Background

Ethnicity: Reid Hoffman has German, English and Scottish ancestry.

Reid Hoffman was born on August 5, 1967, in Palo Alto, California, the United States, to Deanna Ruth and William Parker Hoffman, Jr. His parents were both lawyers and leftist activists. Reid was the only child and grew up in Berkeley, California.

Education

When he was a child, Reid convinced his parents to send him to the progressive boarding school Putney, in Vermont. Hoffman learned blacksmithing, woodworking, and farming techniques in addition to his academic studies.

After completing high school he went to Stanford University from where he graduated in 1990 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Symbolic Systems and Cognitive Science. He proved to be a highly capable university student and successfully won a Marshall Scholarship, one of the most prestigious scholarships awarded in the United States.

Hoffman did not begin his studies thinking about entrepreneurship. He wanted to become a philosopher and had won a scholarship to study philosophy at Oxford University. He went to Wolfson College, Oxford University, as a Marshall Scholar to get his master's in philosophy. He completed his studies in 1993. Once he started though, he realized that was not going to work. He decided to become a software entrepreneur.

Career

Soon after his graduation from Oxford, Reid Hoffman joined Apple Computers in 1994. One of the first projects he worked on was eWorld, an early attempt at creating a social network that was acquired by AOL in 1996. He also worked on Classifieds, Global Access Assistant, and other strategic projects.

He left Apple and worked at Fujitsu for a while. By this time, he was giving serious thoughts about opening his own company. Hoffman decided to start his own tech company in 1997, a site called SocialNet. It was a place to find dates or connect with friends, making it one of the first social networks. However, he was inexperienced in business management and was forced to abandon the project in 1999.

In December of 1998, Peter Thiel told Hoffman he should join him at his pioneering online payments company, PayPal. Hoffman began as a founding board member and then joined full time in 2000, officially joining the so-called "PayPal Mafia" of future tech icons like Elon Musk and the founders of YouTube.

His responsibilities at PayPal included managing Payments Infrastructure (VISA, MasterCard, ACH, WellsFargo), Business Development (eBay, Intuit, others), Government (Regulatory, Judicial), and Legal Issues. In addition, at times he also took over the responsibility for PR, Strategy, Payments Innovations, and Customer Service. With his relentless hard work, he quickly rose through the ranks and became the company’s executive vice president by 2002.

When eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion in 2002, PayPal's stacked team of brilliant executives with alpha personalities went off to start their own companies, fueled by newly grown bank accounts. Hoffman used his PayPal money to revisit the notion of social networks. He gathered four of his friends and former colleagues and founded LinkedIn in 2002 as a hub for ambitious professionals.

It was launched as one of the first business-oriented online social networks. The site, which allows registered users to create professional profiles and connect with each other, became popular soon after its launch. Hoffman served as LinkedIn's founding CEO for the first four years before becoming chairman and President, Products in February 2007. By 2009, he had become executive chairman.

In 2004, a 20-year-old college dropout named Mark Zuckerberg approached Hoffman to see if he had an interest in either his social startup The Facebook or his file transfer service Wirehog. Hoffman was intrigued but didn't want to be a lead investor in a potential deal, since he was building his own social network. He called up Thiel and they met with Zuckerberg and decided to join the company's board.

Hoffman acted as LinkedIn's CEO for four years but stepped back in 2007 once it had sufficient momentum, remaining as chairman. He gave the CEO role to Dan Nye but replaced him with former Yahoo exec Jeff Weiner a year later. Weiner has remained in the role.

LinkedIn maintained healthy growth in terms of users and innovative offerings but was still lagging behind investors' expectations in early 2016. Hoffman and Weiner decided that what would be best for LinkedIn would be to join a larger company and announced a $26.2 billion acquisition by Microsoft that June.

After becoming a successful entrepreneur and accumulating a vast fortune, Hoffman became one of Silicon Valley's most prolific and successful angel investors. He joined Greylock Partners in 2010 and runs its $20 million Discovery Fund. At Greylock, his areas of focus include consumer and services, enterprise software, consumer Internet, online marketplaces, payments, and social networks.

In 2012, he published the career book The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform your Career along with co-author Ben Casnocha. It received positive reviews from critics and became both a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. He wrote another book, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age with Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh which was published in 2014. In the book, the authors discuss how the company and employees can work together toward common goals, even when some of their interests differ, and build long-term relationships in today’s volatile economy. This too became a bestseller.

