WaitWhat is a first-of-its-kind content incubator that invests in, develops and nurtures original media properties until they achieve great scale. Founded by June Cohen and Deron Triff, former TED executives, WaitWhat brings genre-defining media into a world hungry for originality, authenticity and optimism. As a content incubator, WaitWhat combines exceptional creative capacity and distribution know-how to launch new media properties that include podcasts, video series, virtual reality and apps. The company's media properties all incorporate "wait, what?" moments that light an audience up and make people feel alive — inspiring them to share with others. For a combined 16 years, Cohen and Triff led TED's media operations, growing TED Talks from zero to 1 billion views/listens each year through launching TED.com, the TED Open Translation Project, TED Radio Hour on NPR, TED in Cinema, and nearly 100 distribution partnerships around the world. Cohen was previously VP of Content at Wired Digital; Triff was previously VP of Digital Ventures at PBS.
About Midroll Media
Midroll Media is a leading podcast content company, advertising network and distribution platform that is changing the face of digital audio. It is the parent company of the Earwolf network and its top-ranked comedy podcasts; popular podcast listening platform and content network Stitcher and its premium subscription service; and the Midroll advertising network, representing over 300 of the world's largest podcasts. With offices in Los Angeles, New York City and San Francisco, Midroll was founded in 2010 and is a wholly owned subsidiary of The E.W. Scripps Company.
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