Surprising truths from the world’s most successful entrepreneurs

Masters of Scale

What can you learn from a Silicon Valley legend and a pantheon of iconic leaders? The key to scaling a successful business isn't talent, network or strategy. It's an entrepreneurial mindset - and that mindset can be cultivated. 
 
Behind the scenes in Silicon Valley, Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn, investor at Greylock) is a sought-after advisor to heads of companies and heads of state. On his podcast Masters of Scale, he sits down with an all-star list of visionary founders and leaders, digging into the surprising strategies that power their growth. In this book, he draws on their most riveting, revealing stories - as well his own experience as a founder and investor - to distil the counterintuitive secrets behind the most extraordinary success stories of our times. 
 
Here, Hoffman teams up with Masters of Scale's executive producers to offer a rare window into the entrepreneurial mind. They share surprising, never-before-told stories from leaders of the world's most iconic companies, including Apple, Nike, Netflix, Spotify, Starbucks, Google, Instagram and Microsoft, as well as the bold, disruptive startups - from 23andMe to TaskRabbit, from the Black List to the Bevel razor - solving the problems of the twenty-first century. 
 
Through vivid storytelling and straightforward analysis, Masters of Scale distils their collective insights into a set of counterintuitive principles that anyone can use. How do you find a winning idea and turn it into a scalable venture? What can you learn from a 'squirmy no'? When should you stop listening to your customers? Which fires should you put out right away, and which should you let burn? And can you really make money while making the world a better place? (Answer: Yes. But you have to do the work to keep your profits and values aligned.) 
 
Based on more than 100 interviews, and incorporating new material never aired on the podcast, Masters of Scale offers a unique insider's guide, filled with insights, wisdom, and strategies that will inspire you to reimagine how you do business today.

Masters Of Scale is about more than scaling. At its core, it's a book about how wildly successful people have noticed what others haven't, what they did with those ideas and what they learned along the way despite various setbacks. It's also about how curiosity, perseverance, humility and risk have helped turn seemingly impossible ideas into lucrative businesses.

A book to take with you into battle as you build a company or a career. It's full of enjoyable stories, but the killer feature is the sharp insights Reid draws out - specific, memorable, actionable mindsets.

Reed Hastings, co-founder and CEO, Netflix

Whether you're at a startup or working to drive change within a large organization, the business principles in this book will help you deploy your strategy with creativity, integrity and realism.

Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft

Reid Hoffman has a talent for getting right to the heart of a business case and turning it into an unforgettable lesson. If you're scaling a company - or if you just love a well-told story - this is a book to savour.

Bob Iger, executive chair, Walt Disney Co.

To lead with vision and heart, start by listening and learning from others. Using stories to teach lessons, this book is full of solid (and sometimes surprising!) advice that will help accelerate your journey.

Angela Ahrendts, former CEO, Burberry, and former head of Apple Retail

The advice in this book is both principled and creative, rooted in true stories from a broad group of leaders at many stages of success and across many fields. A generous road map and framework for thinking more wisely about your own growing business.

Shellye Archambeau, author of Unapologetically Ambitious

What if, instead of learning from one entrepreneur at a time, you could distil the lessons of many of the greatest founders our time? This book combines memorable stories with actionable insights from world-class leaders to help you turn your biggest, boldest ideas into reality.

Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of the TED podcast WorkLife

Starting a business is not for the faint of heart, and it's good to have a team of mentors at your back. Think of this book as a mentorship in 10 chapters, with stories and advice from people you might already admire, as well as people whose journeys are just starting. Reid's skill at keying in on the bombshell insight inside the narrative turns every story into a tool for clearer thinking and bolder moves. You'll come away with at least a couple of new mantras and a new understanding of the how and why of building your business.

Franklin Leonard, founder, The Black List

This book feels like an extended conversation with Reid, full of stories of success and failure, along with insights that can reshape the way you approach a problem going forward. No matter what field you're in, the stories and advice will help you grapple with the choices you make every day as you scale your business.

Danny Meyer, Restauranteur and CEO, Union Square Hospitality Group

There is no such thing as an overnight success, but you can avoid making some of the same mistakes as those who have walked before you. I highly recommend this book as an insightful and inspiring guide to anyone embarking on an entrepreneurial journey.

Tory Burch, founder of Tory Burch LLC and Tory Burch Foundation

With his characteristic wit, Reid Hoffman draws on the full breadth of his experiences as a founder and investor to offer a level of nuance and insight into the entrepreneurial journey - with all its twists and turns - that few others could. Most importantly, he shows how any company of any stripe can bake generosity and social good into their DNA, and how making a positive contribution to the world can be the driving force that helps your company scale.

Daniel Lubetzky, Executive Chairman and founder of KIND, and NYT bestselling author of Do the KIND Thing

The antidote for the creeping feeling that the business world is hopelessly out of ideas and awash in get-rich-quick schemes.

When you're in the mood for a pep talk, who better to turn to than a well-networked, optimistic mentor who is naturally in your corner?

