A role-playing gamer co-founded LinkedIn and backed Silicon Valley's future
Reid Hoffman grew up hooked on tabletop role-playing games and edited for Chaosium, a game publisher close to his California home. He went on to co-found LinkedIn, one of the first business social networks, which Microsoft agreed to buy in 2016 for $26.2 billion, and became one of Silicon Valley's busiest angel investors.
Born in Palo Alto on 5 August 1967, Hoffman attended the Putney School in Vermont, where students farmed, then studied symbolic systems and cognitive science at Stanford, graduating in 1990. A Marshall Scholarship took him to Wolfson College, Oxford, for a master's in philosophy in 1993. He joined Apple in 1994 to work on eWorld, an early online service, and in 1997 started his first company, SocialNet.com, which paired people for dating and shared hobbies.
He sat on PayPal's board from its founding and joined full-time as chief operating officer in January 2000. In December 2002 he co-founded LinkedIn with former colleagues from SocialNet and Fujitsu; it went live on 5 May 2003, with his PayPal colleague Peter Thiel among the investors. By the 2011 stock market debut his stake was worth an estimated $2.34 billion, and in 2017 he took a seat on Microsoft's board.
As an angel investor he set up the first meeting between Mark Zuckerberg and Thiel, which led to Thiel's $500,000 stake in Facebook, and in 2009 he joined Greylock Partners. He led Airbnb's Series A round and backed firms from Aurora to Joby Aviation. With Ben Casnocha he also wrote The Start-Up of You, a 2012 bestseller urging readers to treat their careers as businesses of one.
Artificial intelligence became his main focus. He was among OpenAI's first donors in 2016 and helped it create a capped-profit subsidiary, then left its board in March 2023 to avoid conflicts of interest. Inflection AI, co-founded with DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, was announced in March 2022, and in January 2025 he launched Manas AI, a drug discovery start-up, with cancer researcher Siddhartha Mukherjee. He has rejected calls to pause advanced AI work, arguing instead for faster progress.
Source: Reid Hoffman
