Reid Hoffman Biography

Reid Garrett Hoffman (born August 5, 1967) is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist and author. Hoffman is best known as the co-founder of LinkedIn, a social network used primarily for business connections and job searching.

Early life and career

Hoffman was born in Stanford, California, the son of Deanna Ruth Rutter and William Parker Hoffman, Jr. and grew up in Berkeley, California. His paternal great-great-great-grandfather was Presbyterian minister and Indiana University president pro tempore Theophilus Adam Wylie. He attended high school at The Putney School, where he farmed maple syrup, drove oxen and studied epistemology. He graduated from Stanford University in 1990 (where he won both a Marshall Scholarship and a Dinkelspiel Award) with a BS in Symbolic Systems and Cognitive Science. He went on to earn an M.A. in philosophy from Oxford University in 1993.

Hoffman says that in college he formed a conviction that he wanted to try to influence the state of the world on a large scale. He saw academia as an opportunity to make an "impact", but later realized that an entrepreneurial career would provide him with a larger platform. "When I graduated from Stanford my plan was to become a professor and public intellectual. That is not about quoting Kant. It's about holding up a lens to society and asking 'who are we?' and 'who should we be, as individuals and a society?' But I realised academics write books that 50 or 60 people read and I wanted more impact."

With that in mind, Hoffman pursued a career in business and entrepreneurship. Hoffman joined Apple Computer in 1994, where he worked on eWorld, an early attempt at creating a social network. eWorld was acquired by AOL in 1996. Hoffman later worked at Fujitsu before co-founding his first company, SocialNet.com in 1997. It focused "on online dating and matching up people with similar interests, like golfers who were looking for partners in their neighborhood." Peter Thiel has said SocialNet.com was "literally an idea before its time. It was a social network 7 or 8 years before that became a trend."

PayPal

While at SocialNet, Hoffman was a member of the board of directors at the founding of PayPal, an electronic money transmission service. In January 2000 he left SocialNet and joined PayPal full-time as the company's COO. Allen Blue, who Hoffman hired at PayPal, said that "PayPal had to scratch and claw for every advantage it had and Reid became an expert at competing effectively in an extremely competitive environment." He was responsible for all external relationships for PayPal, including payments infrastructure (VISA, MasterCard, ACH, WellsFargo), business development (eBay, Intuit, and others), government (regulatory, judicial), and legal. Peter Thiel, Hoffman's boss at PayPal has said, "he was the firefighter-in-chief at PayPal. Though that diminishes his role because there were many, many fires." At the time of PayPal's acquisition by eBay for $1.5B in 2002, he was executive vice president of PayPal.

LinkedIn

Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn in December 2002 with two former colleagues from SocialNet (including Allen Blue), a former college classmate and a former colleague from his time at Fujitsu. It launched on May 5, 2003 as one of the first business-oriented online social networks. Peter Thiel and Keith Rabois, colleagues of Hoffman's at PayPal, invested in LinkedIn. As of November 2012, LinkedIn has more than 187 million registered users in more than 200 countries and territories. The site allows registered users to maintain a list of contact details of people with whom they have some level of relationship, called Connections. Users can invite anyone (whether a site user or not) to become a connection. According to Forbes, "LinkedIn is, far and away, the most advantageous social networking tool available to job seekers and business professionals today."

He was LinkedIn's founding CEO for the first four years before becoming chairman and President, Products in February 2007. Hoffman became Executive chairman in June 2009. With the IPO of LinkedIn on May 19, 2011, Hoffman owns a stake worth an estimated $2.34 billion, not including any potential benefits from Greylock Partners, where he was named a Partner in 2009. Hoffman believes that many people still do not know how to use its service and it is LinkedIn's job to help them out. In an interview, Hoffman said that "you have to think proactively about how to use a tool that enables your ability to move in ways that you weren't able to move before, and most of people are not very good at that".

Investing

After the PayPal sale to eBay, Hoffman became one of Silicon Valley's most prolific and successful angel investors. According to venture capitalist David Sze, Hoffman "is arguably the most successful angel investor in the past decade." Dave Goldberg, CEO of SurveyMonkey, says that Hoffman "is the person you want to talk to when you are starting a company." He made 80 angel investments in technology companies. In 2010 Hoffman joined Greylock Partners and runs their $20 million Discovery Fund. His areas of focus at Greylock are consumer and services, enterprise software, consumer Internet, enterprise 2.0, mobile, social gaming, online marketplaces, payments, and social networks.

