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.
Biography
Hoffman was born in Stanford, California, and grew up in Berkeley, California. He attended Stanford University, where he won a Marshall Scholarship and a Dinkelspiel Award. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in symbolic systems, he attended Oxford University, graduating with a master's degree in philosophy. 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 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 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, Grassroots Enterprises, and Tagged. He is an investor in Facebook, IronPort, Flickr, Digg, Technorati, Nanosolar, Care.com, and several other firms.
He currently lives in Silicon Valley, California with his wife. Reid's favorite films, according to his Flixster profile, include The Lord of the Rings, The Incredibles, The Matrix, Rashomon, and The Hudsucker Proxy.
