Who is Reid Hoffman?

Born August 5, 1967, Reid Hoffman is an American public speaker, entrepreneur, podcaster, author, and venture capitalist. Most know Hoffman as the co-founder of LinkedIn, but the billionaire was also involved at PayPal in the early days and is a current partner at VC firm Greylock Partners.

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Education

Hoffman attended Stanford University where he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Symbolic Systems and Cognitive Science in 1990.

He later earned a Master of Studies in Philosophy from Wolfson College, Oxford, in 1993.

Hoffman initially wanted to impact the world on an appreciable scale and planned to become a public intellectual and professor once he graduated.

However, he soon realized that he could make a greater impact as a businessman than he could as an academic.

Early career

Determined to pursue a career in business, Hoffman joined Apple in 1994 and worked on an early service called eWorld which offered email, news, software, and a bulletin board system.

After a brief stint at Fujitsu, he then founded the online dating turned social and professional networking platform SocialNet.com in 1997.

The platform failed because no one knew what it was supposed to be, but billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel nevertheless called it an idea that was years ahead of its time.

PayPal

Hoffman also sat on the board of directors of PayPal in the late 1990s and joined the company in a full-time capacity as COO in 2000 after leaving SocialNet.com.

Two years later, Hoffman became PayPal’s vice president and was praised for his ability to compete successfully in what was an extremely crowded market.

Thiel also noted that Hoffman “was the firefighter-in-chief at PayPal. Though that diminishes his role because there were many, many fires.” This role encompassed responsibility for payments infrastructure, business development, government, and legal.

Read Also: PayPal Mafia

linkedin-business-model — LinkedIn is a two-sided platform running on a freemium model, where to unlock unlimited search and other features, you need to switch to a paid account. In addition, LinkedIn is the most successful B2B advertising platform. In fact, by 2022, with over 850 million members, LinkedIn generated over $6 billion in revenues through its Talent Solutions and over $5 billion through its Marketing Solutions (B2B advertising platform). Acquired by Microsoft for $27 billion in 2016, LinkedIn might now be worth anywhere between $100-150 billion.

Hoffman founded LinkedIn with an assortment of former colleagues from SocialNet.com and PayPal.

Importantly, Hoffman had learned from his past failure with SocialNet.com where the platform had tried to do too much:

“One of the things I learned from the whole experience, was that you should focus on one domain that really matters to people and just do that really well.”

LinkedIn was launched in 2003 and while initial growth was slow, the platform would surpass 1 million members in 2005, 10 million in 2007, and 90 million by 2010.

Angel investing

More or less after the sale of PayPal to eBay, Hoffman started on a journey that would see him become one of Silicon Valley’s most prolific and successful angel investors.

He joined VC firm Greylock Partners in 2010 and made an early investment in Airbnb.

Since that time, Hoffman has also invested in Flickr, Edmodo, Helion Energy, Aurora, Blockstream, and Coda, among many others.

Speaking and writing

Hoffman has not completely abandoned his interest in being a public intellectual.

He has spoken at TED conferences and Accelerate Good Global – an event uniting tech non-profit entrepreneurs.

He also works as a lecturer at Stanford University, Oxford University, MIT Media Lab, and Harvard University.

In terms of writing, Hoffman has written various posts as a “LinkedIn influencer” with one example an essay advocating for a new way to credential university students.

Some of the books Hoffman has co-authored include The Alliance, Masters of Scale, and Blitzscaling – a technique for scaling a business at a rapid pace to destroy its competitors.

what-is-blitzscaling — Blitzscaling is a business concept and a book written by Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn Co-founder) and Chris Yeh. At its core, the concept of Blitzscaling is about growing at a rate that is so much faster than your competitors, that make you feel uncomfortable. In short, Blitzscaling is prioritizing speed over efficiency in the face of uncertainty.

Key takeaways:

Born August 5, 1967, Reid Hoffman is an American public speaker, entrepreneur, podcaster, author, and venture capitalist.
Hoffman initially wanted to make a sizeable impact on the world and planned to become a public intellectual and professor once he graduated from Stanford University. However, he soon realized that he could make a greater impact as a businessman.
Hoffman learned from his failures at SocialNet.com when he founded LinkedIn in 2002 with some of his former employees from that platform and also from PayPal. Since then, he has become a prolific angel investor and has not abandoned his passion for speaking and writing on meaningful topics.

Read Also: PayPal Mafia