Reid Hoffman

Reid Hoffman is one of those Silicon Valley figures who actually earned the "PayPal Mafia" reputation — he was at PayPal before co-founding LinkedIn, which sounds like a fun little side project until you realize it became the dominant professional network on the planet and sold to Microsoft for $26 billion in 2016. What I find genuinely interesting about Hoffman is that he's not just a money guy: he studied symbolic systems at Stanford and philosophy at Oxford, and he never stopped thinking seriously about networks, society, and what technology does to people. His podcast "Masters of Scale" is better than it has any right to be, and his books on blitzscaling gave a real name and framework to how startups actually grow fast. A CBE from the British government is an odd honor for a California tech billionaire, but honestly, LinkedIn reaching a billion users kind of justifies it.

This take was written by generative AI, one per person, from publicly reported facts (editorial policy). It is a reading of the record, not reporting.

Name (English)

Reid Hoffman

Name (Japanese)

リード・ギャレット・ホフマン

Reading

りーど・ぎゃれっと・ほふまん

Born

August 5, 1967 (age 59)

Origin

Stanford, California, United States

Occupation

entrepreneur / investor / writer / businessperson / podcaster

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Leo / Goat

University

Stanford University

Awards & achievements

• Marshall Scholarship
• Commander of the Order of the British Empire

• Official sitehttps://reidhoffman.org/
• Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/reidhoffman/
• Xhttps://x.com/reidhoffman
• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid%20Hoffman
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%AA%E3%83%BC%E3%83%89%E3%83%BB%E3%82%AE%E3%83%A3%E3%83%AC%E3%83%83%E3%83%88%E3%83%BB%E3%83%9B%E3%83%95%E3%83%9E%E3%83%B3
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q211098

Tags

• California
• entrepreneur
• investor
• writer

Last updated

October 18, 2026

Only publicly available facts are listed; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. Base data was compiled from Wikidata from June 2026 onward; ages are recalculated daily and deaths are checked against Wikidata on an ongoing basis. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.