Spotlight

last updated 8 January 2015

If you are a budding Internet entrepreneur, there’s really only one man you need to see for money, advice, and connections, said Evelyn M. Rusli in The New York Times. That’s Reid Hoffman, “the startup whisperer of Silicon Valley.” The co-founder of business-networking site LinkedIn, Hoffman is considered “something of a Yoda” in the social-media universe. “He’s the first stop for every hot deal,” says tech investor David Siminoff. A “nerd’s nerd” who likes to wax philosophical about the future of technology, Hoffman got his first job at age 12 when he “thrust a manual, marked with his suggestions in red ink,” into the hands of a fantasy-game developer. It was the beginning of his fascination with the way multiplayer games, and later social networks, come together.

Hoffman “created the original social network, a dating service called SocialNet, in 1997,” said Nicole Perlroth in Forbes.com. It flopped, but Hoffman learned from his mistakes and has helped “create nearly every significant social network since.” He’s also moonlighted as a tech investor for more than a decade, seeding early money in companies like Facebook, Zynga, and Flickr. Today he has a second full-time job, at venture capital firm Greylock Partners, where he invests in the “next generation of promising tech startups.”