Biography

Reid Hoffman is executive chairman of LinkedIn Corporation and a partner at Greylock Partners. He co-founded LinkedIn in 2003 in his living room; it now has more than 200 million members in 200 countries and territories around the world. He joined Greylock Partners in 2009. He serves on the boards of Airbnb, Edmodo, Mozilla (Firefox), Shopkick, Swipely, Wrapp, and Zynga, and has co-led investments in Coupons.com, Groupon, and Viki. He leads the Greylock Discovery Fund, which invests in seed-stage entrepreneurs and companies; the fund is an extension of his prior angel investing, which included Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, and Zynga. Prior to LinkedIn and Greylock, he served as executive vice president at PayPal, where he was a founding board member. He believes strongly in the ability of entrepreneurship and technology to improve the world, and serves on the boards of Kiva, Endeavor, DoSomething.org, and Startup America Partnership. He co-authored the best-selling book The Startup of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career. He earned his master’s degree in philosophy from Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar, and his bachelor’s degree with distinction in symbolic systems from Stanford University. In 2010, he was the recipient of an SD Forum Visionary Award and also named a Henry Crown Fellow by The Aspen Institute. In 2011, he was named an Endeavor Entrepreneur of the Year.