Advice for grads in the age of AI from Reid Hoffman, Spencer Rascoff & more
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Hi folks, Jeff Berman here. We have something a little bit different for you today. It's that time of year when so many people graduate into a new phase of their lives, their careers. For me, it's an especially big graduation year as my oldest just graduated from high school and delivered a banger of a commencement address.

We realized that there was an opportunity to share nuggets of wisdom from some of the most remarkable people we've had on Masters of Scale. So you're going to hear this episode from a dozen incredible founders and CEOs. And we're going to start with our founding host, Reid Hoffman, who's gathered some questions from young people graduating this year. And we're going to get to hear some advice from him to them. All right, let's jump into the first question.

Hi, my name is Denise, and I'm a student at the University of Oxford. My question is, should I take a job I don't love after graduation just to get started? You know, typically, like in commencement speeches, the answer is never. But of course, the real answer is sometimes. Because what you should be is you should be strategic about what you're doing. You should be thinking about, where do I might be wanting to go two, five, ten years from now?

How would this job possibly get me there? And by the way, doing a job versus not doing a job is always a better way to ultimately be getting to a much better job two, five, 10 years out. So the answer is sometimes. You're sometimes mistaught that you should only be looking for what you're passionate about. And that's the most important thing. Now, of course, your passion is important, but

If you hate the job, if you're bored with the job, it's very hard to do that job well. So there is an important component of passion. But for example, you can go ask a whole bunch of people. For example, a bunch of people say, I love playing video games. Should you be making video games? Not necessarily. What's the right path for you? What are you really good at? What does the market need? And how do you respond to that?

And sometimes it's take that job that you're kind of mediocre on because you have a plan for how you're evolving. And keeping that plan in mind is the central thing.

Hi, Reid. My name is Michael Astorino. I'm a junior at Wesleyan University. And my question for you is, what can students be doing to truly get ahead of AI right now? Not just learning how to prompt, but learning how to use it in ways that create real value. I love this question because in part, it's saying, hey, I'm already engaging because you're thinking about what the prompting landscape looks like. Now, the first thing for everyone is don't discount how important prompting skills will be.

one of my own personal beliefs right now is that

no one is prompting in particularly good ways. So we're all like 5% users. Like there's this old myth that we only use like 3% or 5% of our brains. Well, I think we're at best at that at our current prompting skills. And so developing prompting skills, always be learning. It's one of the things that I ask people constantly when I am engaging with people who have been using AI is, how are you using it? What have you thought about in terms of how to prompt these things in better ways? And so every

Every single time that I actually, in fact, am talking to someone who is engaging, it's one of the things that I'm constantly learning. And I could spend an hour going through all of the strategies and tips and tricks and all the rest of that. And I think that's really important to do.

Now, the other part to get to it is to say, think about how to use AI strategically. So it's not just, okay, I'm prompting, but which problems could it be applied to? How could it be applied to those problems in ways that is interesting and unique? It could generate particularly good content because this is one of the ways that the world of work will be changing.

Within, you know, two to five years, all of us will be using AI co-pilots along with what we're doing. And it's a question of how do we use them smartly? What's the game we're playing? What's the theory of that game? What's the strategy to do that? My question is, will AI replace a lot of the careers that exist like web designers or web developers?

One of the things is the career landscape has actually, in fact, always been dynamic. It's always been changing. I mean, for example, I know this reveals my age a little bit, but web designer actually, in fact, was a new job that came up during my lifetime. When I was in college, there was no thought about becoming a web designer or what the skills are within web design are.

And AI is just amplifying this fact. The fact that it's changing faster, it's changing in more directions, and it highlights the fact that you need to be dynamic and evolving.

You know, part of the way to do that is to say, well, OK, be learning, but also be embracing these AI tools. We know the AI tools are going to be central. So as a specific example, think about how Web Designer is going to change. The code that you learn with Web Design will, you know, no longer be as relevant.

The fact that you know all the tags, that you know all the coding that you could produce, the website design coding for Dummies book no longer matters as much because AI can do all that.

What it does is it changes what web design could mean in terms of what you have to bring to it is your creativity, your originality, your, hey, this would be some way that it would strategically map onto the kind of goals of the company, organization, entity, person that's doing it. This is something you could try that's different, that other people using AI tools might not think the same way you do or may not be able to bring it into focus the same way you do.

