Reid Hoffman

Reid Hoffman is a world-renowned American internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist, podcaster, and bestselling author who has served as a foundational architect of the modern social web and the contemporary artificial intelligence landscape. Graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University and earning a Master of Studies in Philosophy from the University of Oxford as a prestigious Marshall Scholar, Hoffman initially balanced academic philosophy with corporate technology before emerging as an early employee at PayPal and a core member of the influential "PayPal Mafia." He solidified his status as a titan of global industry by co-founding LinkedIn in 2003, expanding the professional networking platform to hundreds of millions of members before orchestrating its landmark acquisition by Microsoft, where he continues to serve as a member of the board of directors. Joining Greylock Partners in 2009, he built a legendary venture investing track record with early stakes in epochal giants like Facebook, Airbnb, and OpenAI. An immensely prolific author and media node, Hoffman has written a series of highly influential business and technology playbooks, including the career manual The Start-Up of You, the talent management strategy The Alliance, the scale-up framework Blitzscaling, and his audio-native compilation Masters of Scale, while simultaneously hosting the award-winning podcasts Masters of Scale and Possible. Seamlessly transitioning into the vanguard of modern technology, he co-founded the conversational AI studio Inflection AI and co-authored the pioneering human-AI travelogue Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI. Moving aggressively through 2025 and into 2026, Hoffman has further consolidated his leadership in applied technology by co-founding Manas AI, a computational platform designed to compress drug discovery timelines for cancer therapeutics, while actively promoting his latest collaborative masterwork, Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future.