For LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman, Relationships Rule the World

Reid Hoffman

In a community of entrepreneurs and investors who are forthrightly driven by the pursuit of money, Hoffman is still an intellectual at heart. “We’d have a two-and-a-half-hour meeting about the book, and he’d spend the first 45 minutes debating the Singapore model of economics,” coauthor Casnocha says. “He gave me books on the philosophy of the ancient Greeks, DVDs of Japanese anime. He wanted me to think about what anime could teach us about the philosophy of life.

“His brain isn’t tremendously linear,” Casnocha adds. “Reid lives a life of chaos.”

Hoffman grew up in a liberal Berkeley household, the only child of two radical lawyers. “My dad, who graduated from Stanford, did public-service law and went to Woodstock. He took to sleeping at the Black Panthers headquarters in case the police kicked down the door—because the police were less likely to shoot a white person.” His mother studied environmental law at Berkeley. They met when she entered a beauty contest, and were 23 and 22 when Reid was born. “From an early age, I thought of myself as someone who hangs with the adults,” he says. “How society should run, what is a meaningful life: These questions I encountered fairly early.” As a baby, he was carried through tear gas at demonstrations; as a teenager, his first concert—with his dad—was the Grateful Dead. Ethics discussions were common: why Ronald Reagan was wrong to bomb Libya, or why a great society needed strong public education.

When Reid hit 10, a babysitter introduced him to a new obsession: Dungeons & Dragons. After a school friend told him a couple of years later that a similar role-playing game, RuneQuest, was published by nearby Chaosium, 12-year-old Reid turned up one day with a list of flaws he had found in a recent game. “I remember Steve Perrin, the guy I handed this to, thinking, I shouldn’t have let this kid through the door. But then he changed and said, ‘Some of the things you’re saying are pretty interesting. We’re in the process of publishing something else. Could you look at that?’ It was a Friday. I came back on Monday, and he gave me a check. For $162.70.”

Hoffman was under-performing at his local school, so at 14 he made a remarkable self-intervention. Without his parents’ knowledge, he applied to the Putney School, an elite boarding school in Vermont; after he got in, he persuaded them to let him go. “I was directed,” he says. “I remember, when I was 12, sketching out a plan to change the world, where my friends and I would all get various positions of power. I was thinking about being the director of the CIA! My theory was that wars are the biggest source of suffering and that they happen because of a lack of intelligence. I got put off that plan by reading a book called The Lawless State: The Crimes of the US Intelligence Agencies.“

At Stanford he met Thiel, who shared his intellectual intensity, if not a shred of his politics. “His friends told him, ‘You should meet this pinko commie,’” Hoffman says. “My friends told me, ‘You should meet this person to the right of Attila the Hun.’ We argued for eight hours the first time we met, but I thought, hey, this is fun.” The pair merged their election campaigns for student senate, and they both won, inaugurating a partnership that has now lasted for 25 years. (College is also when Hoffman began dating Michelle Yee, whom he married in 2004. “Most of my network in Silicon Valley hasn’t met her—she runs her own life,” Hoffman says. Children are not currently in their plans. “I work seven days,” he adds with a shrug. “I couldn’t do this if I had children.”)

After returning from Oxford, Hoffman camped out in his grandparents’ spare room and began reading about software entrepreneurship. A Stanford friend, Stefan Heck, introduced him to Jesse Ellenbogen, then at Apple Computer, and in 1994 Hoffman joined the user-experience group. Two years later he moved to Fujitsu in search of product-management experience. “I basically believe I can learn the skills to do most anything,” he explains, “but I’m paranoid that I’m not good enough.” By 1997 he was ready to start a business, so he used his network to assemble a team—engineers from Apple and Fujitsu, a Stanford classmate, the founder of GamePro magazine—before he had even come up with an idea. They decided to build a dating site called SocialNet.com and raised $1.7 million. It built a user base, but it never really got off the ground commercially: Hoffman chose, disastrously, to partner with local newspapers, some of which referred only a few customers a month to the site.

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