Hi, Reid. My name is Keisha Patel, and I'm a rising senior at WashU. And my question is, what advice would you give to students who feel like their major is becoming less relevant as AI advances? Given that things are so disruptive, it's very natural to feel anxious about, did all the things I just learned, are they not relevant anymore?

Now, the good news is, is that what you should take forward from your college degree isn't necessarily the thing you learned in X101. It isn't specific degrees, specific courses, even necessarily specific skills that are relevant to you. It's your capacity to learn. It's your capacity to say, hey, here is the new tool set. Here's the new challenge. And that is actually what the future work is going to look like.

So one thing is to not focus on the degree, but to focus on how you learn and to be continually learning. The other part of college that's super important that you should not forget is that life is a team sport, not just an individual sport.

So the people that you became friends with, that you shared experiences with, that are out there in the world with you, you can help each other. And this is, of course, one of the reasons why I built LinkedIn, because the whole idea is it's not just an individual career. It's a, hey, what do you know that I don't know? Do you know of a good opportunity? Hey, have you found a good way to use AI to do this yet? Hey, I'm kind of confused and I may feel like I'm at a dead end. What might shake up that dead end? And of course, not

not just think about maintaining the friendships and network that you have from college, but also think about how you build that as you go forward. So my two primary questions for you are, will AI make my degree or skill set less valuable by the time that I graduate? And I'm also concerned that AI will make it even harder for me to find a job since I don't have that much experience yet. Yeah, it's a legitimate worry. The thing that

You should always keep in mind, and this is part of the kind of entrepreneurial mindset, is how do you convert challenges into opportunities? How do you take something that could be a negative and possibly turn it into an advantage? And that's part of the reason why I wrote the Startup Review. But in this particular case, you think about, okay, AI is changing the landscape, may make entry-level jobs harder to get to, may make employers uncertain about who they're looking for in employing.

Then you say, well, okay, how do I use the current circumstances, the disruption to make this better? How do I use AI to identify what possible new opportunities might be to map me to those opportunities? How do you use AI to make myself stand out? And what's more, and this is one of the kind of driving themes that I have is very strong advice for young people to say, you are generation AI.

you are AI native. So bringing the fact that you have AI in your tool set is one of the things that makes you enormously attractive. And so you say, OK, look, on this side, it's transforming the workspace, entry level work, employers confusion. But on this side, it's making you able to

to show your unique capabilities that, you know, with the environment of a bunch of older people, you might be able to help them out. And that, of course, is part of the magic.

It's been great being in this dialogue, but part of the reason it's a conversation is because it's dynamic and it's ongoing. This is, in fact, just the beginning of these questions that we should be asking, these questions that we should be learning together. So for everyone, including the class of 2025, I wish you the very best on this journey as we discover and make this future together.

Outstanding insights there from Reid. And thanks to those students for their questions. In just a minute, advice for graduates from a dozen more incredible founders and entrepreneurs.

Meet Jeff Plotner, Capital One business customer and co-founder of Brackish, a handcrafted accessories brand in Charleston, South Carolina. My business partner, Ben, had some turkey feathers laying around and he was about to get married. He put two and two together and designed this first turkey feather bow tie. That's how it all started. Jeff and his co-founder had made great strides with their unique men's accessories line, but the call to expand was growing too loud to ignore. We

We were having interactions with our customers telling us, you need to come out with a women's line. We were talking on the phone with Alex Parker from Capital One. He said, I love brackish. I've been wearing brackish bow ties for a couple years now. Expanding into women's accessories would be a hefty investment Jeff could not carry alone. But the encouraging conversation with Alex at Capital One Business helped take the brackish brand to the next level. You get stuck in your day-to-day. It

It takes people from the outside to be able to see what they need to help you with. Alex at Capital One was one of those people. This wasn't just a business transaction. This was a relationship that would genuinely help our business. We worked hard to design some women's accessories, and we were blown away by the response. To learn more, go to CapitalOne.com slash business cards. Welcome back to Masters of Scale. ♪

For the last couple of months, Reid and I have been asking our guests what advice they'd give if they're giving a commencement address this year. First up, you'll hear from Andrew Yaffe, the CEO of the massively popular YouTube channel turned media empire, Dude Perfect.

