Amanda Week 4 topic

For week 4, I looked up Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn. I have posted the contents of my paper for discussion.

I decided to look up Reid Hoffman. He co-founded LinkedIn in 2003. LinkedIn has more than 63 million members in 200 countries around the world. He led LinkedIn through its first four years and also to its profitability as Chief Executive Officer. Prior to LinkedIn, he was executive vice president for PayPal where he was also a founding member. He was instrumental in Ebay’s acquisition of PayPal and was responsible for the partnerships with Intuit, Visa, Mastercard and Wells Fargo. Currently he observes on the board of Gowalla and Swipely and is also a director at Zynga, Mozilla Corp., Six Apart, Shopkick, and Kiva.org. He is an angel investor in multiple influential Internet companies that include Dig, Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, Ning, Six Apart and Zynga. He also went through a period of writing articles speaking about how startup companies can help bail us out of the current recession. For one of the articles, he gives his “Rule of Three for Investing” and states that he hopes it helps someone out there to be successful. He calls himself a serial investor and with all of the companies he is currently invested in, I would say that is a pretty good name for himself.

I posted this so that other's could see. I just think it is amazing how much he is involved in now whether he is an investor or directly involved in the company. It was also very interesting to read that he is also a co-founder for Facebook. I guess it's a small world when it comes to niche technology markets!

http://www.greylock.com/team/team/43/
http://techcrunch.com/2009/04/19/reid-hoffman-my-rule-of-three-for-investing/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erLT4wttTnc