Reid Garrett Hoffman was born on August 5, 1967. Hoffman was born in Stanford, California, to Deanna Ruth (Rutter) and William Parker Hoffman, Jr. and grew up in Berkeley, California. His paternal great-great-great-grandfather was Christian Presbyterian minister and Indiana University president pro tempore Theophilus Adam Wylie. Reid’s uncle Eric Hoffman is a writer. 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 Wolfson College, Oxford University in 1993 as a Marshall Scholar.
He is an American internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist and author. Hoffman is best known as the co-founder of LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network used primarily for professional networking. Hoffman, with a net worth of US$4.7 billion (as at January, 2015), is ranked as #341 on the list of the world’s richest people.
While in college, according to Hoffman, 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 realized 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. He 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. He 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.
While at SocialNet, Hoffman was a member of the board of directors during 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, whom 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.” Hoffman 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 that Hoffman “ 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. 
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 2014, LinkedIn has over 332 million members in more than 200 countries and territories. The site allows registered users to create professional profiles and connect with each other. 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.
Reid Hoffman was LinkedIn’s founding CEO for the first four years before becoming chairman and President, Products in February 2007. He 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, he said,
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.
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 said,
Hoffman is the person you want to talk to when you are starting a company.
In 2010 Hoffman joined Greylock Partners and runs their $20 million Discovery Fund. His areas of focus at Greylock include consumer and services, enterprise software, consumer Internet, enterprise 2.0, mobile, social gaming, online marketplaces, payments, and social networks.
According to David Kirkpatrick’s book The Facebook Effect, Reid Hoffman arranged the first meeting between Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel, which led to Thiel’s initial $500,000 angel investment in Facebook. Hoffman invested alongside Thiel in Facebook’s very first financing round.
Hoffman’s current investments include Airbnb, One Kings Lane, Swipely, Viki, Coupons.com, Edmodo, Wrapp, TrialPay, Xapo, and Talko. Past investments include Flickr, Digg, SixApart, Wikia, Permuto, thesixtyone, Tagged, IronPort, Ping.fm, Nanosolar, Care.com, Knewton, Kongregate, Last.fm, Technetto, Vendio, VigLink, Viki and shopkick. He served on Zynga’s board of directors from March 2008 to June 2014.
Reid Hoffman 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 has appeared on The Charlie Rose Show, Fareed Zakaria’s Global Public Square on CNN and other current affairs television programs.
Hoffman has published a variety of posts as a “LinkedIn Influencer” on LinkedIn. He published an essay proposing a new form of credentialing for university students and professionals entitled “Disrupting the Diploma.” On his personal website, he published “LinkedIn’s Series B Pitch to Greylock: Pitch Advice for Entrepreneurs,” in which he analyzed LinkedIn’s 2004 Series B venture funding pitch deck and offered advice to prospective entrepreneurs on how to formulate a pitch deck.
Hoffman has also written op-eds in the Washington Post, including one published in 2009 entitled “Let Startups Bail Us Out” encouraging funding for grassroots innovation in the wake of the financial crisis and another in June 2013 entitled “Immigration promotes entrepreneurship and prosperity” advocating for immigration reform. He has written for Strategy+Business on professional networking and is an “Influencer” on LinkedIn where he posts original written content.
Reid Hoffman’s Honors and awards;
- In September 2014, the Academy of Achievement awarded Hoffman with the annual Golden Plate award, which honors accomplished individuals “for significant achievement in their fields.”
- In April 2014, President Barack Obama named Hoffman as a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship “to help develop the next generation of entrepreneurs.”
- In April 2014, Hoffman received the Distinguished Citizen Award from the Commonwealth Club.
- 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.
- In 2012, 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.
- In 2011, Hoffman and Jeff Weiner of LinkedIn shared the Ernst and Young U.S. Entrepreneur of the Year Award.
- In 2010, Hoffman was named No. 17 on Fast Company ‘s list of the 100 Most Creative People in Business.
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