It's traumatic for me because in my commencement speech, it was pouring rain and we sat out and the speaker who I shall not name started by saying, I was given 45 minutes and I'm going to use every single one of them. Oh, this is not good. I don't have warm and fuzzy memories about commencement speeches, but... So the advice of the speaker is be brief. You know, I think what I'd say is there are a lot of people who tell you to follow your passions.

And then there are a lot of people who tell you to do something you're great at. And I don't think either of those things is true. I think it has to be both. I'm someone personally who I need to love what I work on. You can look at my resume and it speaks to that, that I would work at the NBA and then I'd go home and watch NBA basketball. That motivation and that passion for the product was critical to me being highly engaged and excited and motivated to get to work.

At the same time, I tell people all the time, don't work in sports just to work in sports. It is not an industry as one would define it. You are selling sponsorships or you're marketing or you're creating content. When I was running strategy, it was still PowerPoint and Excel. And so if I wasn't motivated by the business problems that I was working on as the head of strategy for the NBA, I wouldn't have been good at it.

Following your passion doesn't get you anywhere if you're not really narrow on what are the things that get you out of bed in the morning, that make you excited and that you're really good at. Next up, advice from the therapist, author and game maker, Esther Perel. I just did a whole conference with 2,500 therapists and coaches and the likes and

And I had a phenomenal surprise. At one point, I said, how many of you are in the field as a second career? Now, that used to be a tiny fraction of people that would answer and probably half the people in the audience answered.

And I thought, wow, this is like a transformation of my field that used to be something totally secret, something hidden away, tucked in a room. Nobody talked about it. It's fascinating how that has shifted. So I would say to the young student, where you start is not where you will go nor where you will end.

It doesn't really matter where you start. Start by finding people who will teach you to work, to think, to solve problems. Because it's like a teacher in college. You can be passionate about a subject. If you have a bad teacher, they'll ruin it for you. But if you have a subject you know nothing about and couldn't care less, but you have a teacher who can pique your curiosity, they will open an entire world to you.

So go for the teacher. Don't go for the topic. Go for the particular manager. Don't go for the company. Next up is Aaron Levy, founder and CEO of Box, the cloud-based file sharing platform valued at over $4 billion. My biggest advice right now is truly become an expert in AI. Not how the models are trained, but in using AI for daily work. Like if you are not an expert in AI,

Just incredible prompt engineering, how to write the perfect prompt for doing a research project or analyzing a set of data or generating marketing materials or producing code or

That is a liability in this job market. You want to be incredible at using AI to get work done. That does not mean that every company you join will afford you that ability right now. But for the companies that do, you will be able to stand out relative to basically every other employee in that organization. You will seem like you've come from the future.

into this company. And so the more that you can look like a time traveler right now, because you're kind of like perfectly set up to do that, because you have a larger proportion of your life with AI than anybody else in the job market.

So there's no excuse to not be incredible at this stuff and just know your way around these tools, you know, flawlessly. And then, you know, I think understanding things like human judgment and analysis and creativity, because these are the things that will always be the X factor on top of using AI.

So, on top of getting the response is what judgment did you apply to that response from the AI to lead to a better outcome? So, analytical skills, critical thinking, judgment, creativity, get incredible at that, but also be amazing at using these tools and you will stand out in this environment. Let's hear next from Stacey Brown-Philpott. She's the founder of a new fund, Cherry Rock Capital, the former CEO of TaskRabbit, and a longtime leader at Google.

My eighth grader is graduating. She's going to ninth grade. Big moment. Big moment. And she said to me, she said, Mom, after I graduate from high school, then I have to go to college. And then what am I going to do? I have to become an adult.

And I said, yes, you do. So my advice, anyone's graduating from college, become an adult. Yes, you can. What does that mean? Do the work. Part of what you've accomplished up until this point is because somebody put an infrastructure in place called an education system to help you get there. Create your own. How are you going to continue to learn and do the work?

to fulfill whatever it is that you want to accomplish in life. Create a vision and do the work. Achieve some goals, do the work. Start a family, do the work. Have fun and do the work. Next up, the CEO of the ride-sharing app Lyft. Here's David Risher. My advice for a new graduate would be to look at the decade of your 20s as a decade of maximal experimentation.

