🇺🇸 Reid Hoffman

Reid Hoffman has been called Silicon Valley's super-connector, and the title is not hyperbole. He co-founded PayPal, founded LinkedIn, invested early in Facebook, Airbnb, and dozens of other companies that define the modern internet economy, and became a partner at one of the most powerful venture capital firms in the world. More than almost any other figure in technology, Hoffman understood that the real currency of Silicon Valley is not money but relationship — who you know, who knows you, and what you can accomplish together. He built that understanding into a platform, and the platform became the world's largest professional network with over a billion members.

Reid Garrett Hoffman was born on August 5, 1967, in Stanford, California, the son of an attorney and a teacher. He attended Stanford University, earning a degree in Symbolic Systems — a hybrid of cognitive science, linguistics, philosophy, and computer science — and then studied at Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, where he focused on philosophy. The combination of philosophical training and technical education gave him an unusual vantage point: he could think about systems, meaning, and human behavior with equal facility, a skill that would prove invaluable when building networks designed around professional identity and human ambition.

After Oxford, Hoffman returned to Silicon Valley and joined Apple, where he worked on the eWorld online service — an early attempt at a social network that predated the web. He later co-founded SocialNet, an online dating and community site, in 1997. Neither Apple nor SocialNet was his defining chapter, but both contributed to his thinking about how people form relationships through digital infrastructure. When Peter Thiel was assembling the team that would become PayPal, Hoffman joined as executive vice president, bringing his network and his judgment about people. PayPal went public in 2002 and was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion that same year, generating returns that would fund the next wave of Silicon Valley ambition.

LinkedIn was founded in Hoffman's living room in December 2002 and launched publicly in May 2003. The founding insight was simple but profound: people have professional identities that are distinct from their personal identities, and the internet had built platforms for the personal side — social networks, dating sites, forums — but nothing serious for the professional. LinkedIn would be the resume that lives online, the professional network that updates itself, the digital business card that persists and compounds over time. In an economy increasingly organized around talent mobility and knowledge work, the professional graph would become as valuable as the social graph.

The bet was correct. LinkedIn grew steadily through the mid-2000s and accelerated as smartphones made professional networking a daily habit rather than an occasional activity. By the time Microsoft acquired LinkedIn in 2016 for $26.2 billion — the largest acquisition in Microsoft's history at that point — it had 433 million members. Today it exceeds one billion. Hoffman received hundreds of millions of dollars in the transaction, but his more lasting contribution may have been the template he established: that professional identity, career trajectory, and business relationship management deserve their own dedicated digital infrastructure.

As a venture capitalist at Greylock Partners, where he joined in 2009, Hoffman invested in and advised some of the most consequential companies of the decade: he was an early investor in Facebook, writing a $37,500 check when Mark Zuckerberg was still at Harvard; he invested in Airbnb, Convoy, Aurora, and many others. His investment thesis emphasized network effects and winner-take-most dynamics — insights he had developed as a practitioner rather than an observer of platform businesses. He co-authored the business strategy book "Blitzscaling," which argued that in certain competitive environments, speed of growth matters more than efficiency, a philosophy he had lived firsthand at LinkedIn and PayPal.

Hoffman's public profile expanded further with his podcast "Masters of Scale," in which he interviewed founders and leaders about how they built their companies, and with his increasing involvement in AI — he co-founded Inflection AI in 2022 and became an early advocate for thoughtful AI development. His net worth, estimated at approximately $2.5 billion, reflects a career that has compounded across multiple roles: founder, operator, investor, author, and connector. In Silicon Valley, where most people specialize, Hoffman has done everything and done it well.