How Reid Hoffman went from studying philosophy at Oxford to building LinkedIn

While he’s perhaps best known as the founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman has played an influential role in other Silicon Valley giants.

He joined PayPal in its early days and was one of Facebook’s first investors, for example. He went on to lead investments in firms like Airbnb and today is the cofounder of AI company Inflection AI.

Here’s a look at Hoffman’s life and career rise over the years:

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

His parents were both lawyers and leftist activists.

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

At 12, he was hired for a one-time consulting role on a new game after he pointed out flaws in a gamemaker’s last game.

“There’s nothing obsessive like a kid,” Hoffman previously told BI, referring to his game-playing habit. “I literally spent days and days and days and days just doing that, and that led me to a sense of strategy, which was then, of course, very helpful when I later got to my entrepreneurial and business life.”

He went to the progressive boarding school Putney, in Vermont, where he learned blacksmithing, woodworking, and farming techniques in addition to his academic studies

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

He has said there was “a very pragmatic kind of ‘work on solving the problem’ versus ‘being an expert within a discipline,’” at the school, and that he is grateful for learning that you could take “this kind of entrepreneurial focus on a personal life,” instead of associating his future self with a single title like “product manager,” “artist,” or “lawyer.”

He studied at Stanford University, where he’d meet future fellow billionaire investor and PayPal Mafia member Peter Thiel

Hoffman with Thiel when they were sophomores, and at that point Hoffman had a reputation for being a “pinko commie” and Thiel a “libertarian wacko,” as Hoffman joked in an episode of his podcast “Masters of Scale.” It was this contentious dynamic that proved to be the heart of their unlikely bond.

This friendship would go on to be one of the most impactful in Silicon Valley’s 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 be a ‘public intellectual’ and went to Oxford as a Marshall Scholar to get his master’s in philosophy

He completed his studies in 1993.

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

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

It was a place to find dates or 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 caused him to abandon the project in 1999.

He considers it, however, an important crash course in both social networks in general and what it takes to run a company.

In December of 1998, Thiel told Hoffman he should join him at his pioneering online payments company, PayPal

Hoffman started as a founding board member and then 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, PayPal’s stacked team went off to start their own companies.

Hoffman used his PayPal money to revisit the notion of social networks

He gathered four of his friends and former colleagues and founded LinkedIn in 2002 as a hub for ambitious professionals.

In 2004, a 20-year-old college dropout named Mark Zuckerberg approached Hoffman to see if he had an interest in either 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 up Thiel and they met with Zuckerberg.

Hoffman previously told BI that he and Thiel found Zuckerberg to a painfully awkward kid, but they made a deal — the first investment into Facebook — and Thiel joined the company’s board.

The two have served as friends and advisors to Zuckerberg over the past 15 years, and Hoffman told us that he’s never seen anyone else make such a radical transformation into a high-functioning and visionary CEO than Zuck.

“I am learning from a bunch of things that he does,” Hoffman said.

Also in 2004, Hoffman married Michelle Yee, his girlfriend since his days at Stanford. 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 with former Yahoo exec Jeff Weiner a year later. Weiner has remained in the role since

Hoffman acted as LinkedIn’s CEO for four years but stepped back in 2007 once it had sufficient momentum, remaining as chairman.

Hoffman and Weiner have had a close working relationship and Weiner became one of the most lauded CEOs in any industry.

“Part of what made it very clear very early that Jeff was the right CEO is that he had actually really started embodying, acting as a founder,” Hoffman said.

LinkedIn went public in 2011.

Hoffman and Weiner decided it’d be best for LinkedIn to join a larger company and announced a $26.2 billion acquisition by Microsoft that June

LinkedIn maintained healthy growth in terms of users and innovative offerings but was still lagging behind investors’ expectations in early 2016.

The deal closed in December 2016 and Hoffman joined Microsoft’s board, with Weiner still at the helm and the promise that LinkedIn would act as an independent subsidiary of Microsoft.

Hoffman previously told BI the decision was very difficult but that he and his executive team ultimately decided that after discussions with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and his team about his goals and theirs, “There was a natural alignment of those missions, and we realized that we could better achieve our mission combined.”

Hoffman became one of the Valley’s most sought-after and well-connected investors

He became a partner with the venture capital firm Greylock in 2009, where he’s made deals like his highly profitable one in Airbnb.

In 2022, Hoffman cofounded Inflection AI with Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI

Suleyman had already cofounded another AI company, DeepMind, which was later acquired by Google.

Hoffman has since become a vocal figure on AI.

Hoffman is embracing more than ever his teenage desire to be a ‘public intellectual’

Hoffman has become a prominent Democratic donor, most recently supporting Vice President Kamala Harris for the presidency. He previously told BI he views his political donations to candidates the same way he does his tech investments.

He’s also emerged as 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 is nowhere near as effective as continuing to build and contribute to his network and seeing what comes of that.

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

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