It was surprising to learn-as I did from Reid Hoffman's new book, Masters of Scale-how many of today's top Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are inveterate questioners, driven by curiosity... You need to be a restless learner and a person who's not afraid to question anything-including your own bright ideas... One of the surprises in the Masters of Scale book is seeing how many success stories were born out of failure.

June Cohen

We were right all along. A joyous baedeker of six ancient traditions that can recharge, inspire and perhaps change us for the better.

With compassionate curiosity about what makes us human, June takes us on an archeological tour of the ancient yearning pulsating beneath all of our evolving technologies and changing moral fashions – to make sense of our mortality and rejoice in our aliveness, to salve our suffering and give shape to our joy. What a revelation, what an invitation, to discover that people who had no notion of gravity, genetics, or democracy answered the questions we live with more wisely than we do – a beckoning to rethink how we make of our fragile embodiment a cathedral of meaning.

June Cohen’s essential book hooks you from the very first sentence and takes you on a journey of rediscovery that will fill you with joy and rouse you with determination to implement the wisdom she animates with effortless grace. The Great Remembering is an urgent and important book that you won’t soon forget.

Bruce Feiler, seven-time best-selling author of Walking The Bible, Life is in the Transitions and A Time to Gather

An electrifying, dizzying, wondrous celebration of humanity, then and now. I finished it feeling connected, inspired, hopeful.

Keith Ferrazzi, best-selling author of Never Eat Alone

June Cohen is such a friendly, open-hearted, deeply informed guide to recovering the wisdom that can make us whole and alive once more. She knows all the science, she writes with a professional's clarity and precision and, most of all, she can make us feel joyful and in love again as we go about the beautiful business of living.

Chip Conley, Founder, Modern Elder Academy; Founder, Joie de Vivre Hospitality Group

I’ve never seen the science explained better for a lay audience.

Charles Raison, Professor of Psychiatry and Human Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison

An epic and intimate journey into what makes us human, what heals us, and what binds us together. June Cohen is an unparalleled guide to the ancient wisdom and modern science that remind us why we’re here and how we find joy and meaning in our lives each and every day. What a gift she has rescued from our ancestors.

Doug Abrams, Co-Author of the New York Times-bestselling The Book of Joy and The Book of Hope

The Great Remembering is a joy to read, Cohen’s own sense of awe and wonder on display as we time-travel with her around the globe. The bottom line: June Cohen has much to teach us about how to live today. Pay attention.

Powerful Ancient Practices That Modern Life Lost - and the New Science Bringing Them Back

What if the most powerful solutions for the crises of modern life are ten thousand years old? 
 
Modern life is full of advice about how to feel better, think better and live better – yet many of us still feel anxious, lonely and cut off from meaning. What if the problem is not that we have forgotten how to look after ourselves, but that we have forgotten how to do it together? 
 
In The Great Remembering, June Cohen travels across cultures, continents and centuries to uncover the wisdom systems our ancestors built to help human beings endure upheaval and feel more fully alive. From epic physical ordeals and communal festivals to sauna and cold plunge, psychedelic ceremony and shared rituals of grief, these were not superstitions or quaint traditions, but sophisticated social technologies grounded in close observation of the body, the mind and the bonds between people. 
 
Blending reportage, cultural history and new science with unusual range and clarity, Cohen shows how modern research is beginning to validate what older cultures already knew: that resilience is embodied, that healing is social, and that meaning cannot be reduced to personal optimisation. The Great Remembering is a bold, hopeful book about how we might live now – by recovering what modern life has left behind.

June Cohen

Praise for The Great Remembering

We were right all along. A joyous baedeker of six ancient traditions that can recharge, inspire and perhaps change us for the better.

With compassionate curiosity about what makes us human, June takes us on an archeological tour of the ancient yearning pulsating beneath all of our evolving technologies and changing moral fashions – to make sens ...

June Cohen’s essential book hooks you from the very first sentence and takes you on a journey of rediscovery that will fill you with joy and rouse you with determination to implement the wisdom she animates w ...

We were right all along. A joyous baedeker of six ancient traditions that can recharge, inspire and perhaps change us for the better.

With compassionate curiosity about what makes us human, June takes us on an archeological tour of the ancient yearning pulsating beneath all of our evolving technologies and changing moral fashions – to make sens ...

June Cohen’s essential book hooks you from the very first sentence and takes you on a journey of rediscovery that will fill you with joy and rouse you with determination to implement the wisdom she animates w ...

We were right all along. A joyous baedeker of six ancient traditions that can recharge, inspire and perhaps change us for the better.

With compassionate curiosity about what makes us human, June takes us on an archeological tour of the ancient yearning pulsating beneath all of our evolving technologies and changing moral fashions – to make sens ...

June Cohen’s essential book hooks you from the very first sentence and takes you on a journey of rediscovery that will fill you with joy and rouse you with determination to implement the wisdom she animates w ...

Books by June Cohen

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