Facebook

According to David Kirkpatrick's book The Facebook Effect, Hoffman arranged the first meeting between Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel, which led to Thiel's initial $500,000 angel investment in the company. Hoffman invested alongside Thiel in Facebook's very first financing round.

Zynga

Hoffman personally invested and joined the board of directors in Zynga's first round of funding. Hoffman and Zynga CEO Mark Pincus co-own the Six Degrees Patent. Zynga is now a publicly traded company with a market capitalization of $2.48 billion as of August 2012.

Other investments

His other investments include Wikia, Permuto, SixApart, thesixtyone, Tagged, IronPort, Flickr, Digg, Ping.fm, Nanosolar, Care.com, Knewton, Kongregate, Last.fm, Technetto, OneKingsLane, Wrapp, Edmodo, Vendio, VigLink and shopkick.

Hoffman is known in Silicon Valley as a person who has sat at every seat at the table. He has been a junior product manager (Apple and Fujitsu), an executive at a hypergrowth company (PayPal), an angel investor, an institutional investor, founder and CEO of a venture-backed company (LinkedIn), and independent board member of both private and public companies.

Public Intellectual Work

Hoffman is a frequent attendee of the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland and attended the Bilderberg Meetings in 2011 and 2012.

Hoffman co-organizes The Weekend To Be Named Later, "a Ben Franklin-inspired gathering of ambitious friends, to brainstorm ways to change the world." He has spoken at the XPrize Foundation's conference and the TED conference in Long Beach in 2012. He is a frequent lecturer at Stanford University, Oxford University, Harvard University, MIT's Media Lab, and others. He's appeared on The Charlie Rose Show, Fareed Zakaria's Global Public Square on CNN and other current affairs television programs.

Writing

Hoffman wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post in 2009, entitled "Let Startups Bail Us Out." He has written for Strategy+Business on professional networking and is a "thought leader" on LinkedIn where he posts original written content.

The Start-Up of You

Hoffman is co-author, with Ben Casnocha, of the business book The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform your Career.

The book was released in the United States on February 14, 2012. It argues that individuals should think of themselves as businesses-of-one " the "CEO of their own career" " and draws many parallels between lessons learned from the stories of successful Silicon Valley technology companies and an individual's career. As of September 2012 it had sold more than 100,000 copies. It became both a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller.

Publisher's Weekly reviewed the book positively, saying, "with plenty of valuable guidance relevant to any career stage, this book will help readers not only survive professionally in times of uncertainty but stand out from the pack and flourish." The Economist said that "Hoffman and Casnocha make a number of astute observations about shifts in the world of work."

Philanthropy

Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn's CEO, has said that "Reid's true north is making a positive and lasting impact on the world, in a very profound way." He serves on the boards of Do Something (organization for young people taking action), Kiva.org (a micro-finance organization), Mozilla (creator of Firefox), the Exploratorium (a museum of science, art and human perception) and Endeavor Global an international non-profit development organization that finds and supports high-impact entrepreneurs in emerging markets. Hoffman is also a supporter and Chair of the Advisory Board for QuestBridge, a provider of talented low-income students to top colleges/universities.

Politics

In April 2013, a lobbying group called FWD.us (aimed at lobbying for immigration reform and improvements to education) was launched, with Reid Hoffman listed as one of the founders.

Honors and awards

In May 2012, Hoffman was ranked third on the Forbes Midas List of the top tech investors. Forbes described Hoffman as "Silicon Valley's uber-investor" and said Hoffman "has had a hand in creating nearly every lucrative social media startup."

In 2012, Newsweek and The Daily Beast released their first "Digital Power Index," a list of the 100 most significant people in the digital world that year (plus 10 additional "Lifetime Achievement" winners), and Hoffman was ranked No. 3 in the "Angels" category.

Reid Hoffman and Jeff Weiner of LinkedIn shared the Ernst and Young U.S. Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2011.

In 2010, Reid Hoffman was named No. 17 on Fast Company's list of the 100 Most Creative People in Business.

Hoffman, along with Salman Khan of Khan Academy, was honored by the World Affairs Council and Global Philanthropy Forum in 2012. The council recognizes and honors remarkable leaders who have effected and will continue to effect social change through their private enterprise and social action. The awards in 2012 were dedicated to celebrating Technology for Social Impact.

Hoffman was awarded the 2012 David Packard Medal of Achievement Award by TechAmerica for his contributions and advances within the high-tech industry, his community, and humankind.

Hoffman received an Honorary Doctor of Laws from Babson in 2012.