It's such an opportunity for you to explore and not yet be asking yourself the question, what is my career going to be? Or how do I do this thing to get to this thing, to get to this thing, to get to this thing? I think people who worry a lot and get stressed a lot about that tend to get in sort of a frustrated position and tend to sort of narrow their thinking quite early in life. And most successful people that I have met

have gone through periods of sort of active exploration. And I think particularly now, I think 20 or 30 years ago, there was sort of a career track that you sort of felt like you kind of needed to be on because it was kind of the default. I don't really think that's the default right now or doesn't need to be. There are opportunities that literally haven't been even created yet. I don't even know what the job is going to be two or three years from now, right? Because AI will change so much and so forth. So you have to do something that satisfies your economic reality. I mean, let's be clear, I'm not being naive.

But I wouldn't optimize for that, and I wouldn't optimize for the long-term career. I'd set a floor, an economic floor, but I'd say above the floor, I think it's really about exploration. I think if you have that mindset for the next couple of years at least, you'll almost certainly end up in a happier, better place. Next up, Ben and Guido Teuber, the brothers who now run the board game company Catan that their father started 30 years ago. First, let's hear from Ben.

Something I learned in game development is that if you want to really make a good game, it takes a lot of patience because you'll have one iteration after the next and it will be bad very often. So patience is one of the things that you should always test yourself and failure is never the end result. And now his brother Guido.

Stay curious and obviously fulfill your dreams, you know, shoot for the moon, but also be empathetic and be kind. Take failure in stride. So when you play a Catan game, it is in itself a game where even the person who loses gets some victory points.

Next, it's Zillow alums and co-founders of Picasso, Spencer Raskoff and Austin Allison. Here's Spencer. Put yourself in a situation where you can learn. So optimize for growth, not compensation early in your career. Surround yourself with people that you can be a sponge and learn from, especially early in your career. And here's Austin's advice.

My one piece of advice would be around surrounding yourself with great people, but that's such a, I think, well-documented piece of advice at this point that I'll offer one other one, which would be to live in the moment and be present. You know, life passes us by really quickly, and when you're looking back on time, many of the what felt like big struggles end up being the most enriching part of company building.

and life. So try to embrace the struggle and live in the moment. I talked with Buddy Media founder Mike Lazaro recently at South by Southwest, and here's what Mike offered. To me, it's so simple. It's basically large platforms that have aggregated audience, AI, and the no-code development platforms. So check out Lovable. Build me an app that

or a website, and it's like, it opens it up and it walks you through how to connect it to a database, right? And so all of a sudden we have the democratization of engineering with the largest productivity hack the world has ever seen, AI, and access to consumers that we have never had access to like this.

Right. And I'm not talking about just Facebook and Instagram and whatever that Twitter X thing is, but also Shopify and Etsy and, you know, all these other incredible platforms. And so I just think figure out an idea that should exist and even a journalism student can build it now.

And here's Rachel Botsman, author of several books on trust, including her latest How to Trust and Be Trusted. I've actually given a commensal speech, but I didn't give I didn't say these words. And I always think about the redo. And I would stand up there and say, there are three words that have served me well in my career, and I want to pass them on to you.

I don't know. The three most important words in the English language, perhaps. Yeah. They are the three most important words that will serve you so well in your career. Be confident with humility. But also those words, they're what makes me a deeply curious person, right? Like it's like,

so much of education is about knowing and it's about those positive capabilities and it's about achievement and performance and outcomes. And the earlier you can be comfortable in that space of unknowing and complexity and uncertainty, the more you'll be able to handle life, but the more valuable you'll be in organizations. So that's my do-over.

Thanks to all these folks for offering up advice for graduates and to Rapid Response host Bob Safian for helping gather some of these interviews. I'm Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening. This is Emily Worden, Capital One business customer and owner of Emily Worden Designs, a bespoke fine jewelry store that quickly gained buzz after opening its doors in Richmond, Virginia.

My customer base grew exponentially once we had a storefront. We had one engagement ring case at the time, and we had lines out the door every weekend. As her storefront continued to have record sales, Emily knew it was time to up-level production. We normally just purchase diamonds in very small batches or per order. So we wanted to invest in not just one or two pieces, but a collection of natural diamonds.

Emily knew creating a collection would be a big investment, but with the help of her Capital One business card, she was ready to bet on herself and bet big. It was about $40,000, $45,000 all in up front. Having the Capital One card was definitely reassuring to be able to make such a large investment purchase. And of course, to get the cash back that came with it. To learn more, go to CapitalOne.com slash business cards.

Our head of podcasts is Lital Molad.

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