Reid Hoffman

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Reid Hoffman (born August 5, 1967) is an American entrepreneur and angel investor.

Hoffman is best known as the founder of LinkedIn, a social network used primarily for business connections and job searching.

[edit] Biography

Hoffman was born in Stanford, California, and grew up in Berkeley, California. He attended Stanford University, where he won a Marshall Scholarship and a Dinkelspiel Award. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in symbolic systems, he attended Oxford University, graduating with a master's degree in philosophy.

His first job was a summer internship with Inglenook, a Napa Valley winery. After working at Apple Computer and Fujitsu, Hoffman was a member of the board of directors at the founding of PayPal, an electronic money transmission service, and later joined the firm as a full-time employee. At the time of PayPal's acquisition by eBay in 2002, he was Executive Vice President of PayPal.

Reid was LinkedIn’s founding CEO for the first four years before moving to his role as Chairman and President, Products in February 2007. LinkedIn is a business-oriented Internet-based social network service. He serves as a director of a variety of businesses, most in the social network domain, including Mozilla, Vendio, Six Apart, Kiva.org, Grassroots, and Tagged. He has also been an investor in Facebook, IronPort, Flickr, Digg, Technorati, Nanosolar, and several other firms.