LinkedIn changed two things at once: how people build careers, and how companies find the people to hire. Reid Hoffman co-founded it, ran it for years, and sold it to Microsoft in one of the largest technology acquisitions of its time.

Then he became the person other founders call. Early cheques and board seats across a striking run of successful startups made him one of the best-connected figures in Silicon Valley, which in that ecosystem is its own form of capital.

He treats networks as the fundamental unit of the modern economy — of careers, companies and ideas alike.

He writes, too, and the ideas travel. Blitzscaling — grow recklessly fast and fix the damage later — became the operating manual for a whole generation of startups, for better and frequently for worse.

Lately the attention has gone to artificial intelligence: new ventures co-founded, and a consistent public argument that these systems should augment people rather than replace them. Building, investing, and shaping how the industry talks about itself — he does all three at once, which is rarer than it sounds.

Hoffman studied symbolic systems at Stanford and then philosophy at Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, planning an academic career before deciding software could reach more people. He worked at Apple and Fujitsu, founded an early social site called SocialNet, and then joined PayPal's board and became its executive vice-president, part of the group later known as the PayPal Mafia.

LinkedIn launched in 2003, listed in 2011 and was bought by Microsoft in 2016 for about 26.2 billion dollars, after which Hoffman joined Microsoft's board. A partner at Greylock since 2009, he has backed companies including Airbnb, and he was an early investor in Facebook. He also sat on OpenAI's board until 2023.

In 2022 he co-founded Inflection AI with Mustafa Suleyman, whose team moved to Microsoft in 2024, and he set out his optimistic case for AI in the 2025 book Superagency. He hosts the podcast Masters of Scale and is one of the largest donors to Democratic causes in the United States.