Reid Hoffman

Reid Garrett Hoffman was born in Palo Alto, California, in 1967 and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He studied Symbolic Systems at Stanford University, then earned a master's degree in philosophy at Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar. He began his technology career in the late 1990s, and by 2000 had joined PayPal, where he served as chief operating officer and was part of the founding team, one of the group of founders and investors later known as the "PayPal Mafia." In December 2002, Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn, which launched the following spring and grew into the world's largest professional network. He led the company as chief executive and later executive chairman, and in 2016 LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft for roughly 26.2 billion dollars. Hoffman joined the Microsoft board the following year. Alongside LinkedIn, he became one of the most active early-stage technology investors of his generation, backing Facebook, Airbnb, and many others. In 2009, Hoffman became a partner at Greylock Partners, where he focuses on early-stage companies with strong network effects. Over the following years he also became a prolific author, distilling what he had learned into a series of influential books: The Startup of You on career strategy, The Alliance on the modern employer-employee relationship, and Blitzscaling, the framework he coined for building massively valuable companies at speed. He founded and hosts the award-winning podcast Masters of Scale, and co-hosts Possible. Since 2022, Hoffman has been one of the most prominent builders and voices in artificial intelligence. He co-founded Inflection AI with Mustafa Suleyman, served on the board of OpenAI before stepping down in 2023, and in early 2025 co-founded Manas AI, a drug-discovery company applying AI to aggressive cancers. In January 2025 he published Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future, an instant New York Times bestseller making the optimist's case for AI, and in 2025 he was named a Visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics. Today Hoffman splits his time between investing at Greylock, building and advising AI companies, writing, and hosting his podcasts. On stage, he brings a rare combination: a founder who has built defining companies, an investor who has backed the platforms that shaped the internet, and an author whose current work is a clear-eyed guide to the AI era.