Reid Hoffman

Reid Hoffman (born 1967 in the Palo Alto area of California) is an American internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist and author. He is best known as a co-founder of LinkedIn, the professional networking site he helped launch in 2003. His career, built in Silicon Valley from the 1990s onward, traces how online services grew from early experiments into the platforms that now shape hiring and much of commerce.

Hoffman grew up in California, the son of two lawyers. He attended the Putney School in Vermont and graduated from Stanford in 1990 with a degree in symbolic systems and cognitive science. He then studied philosophy at Oxford. He first imagined an academic career, but came to believe that a business life would give him a far wider reach. After stints at Apple and Fujitsu, he started SocialNet.com in 1997, a dating and networking service for people with shared interests.

His best-known period began at PayPal, where he moved from operations into business development and handled relations with payment partners, eBay and regulators. After eBay bought PayPal in 2002, he co-founded LinkedIn with former colleagues. The site went live in 2003 and listed on the stock market in 2011. As an investor he backed companies such as Facebook, Zynga and Airbnb, and in 2009 he became a partner at Greylock Partners.

His writing is practical and aimed at general readers. In 2012 he co-wrote The Start-Up of You with Ben Casnocha, a book urging readers to treat their own careers as a business. In recent years he has turned to artificial intelligence, co-founding Inflection AI and appearing among OpenAI's early donors. His legacy lies less in a single invention than in a model of career building and early-stage funding that many founders have since adopted.