Reid Hoffman
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| Reid Hoffman | |
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 Hoffman in 2007 |
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| Born | August 5, 1967 Stanford, California, USA |
| Occupation | Entrepreneur |
Reid Hoffman (born August 5, 1967) is an American entrepreneur and angel investor.
Hoffman is best known as the founder of LinkedIn, a social network used primarily for business connections and job searching.
[edit] Biography
Hoffman was born in Stanford, California, and grew up in Berkeley, California. He attended high school at The Putney School,[1]. He graduated from Stanford University (where he won a Marshall Scholarship and a Dinkelspiel Award) with a bachelor's degree in symbolic systems and from Oxford University with a master's degree in philosophy.
Hoffman says he saw academia as an opportunity to make an "impact", but later realised that an entrepreneurial career would provide him with a bigger 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."[2]
His first job was a summer internship with Inglenook, a Napa Valley winery. After working at Apple Computer and Fujitsu, Hoffman co-founded his first company, SocialNet.com. While at Socialnet, Hoffman was a member of the board of directors at the founding of PayPal, an electronic money transmission service, and later joined the firm as a full-time employee. At the time of PayPal's acquisition by eBay in 2002, he was Executive Vice President of PayPal in charge of business and corporate development.
Reid was LinkedIn’s founding CEO for the first four years before moving to his role as Chairman and President, Products in February 2007. LinkedIn is a business-oriented Internet-based social network service. He has been called[by whom?] the "most connected man in all of Silicon Valley". He has personally mentored many of the Web 2.0 CEOs and has given valuable advice to many Silicon Valley VCs as well as the United States military where he was honored with a Department of Defense medal of brilliance for his valuable service to the United States. He invented the term for his people as the new "Second Generation Web Entrepreneurs". He leads as the director of a variety of Silicon Valley businesses, most in the social network domain, including Mozilla, Vendio, Six Apart, Kiva.org, Tagged, and Zynga. He is an investor in Facebook, IronPort, Flickr, Digg, Grockit, Ping.fm, Nanosolar, Care.com, Knewton, Kongregate, Last.fm, Zynga and several other firms.[citation needed]
He currently lives in Silicon Valley, California with his wife.
[edit] References
[edit] External links
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Reid Hoffman |
- LinkedIn management page including a brief biography of Hoffman
- Hoffman's resume on LinkedIn
- Podcast and videos of Reid Hoffman, speaking at Stanford University
- Well connected, Reid Hoffman in profile, July 2009
