30 Surprising Facts We Bet You Didn't Know About Reid Hoffman

13 February 2019, 3:53 pm EST By Ruby Karnick

Reid Hoffman, the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, has been listed in the Forbes World's Billionaires list as well as the Most Influential People list regularly in the past few years. Here are some very interesting facts about the American internet entrepreneur:

Hoffman is one of the most successful internet entrepreneur, a venture capitalist, and an author in the United States,
In April 2014, he was named as a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship by President Barack Obama, to help develop the next generation of entrepreneurs.
He attended Putney School where he engaged in various other activities such as farming maple syrup and driving oxen along with his studies.
He received an Honorary Doctor of Laws from Babson in 2012.
He was born Reid Garrett Hoffman on August 05, 1967, at Stanford Hospital, in Palo Alto, California, to Deanna Ruth and William Parker Hoffman, Jr. His parents were both lawyers and leftist activists.
Hoffman is recipient of 2012 David Packard Medal of Achievement Award by TechAmerica for his contributions and advances within the high-tech industry, his community and humankind.
He went to Stanford University and graduated with a B.S. in Symbolic Systems and Cognitive Science in 1990. He received Marshall Scholarship, one of the most prestigious scholarships in the United States.
As a Marshall scholar he earned an M.A. in Philosophy from Wolfson College, Oxford University in 1993. While in college he saw academia as a platform to make an impact, but realized that becoming an entrepreneur would provide him with a larger platform.
A baby sitter introduced him to ‘Dungeons and Dragons,’ the role-playing game and his obsession led him to analyze its weakness earned him his first job as a 12 year old consultant for the next game.
Games were as important to Hoffman as a teenager that he included D&D imagery on his high school diploma. As a child he was an avid tabletop role-playing game and according to him, ‘I play board games as a way of hanging out.’

As an adult, Hoffman is an avid player of ‘Settlers of Catan,’ and has developed his own games. In 2016, he created ‘TrumpedUp Cards,’ a satirical game incorporating Hoffman’s dislike of President Donald Trump and the ‘Startups of Silicon Valley,’ for his friends
His first job was a summer internship at Inglenook, a Napa Valley winery. He later joined Apple Computer in 1994, were he worked on ‘eWorld,’ an early attempt at creating a social network.
After short stint in Apple and Fujitsu, he 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.
In December 1998, at the instance of Peter Thiel, he joined online payment company ‘PayPal’ as founding board member. Later in January 2000, he joined full time as the company’s COO. At the time of PayPal’s acquisition by eBay for $ 1.5 billion in 2002, he was executive vice president.
Along with two former colleagues he founded ‘Linkedin’ in 2002 and on May 05, 2003, it was launched as one of the first business oriented online social network.
He was its founding CEO, before becoming chairman and president of product in 2007, and in June 2009, he became its executive chairman.
Following Linkedin success, he started investing into nearly 30 to 40 internet businesses, Flickr, Wikia, Coupons, Xapo, OneKingsLane, Edmodo and Wrapp being some of them.
Hoffman’s ‘The Start-Up Of You,’ one of his books on business venturing is highly acclaimed by his followers. The book went on to become a New York Times best seller.
Hoffman became one of Silicon Valley’s most prolific and successful angel investors. He joined ‘Greylock Partners’ in 2010 and runs their $ 2o million Discovery Fund and also invested in Facebook’s financing round.
In 2014, he co-authored a book ‘The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age,’ with Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh. The book is about long term relationships between company and employees and became a bestseller.

He served on the board of advisors of Center for Citizen Media in 2006-07. It is a non-profit initiative jointly affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University Law School.
Hoffman is a frequent lecturer at Stanford University, Oxford University, Harvard University, MIT’s Media Lab and others. He has spoken at the XPrize Foundation’s conference and at the TED conference in Long Beach in 2012.
He has written op-eds in the Washington Post, in 2009 entitled ‘Let Startups Bail Us Out’ encouraging funding for grassroots innovation and in 2013 entitled ‘Immigration promotes entrepreneurship and prosperity,’ advocating for immigration reforms.
On May 03, 2017, he launched ‘Masters of Scale,’ a podcast hosted by Hoffman, wherein he introduces a theory on how successful businesses scale, and test its validity by interviewing founders.
In 2012, Hoffman was placed third in the ‘Angel s’ category of the first ‘Digital Power Index,’ list of the 100 most significant people in the digital world, released by Newsweek and The Daily Beast.’
He married Michelle Yee in 2004 and the couple resides in four –bedroom house in Palo Alto. His one weakness is for fine dining specially on a Saturday evening in Palo Alto, with Yee enjoying a five-hour molecular-gastronomy dinner at Baume.
Forbes has pinned down a record 2,208 billionaires from 72 countries in 2018 and Hoffman is listed in # 703 with a real time net worth of $ 1.8 billion.
Hoffman was elected in 2015, as a member of the ‘Council on Foreign Relations,’ and he is also a member of the ‘Bilderberg Group,’ consisting of North American and European political leaders and experts from industry, finance, academia and the media, since 2011.
He and his wife Yee, donated $ 20 million to the Chan Zuckerberg’s Initiative to eradicate disease by 2100. They are also a part of ‘the Giving Pledge,’ a global effort encouraging the wealthiest, to part with their wealth for philanthropic causes.
In 2012, The Martin Luther King Jr. Center honored Hoffman with their ‘Salute to Greatness’ award which recognizes excellence in leadership and a commitment to social responsibility.