#119 with Josh Elman - How To Get The Benefits of Entrepreneurship Without Starting a Company

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, a quick break to talk about our sponsor. So if you run a startup and you're trying to grow, you need a marketing and sales tool that will scale up with you.
Check out the HubSpot for Startups program. You can save 30 to 90% on the CRM, which is gonna help you increase your leads, boost your revenue, and just keep your whole team organized as you're trying to grow. HubSpot for Startups is trusted by thousands of startups all around the world, and you should go check out if you're eligible to join the HubSpot for Startups program and take your growth to the next level. Visit hubspot.com/startups.
We're back and we got a special guest. We've been on fire with guests lately. So we had, who did we have? We had Austin from Lambda School. We had Harley, who's the president of Shopify, and now big shoes to fill. So Josh Elman is here. Josh is in the house.
You can give your kind of like, I don't know, you could give your resume a little bit better than I can, but I'll give you the highlights. I'll tell people what I think about Josh. About every two months or so now, I call Josh for some combination of life advice, career advice, whatever, because this guy's sort of had kind of a miraculous career at Silicon Valley. So LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Robinhood, was VC and investor, and just basically has been doing growth in Silicon Valley for a long, long time, growth in products. So Josh, what did I miss? Zazzle, where were you at earlier in your career?

**Josh Elman** (1:38)
Look, I started my career at Real Networks in 1997 with the idea of like, we could put audio video on the internet, and Real was the company that could have grown up to be YouTube plus Netflix plus everything else, but that's sort of been the pattern in my career. Real was sort of one of the companies that didn't make it all the way through, but it's always been, if we get this thing right, it could be so much bigger for the world. LinkedIn was 15 people when I showed up. We turned into the world's largest professional network. Facebook was like 500 people, and they got to work on the platform. And we thought, can we get everybody to log into websites and apps with their Facebook ID? And I launched Facebook Connect, and now that's doing it.

**Shaan Puri** (2:14)
Twitter was like 80 people.

**Josh Elman** (2:16)
We got it from like 10 to 100 million users when I was there to tune in to daily information. That's kind of been my kind of pattern is I have jumped around a little more than I thought, which is part of why I thought I'd be a VC for a while too.
I really like just building products and getting into it with teams and making stuff that matters.

**Shaan Puri** (2:32)
How many people worked at Facebook? So LinkedIn, you were number 15 Twitter, you were 30, you said 80?

**Josh Elman** (2:38)
No, 80s, in the 80s.

**Shaan Puri** (2:40)
And Facebook?

**Josh Elman** (2:41)
Facebook is like 500 something. It's a little bit bigger.

**Shaan Puri** (2:44)
Damn, so you have a good hit rate.

**Sam Parr** (2:47)
Yeah, he's a good picker.
We had a good conversation before you came on. It was like, oh, well, we talk about it. And I thought, okay, there's, the normal brainstorming of cool ideas that you're actually pretty plugged into consumer in a way that most people aren't. So I think we will do that. The other thing I thought was interesting was this career path you have, which was like something in between, like not the founder and CEO, but not employee number 2,500, like senior management, but way later, you had this like awesome kind of get on the rocket ship while there's still, some seats available early enough where you could be like, hey, I didn't just join already made success, but late enough where you weren't like two guys in a garage, just scratching your balls, trying to figure out what's going on. So talk about, was that intentional? Was that accidental that you went on that career path?

**Josh Elman** (3:31)
Looking back, it was clearly accidental that it turned out as well as it did. But I think my instinct was always to go jump on those things that I just thought could be a lot bigger for the world. In college, I interned at Microsoft the summer of Windows 95, which is ancient history now for most people. But this was like the launch of really personal computing in the home.