In 2018, his new book Blitzscaling came out, which states that the secret to starting and scaling massively valuable companies is "blitzscaling", a set of techniques for scaling up at a dizzying pace that blows competitors out of the water. In that book, he shares what he learned from the companies he invested in.

Achievements

• 

  Reid Hoffman is best known as the co-founder of LinkedIn, which was one of the first business-oriented social networking services at the time of its launch. The site became immensely popular and is today available in 24 languages including Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch. It has more than 364 million acquired users in more than 200 countries and territories.
  
  In 2012, Reid Hoffman received the David Packard Medal of Achievement Award by TechAmerica for his contributions and advances within the high-tech industry, his community, and humankind. In April 2014, Hoffman received the Distinguished Citizen Award from the Commonwealth Club. The Academy of Achievement awarded Hoffman with the annual Golden Plate award, which honors accomplished individuals "for significant achievement in their fields" later the same year.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

    (What entrepreneur or founder doesn’t aspire to build the ...)

    2018
  • The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career

    (A blueprint for thriving in your job and building a caree...)

    2012
  • The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

    (Introducing the new, realistic loyalty pact between emplo...)

    2014

Politics

Hoffman became an increasingly prominent Democratic donor to combat Trump. In early 2017, Hoffman joined forces with political strategist Dmitri Mehlhorn, among others, investing some $3 million in Democratic candidates and groups in Virginia with the goal of flipping the state’s Republican-held legislature.

Views

Much of the work Hoffman is doing is philanthropic. The programs he creates and works on are part of his mission to make a "positive and lasting impact on the world." He is part of Kiva.org, a micro-financing organization, and Endeavor Global, a non-profit organization that seeks out budding entrepreneurs from all over the world and helps support them.

Hoffman has supported DoSomething.org, a nonprofit that engages young people's volunteerism, and activities aimed at bringing about social change. Hoffman has served on the board of Endeavor Global, a nonprofit that supports what it refers to as "High-Impact Entrepreneurs" around the world. The main goal is to facilitate increased employment and high-quality jobs in developing areas. The types of ideas that receive support vary widely and include examples such as tech companies, shopping clubs, and women-only gyms.

Hoffman serves as advisory board chair for QuestBridge, an organization that connects high-achieving, low-income students to educational and scholarship opportunities at leading United States colleges and Universities. In the winter of 2015, Hoffman joined a collective of other tech companies and entrepreneurs in donating a combined $1 billion to OpenAI, a nonprofit focused on improving "digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole."

In May 2018, Hoffman and his wife joined the Giving Pledge.

Quotations: "The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be."

"No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team."

"You have to be constantly reinventing yourself and investing in the future."

"A business that isn’t investing in tomorrow’s opportunities and technologies - well, that’s a company already in the process of dying."

"Ironically, in a changing world, playing it safe is one of the riskiest things you can do."

Membership

Reid is a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences.

• 

  Academy of Arts and Sciences

Personality

Hoffman's babysitter introduced him to Dungeons and Dragons when he was 10, kicking off a new love of strategy and role-playing games.

Interests

• Role-playing games

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Aristotle, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein

• Politicians

  Matt Dunne

• Writers

  The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks by Joshua Cooper Ramo, The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them - And They Shape Us by Ray Fisman, Tim Sullivan, More Human: Designing a World Where People Come First by Steve Hilton, Scott Bade, Jason Bade, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer, This Brave New World: India, China, and the United States by Anja Manuel

Connections

In 2004, Hoffman married Michelle Yee.

Father:

William Parker Hoffman, Jr.

Mother:

Deanna Ruth Hoffman

Spouse:

Michelle Yee

Friend:

Mark Zuckerberg

Reid served as friends and adviser to Zuckerberg over the past 15 years, and Hoffman told that he's never seen anyone else make such a radical transformation into a high-functioning and visionary CEO than Zuckerberg.

Friend:

Brian Chesky

Hoffman was compelled to invest in Airbnb because of its CEO Brian Chesky's inspiring vision, even though he had reservations about the concept.

References

• Reid Hoffman on LinkedIn
• Reid Hoffman on Twitter
• Reid Hoffman Official Site