LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman "How to Benefit 100 Million People"
LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman "How to Benefit 100 Million People"
Designing and Building Human Ecosystems for Networks and Marketplaces
Monday, July 18, 2011 | 11:00am - 12:30pm
Host/Chair: 
Joi Ito

An accomplished entrepreneur, executive, and angel investor, Reid Hoffman has played an integral part in building many of today’s leading consumer-technology businesses. Hoffman was a founding board member and executive at PayPal before he launched LinkedIn from his living room in 2003. By the end of the first month, LinkedIn had 4,500 members; today it has over 100 million. Hoffman was also an early investor in such successful enterprises as Facebook, Zynga, Digg, and Flickr.

Biography: 

Reid Hoffman is a partner at Greylock, and co-founder and executive chairman at LinkedIn. He joined Greylock Partners in 2009. His areas of focus include consumer Internet, enterprise 2.0, mobile, social gaming, online marketplaces, payments, and social networks.

An accomplished entrepreneur, executive, and angel investor, Hoffman has played an integral part in building many of today’s leading consumer technology businesses. He possesses a unique understanding of consumer behavior and the dynamics of viral businesses, as well as deep experience in driving companies from the earliest stages through periods of explosive growth.

Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional networking service, in 2003. LinkedIn is thriving, with more than 100 million members in 200 countries around the world and a diversified revenue model that includes subscriptions, advertising, and software licensing. Hoffman led LinkedIn through its first four years and to profitability as chief executive officer.

Prior to LinkedIn, Hoffman served as executive vice president at PayPal, where he was a founding board member. He is a board observer at Airbnb, Gowalla, and Swipely, an advisor to Groupon, and a director at Zynga, Mozilla Corp., Six Apart, Shopkick, and Kiva.org. He is an angel investor in numerous influential Internet companies, including Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, Ning, Six Apart, and Zynga.

Hoffman earned a master’s degree in philosophy from Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a bachelor’s degree with distinction in symbolic systems from Stanford University.