Linkedin corporation reid hoffman8/31/2023 ![]() That's what got me to my view of how the world of work was changing. You're piecing together pieces of information. ![]() So I was looking for some people who had expertise in the banking industry, some in the regulatory industry, some in the Internet industry, some in the payment industry. People had not solved the PayPal problem before. While I was at PayPal, I saw how I was operating, how was I solving my problems. The rocket is about to start taking off." When I decided to leave Socialnet to start another business, I went to Peter and he said, "No, don't do that yet. While I was doing Socialnet, a close friend of mine from Stanford, Peter Thiel, had started a small hedge fund and met another guy named Max Levchin. We thought we were going to partner with newspapers, and that didn't work. How do you get to millions of users, and tens of millions? We had a bad model at Socialnet. The lesson I learned was that, as much as you are building a really great product, you have to understand your product distribution strategy. But the first time you do anything, you learn lots and lots of lessons. We raised money from some very good venture capitalists. It also had some activities like finding golf partners and roommates and that kind of stuff. The idea of Socialnet was that you have millions of people all publishing online, so what kind of applications can you build to connect them? Socialnet focused on online dating. In August I started my first company, Socialnet. I really wanted to get out there and start creating new businesses, so I resigned my Fujitsu position in July 1997. I watched the whole online market heating up. After Apple, I went to Fujitsu for product management and the business side. The first step was pure software development. I started with a checklist of all the things I needed to learn in order to do startups. I found a really good opportunity through the roommate of a good friend of mine from Stanford. So then I networked my way to a job at Apple ( AAPL, Fortune 500). You've done this before, yes?" I said, "No, not really."And they said, "Go get a job first." They said, "Have you shipped software before? You're asking us to invest millions of dollars in your company. I networked my way to a couple of different venture capitalists. Because I had been at Stanford, I thought about starting a software company. Studying at Oxford, I realized I wanted to have a much broader relevance in people's lives. This was when America Online was starting to drop floppy disks to everybody to try to get people online. ![]() It was the beginning of the online revolution, in 1993. Hoffman recently sat down with to discuss his entrepreneurial journey. There, he immediately started tapping into his connections to pursue his dream of starting a software company. In the early 1990s, after a stint studying philosophy at Oxford and planning an academic life, he changed course and returned to Silicon Valley. Beyond LinkedIn, the entrepreneur is also an active investor, advising and funding more than 60 Silicon Valley startups, including Facebook. Profitable since 2006, LinkedIn's management says, the company raised nearly $80 million from investors last year, valuing it at $1 billion.įrom the beginning, Hoffman, a Stanford graduate, understood the importance of building and leveraging his network. ![]() In just six years, the Mountain View, Calif., company has become one of Silicon Valley's stalwarts, with 350 employees and a brand recognized throughout corporate America. Its 41 million members include people from more than 200 countries and executives from every Fortune 500 company. Hoffman, 41, started LinkedIn, the social networking site for professionals. Reid Hoffman knows a little something about that. () - In Silicon Valley, it's all about knowing the right people.
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