The life and career of LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman in photos

Hoffman was born in 1957 in Palo Alto, California and grew up in Berkeley

His parents were both lawyers and left-wing activists.

Hoffman’s nanny introduced him to Dungeons & Dragons when he was 10, which sparked a new love of strategy and role-playing games

At the age of 12, he was hired for a one-time advisory role on a new game after spotting mistakes in a playmaker’s latest play.

“There’s nothing more obsessive than a kid,” Hoffman previously told BI, referring to his habit of playing games. “I literally spent days and days and days and days doing that, and that led to a sense of strategy, which was obviously very helpful as I went into my entrepreneurial and business life later on.”

He attended the progressive boarding school of Putney in Vermont, where in addition to his academic studies he also learned blacksmithing, woodworking, and agricultural techniques.

While Hoffman was bullied for what teenagers would call his love of “nerdy” things, as an adult he has only good things to say about him his time at Putney.

He said that in school there was “a very pragmatic way of ‘working on solving problems’ rather than ‘being an expert in a field'” and that he is grateful that he learned that you can “apply this entrepreneurial focus to your personal life as well” rather than associating his future self with a single title like “product manager,” “artist” or “lawyer.”

He attended Stanford University, where he met fellow future billionaire investor and PayPal mafia member Peter Thiel

Hoffman meets Thiel when they were sophomores, and at the time Hoffman had a reputation as a “pink communist” and Thiel a “libertarian nutcase,” as Hoffman joked in an episode of his podcast “Masters of scale.” It was this combative dynamic that proved to be at the core of their unlikely bond.

This friendship would become one of the most influential in Silicon Valley history.

Hoffman graduated from Stanford in 1990 with a bachelor’s degree in symbolic systems

This unique Stanford concentration essentially combined computer science and applied philosophy.

He wanted to become a ‘public intellectual’ and went to Oxford as a Marshall Scholar to obtain his master’s degree in philosophy

He completed his studies in 1993.

Hoffman said he realized at Oxford that if he went into academia, he would focus on writing for an academic community rather than on pursuing his long-held, highly ambitious guiding question: “How can I help humanity evolve?”

After brief stints at both Apple and Fujitsu, Hoffman decided to start his own technology company in 1997, a site called SocialNet

It was a place to find dates and connect with friends, making it one of the first social networks.

The combination of the site being ahead of its time and Hoffman’s inexperience as a manager meant that he abandoned the project in 1999.

However, he sees it as an important crash course in social networking in general and what it takes to run a business.

In December 1998, Thiel told Hoffman he should come work for him at his groundbreaking online payments company PayPal

Hoffman started as a co-founder and board member and joined full-time in 2000, officially joining the so-called “PayPal mafia” of future tech icons like Elon Musk and the founders of YouTube.

When eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion in 2002, the successful PayPal team decided to start their own companies.

Hoffman used his PayPal money to re-examine the idea of ​​social networking

He gathered four friends and former colleagues and founded LinkedIn in 2002, a platform for ambitious professionals.

In 2004, a 20-year-old college dropout named Mark Zuckerberg approached Hoffman to ask if he would be interested in his social startup The Facebook or his file transfer service Wirehog

Hoffman was intrigued, but didn’t want to be a lead investor in a potential deal since he was building his own social network. He called Thiel and they met with Zuckerberg.

Hoffman previously told BI that he and Thiel found Zuckerberg to be a painfully awkward guy, but they struck a deal — the first investment in Facebook — and Thiel joined the company’s board of directors.

The two have been friends and advisers to Zuckerberg for the past 15 years, and Hoffman told us he’s never seen anyone else make such a good impression. radical transformation to a better functioning and visionary CEO than Zuck.

“I learn from a lot of things he does,” Hoffman said.

Also in 2004, Hoffman married Michelle Yee, his girlfriend since his Stanford days. Hoffman told Wired in 2012 that Yee prefers to stay out of the spotlight.

Hoffman gave the CEO role to Dan Nye, but replaced him a year later with former Yahoo executive Jeff Weiner. Weiner has remained in that role ever since

Hoffman served as LinkedIn’s CEO for four years, but stepped down in 2007 when the company had gained enough momentum and remained as chairman.

Hoffman and Sausage have worked closely together and Weiner has become one of the most acclaimed CEOs in any industry.

“What made it clear early on that Jeff was the right CEO was that he actually behaved like a founder,” Hoffman said.

LinkedIn went public in 2011.

Hoffman and Weiner decided it would be best for LinkedIn to join a larger company and announced a $26.2 billion acquisition by Microsoft in June.

LinkedIn experienced healthy growth in terms of user base and innovative offerings, but still fell short of investor expectations in early 2016.

The deal closed in December 2016, with Hoffman joining Microsoft’s board of directors. Weiner remained at the helm, and there was a promise that LinkedIn would operate as an independent subsidiary of Microsoft.

Hoffman previously told BI that it was a difficult decision, but that he and his executive team ultimately decided that after talking with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and his team about his goals and theirs, “those missions naturally aligned and we realized we could better achieve our mission together.”

Hoffman is embracing his teenage dream of being a ‘public intellectual’ more than ever

Hoffman has become a prominent Democratic donor, recently endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president. He previously told BI that he views his political donations to candidates the same way he views his technology investments.

He has also become a leading public expert on entrepreneurship and careers, writing two career guides and hosting a popular business podcast called “Masters of scale.”

Hoffman previously told BI that he’s learned that having a master plan for his career isn’t nearly as effective as continuing to build and contribute to his network and then waiting to see what happens.

That’s because, he said, “that’s the thing that catapults you the most, in terms of your capabilities, in terms of your ability to do things.”