Reid Hoffman is a U.S based venture capitalist, author, and entrepreneur best known for being the co-creator of LinkedIn which can be called the Facebook of work. His brainchild is very useful for making new business connections and job searches.
Hoffman was born on 5th August 1967 in Stanford, California. He studied at The Putney School and then went on to Stanford University where he received his degree of B.S in Cognitive Science and Symbolic Systems in 1990. He did his master’s in philosophy from Oxford University in 1993. Reid Hoffman wanted to do something big; something that would positively affect the world.
He realized that although his educational background would no doubt be very useful for him the main factor would be a career as an entrepreneur. So he started in 1994 by joining Apple Computer where he made his first attempts to make a social network. He worked on eWorld which was acquired by AOL in 1996. He took a job at Fujitsu for a while before co-founding his first company called SocialNet.com.
It was mainly an internet dating website but back then it was an idea before its time. During this time, Hoffman was also a member of the board of directors at PayPal. He left SocialNet.com in 2000 and began working full-time at PayPal as a COO. By 2002, he had become the vice president of the company.
In 2002, Hoffman co-established LinkedIn with two of his colleagues from SocialNet. The website launched in May 2003 becoming one of the first sites of its kind. From November 2012 onwards LinkedIn has had over 187 million users in more than 200 countries. The users can maintain a list of people with their details on ‘Connections’.
Forbes called this site ‘the most advantageous social networking tool available to job seekers and business professionals today. He was the founding CEO of LinkedIn in the beginning and became the Chairman and President of Products in 2007. In June 2009, he became the Executive Chairman of the company.
After PayPal was sold to eBay, Hoffman became very successful and one of the most creative angel investors in Silicon Valley. Known as ‘Silicon Valley’s uber-investor’, Reid Hoffman has invested in many ventures such as Zynga, Wikia, SixApart, Permuta, Flickr, and Ping. FM, Care.com, Kongregate, Tagged, IronPort, OneKingsLane, Edmodo, Shopkick, Vendio, Digg, Nanosolar, Knewton, Technetto, Wrapp, and OneKingsLane.
He is said to have sat on almost every seat on the table in Silicon Valley. He was a junior product manager at Apple and Fujitsu, an executive at PayPal, an institutional investor, an angel investor, a board member of public and private companies, and finally the founder and chief executive officer of LinkedIn.
Hoffman often attends the World Economic Forum at Switzerland, Davos, and Bilderberg Meetings. He also frequently lectures at Oxford University, Stanford University, Harvard, MIT, and several others. His achievements have been recognized with many awards and honors including the ‘Ernest and Young U.S Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2011. He was also ranked number 3 on the Forbes’ Midas List of Top Tech Investors.
Courtesy:— Famous Entrepreneurs. com