Reid Hoffman has been called the most connected person in all of Silicon Valley. Exec spoke to him about Web 2.0 and how it transforms lives.
By John O’Hanlon
Reid Hoffman is best known these days as the founder and CEO of LinkedIn, the fast-growing social network for professional people, which has now topped 15 million users worldwide and therefore ranks up there with Facebook and MySpace as one of the ‘viral’ Web 2.0 spaces where senior managers and highly skilled people, many of them employed in the world of technology, can connect – and often find jobs.
As a Marshall Scholar at Wolfson College Oxford, Reid studied philosophy, and it was there that he formulated his life goals. “I would describe myself as having two motivations, and they are related. One is to change the world, and the other is to have the freedom to do so.” The first of these is probably shared by every idealistic young person, the second, though, differentiates the effective thinker. What he meant when he decided to have this freedom was: “… to make enough money not to require a salary, because then you have the freedom to spend your days the way you prefer to spend them - for me that was in trying to figure out how, in a scalable way, to make society a better place.”
There, I’d say, speaks a true idealist, and a pragmatist as well, a potent combination as he has since proved. The internet with its speed, flexibility and universality gave him the opportunity he needed, and the fact that he was born in Stanford and attended his local university put him in the right place at the right time to pursue his “modest goal - to create massive discontinuous value that changes millions of people’s lives, not just in an evolutionary but in a transformative way.”
Freedom through wealth
While many people also share the desire to be financially independent, this is usually a goal in itself. Reid makes it clear that for him it was a means to an end. He says that he sees a role for ‘public intellectuals’ in helping people reflect on who they are as individuals, and who they ought to be; where we are as a society and where we should be. “That is one of the zones that I decided I wanted to play in. To do that in an effective way I decided that for me that meant that I have to be independent of a salary.”
The route to this independence, he could see, was starting up and growing companies. After working for a while at Apple and Fujitsu he started his first company SocialNet.com, a dating site. He had also started to participate as a board member on other startups, one of which was the global online payment company PayPal. A longtime friend of its co-founder Peter Thiel, another Stanford philosopher, Reid had been invited to help…
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