Reid Hoffman

Reid Garrett Hoffman (born August 5, 1967) is an American internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist, podcaster, and author.

Hoffman is the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network used primarily for professional networking.

He is also a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners and a co-founder of Inflection AI.

Hoffman was an avid tabletop roleplaying gamer as a child and worked as an editor at the game company Chaosium, then based in Oakland, California near his home.

Hoffman attended high school at the progressive Putney School in Vermont, where he engaged in farming activities.

He graduated from Stanford University in 1990 with a Bachelor of Science in Symbolic Systems and Cognitive Science.

He was awarded a Marshall Scholarship for graduate study abroad, on which he earned a Master of Studies in Philosophy from Wolfson College, Oxford, in 1993.

His paternal great-great-great-grandfather was Theophilus Adam Wylie, a Christian Presbyterian minister and Indiana University president pro tempore.

Hoffman's uncle Eric Hoffman is a writer.

Hoffman joined Apple Computer in 1994, where he worked on eWorld, an early attempt at building an online service.

AOL acquired eWorld in 1996.

He later worked at Fujitsu before co-founding his first company, SocialNet.com, in 1997.

It focused "on online dating and matching up people with similar interests, like golfers who were looking for partners in their neighborhood."

While at SocialNet, Hoffman was a member of the board of directors during the founding of PayPal.

In January 2000, he left SocialNet and joined PayPal full-time as the company's COO.

Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn in December 2002 with two former colleagues from SocialNet (including Allen Blue) from his time at Fujitsu.

LinkedIn launched on May 5, 2003 as one of the first business-oriented online social networks.

Peter Thiel, a colleague of Hoffman's at PayPal, invested in LinkedIn.

He served on Zynga's board of directors from March 2008 to June 2014 and currently serves on several public boards, including Aurora, Joby Aviation, and Microsoft.

Hoffman has made multiple investments in transportation technology companies, including Aurora, Convoy, Nauto, Nuro, and Joby Aviation, among others.

In 2009, Hoffman joined Greylock Partners.

According to David Kirkpatrick's book The Facebook Effect, Hoffman arranged the first meeting between Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel, which led to Thiel's initial $500,000 angel investment in Facebook.

Hoffman invested alongside Thiel in Facebook's first financing round.

Since 2009, Hoffman has provided venture capital to dozens of businesses across industries, including consumer and transportation technology, finance, and artificial intelligence.

Examples include Airbnb, Aurora Innovation, Taptap Send, and Helion Energy.

At the time of LinkedIn's IPO on May 19, 2011, Hoffman owned a stake worth an estimated $2.34 billion, not including any potential benefits from Greylock Partners, where he was named a partner in 2009.

An early advocate for cryptocurrency, Hoffman led Greylock's 2014 Series A financing round in Xapo, a company that developed a bitcoin wallet product.

In August 2023, Hoffman said he will not serve as a general partner for Greylock's upcoming funds.

Microsoft proposed to acquire LinkedIn on June 13, 2016 for $26.2 billion in cash.

Hoffman became a Microsoft board member on March 14, 2017.

Hoffman was a founding investor in the artificial intelligence research company OpenAI.

In March 2022, it was announced that Hoffman was co-founding a new startup, Inflection AI, with his long-time friend and Greylock colleague Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of DeepMind.

CNBC reported that "Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Inflection will aim to develop AI software products that make it easier for humans to communicate with computers."

On March 3, 2023, Hoffman resigned from his board seat at OpenAI, citing a desire to avoid conflicts of interest between his board seat at OpenAI, investments in AI technology companies via Greylock Partners, and role as founder of Inflection AI.

As of May 2023, Hoffman and Greylock Partners have invested in at least 37 AI companies.

For example, they were an early investor in Tome, makers of productivity software driven by AI.

The company claims it is the fastest productivity software maker to reach 1 million users.

Hoffman has dismissed calls to “pause” the development of advanced AI systems, calling such ideas “foolish” and “anti-humanist.” Instead, he has called for the pace of development to be accelerated to help humans solve societal problems.

After the PayPal sale to eBay, Hoffman became one of Silicon Valley's most prolific angel investors.

Dave Goldberg, former CEO of SurveyMonkey, said that Hoffman "is the person you want to talk to when you are starting a company."