Keen on Reid Hoffman

If there is a father of social media in Silicon Valley, it may be Reid Hoffman, the Stanford and Oxford educated entrepreneur best known for co-founding LinkedIn in December 2002. Hoffman, currently the executive chairman of LinkedIn and a partner in the venture firm of Greylock Partners, saw the future before almost anyone else.

Grasping the Internet’s shift from a platform for data to one for people, Hoffman not only started the very first contemporary social media business back in 1997 – a dating service called SocialNet, but also was an angel investor in Friendster, Facebook and Zynga as well as the former CEO of LinkedIn, the 78 million member strong business social network which is currently adding a million new members every 10 days. Indeed, back in 2003 Hoffman – in partnership with his friend Mark Pincus, the founder of Zynga – paid $700,000 in an auction for an intellectual patent on social networking, thereby making him, in a sense, the owner of the idea of social media itself....