Reid Hoffman

Reid Hoffman studied philosophy at Oxford as a Marshall Scholar after graduating from Stanford. He worked at Apple and Fujitsu before joining PayPal, where he was an executive. He co-founded LinkedIn in 2003 with the vision of creating a professional networking platform. LinkedIn grew to over 500 million members and went public in 2011 at a market cap of $4.25 billion. Microsoft acquired LinkedIn in 2016 for $26.2 billion — one of the largest technology acquisitions in history. Throughout this period Hoffman was also an active angel investor: he was an early investor in Facebook (investing before the Accel round), Airbnb, Zynga, and many others. He joined Greylock Partners as a partner in 2009 and has invested in companies including Aurora (autonomous vehicles), Convoy, and numerous AI and enterprise software companies. Hoffman is also a prominent author and thinker: his book 'Blitzscaling' (2018) with Chris Yeh articulates a theory of rapid business scaling that has influenced how Silicon Valley founders think about growth. He is a member of the PayPal Mafia — the alumni network of early PayPal employees including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and others who went on to found or invest in many of Silicon Valley's most influential companies.