Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn Has Become the Go-To Guy of Tech

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.

THEY come for his money. They come for his advice. They come — duh — for his connections.

But mostly they come, with all the élan of Dorothy on her way to Oz, for a chance at some face time with Reid G. Hoffman, the start-up whisperer of Silicon Valley.

Mr. Hoffman made his name and fortune as the co-founder of LinkedIn, the social network that went public five months ago. But he has also emerged as something else — — as the man whom Internet entrepreneurs call when they dream of becoming the next, well, Reid Hoffman.

Want to brainstorm about new technology? Build a business? Raise a cool million — or billion? Mr. Hoffman is a man to see. If he can’t help, he probably knows someone who can. He is, as you might expect, a seriously linked-in guy.

On this particular day in July, a rising entrepreneur named Brian Chesky has come calling. Mr. Chesky, the co-founder of Airbnb, an online service that matches people looking for vacation rentals with those with rooms to rent, wants some pointers about expanding into China.

Mr. Hoffman, 44, leans back in his chair. Then he lets fly: Airbnb will need a team in China, a robust Chinese-language platform, Web filters to keep Beijing happy, he says. It might also need a joint venture partner. He rattles off a few names.

It’s noon, and this is the third of nine meetings that Mr. Hoffman has scheduled today. He is trying not to sneak a peek at his smartphone — or, rather, his four smartphones. He fields upward of 400 e-mails a day, not counting all the stuff that streams in via Facebook, Twitter and, naturally, LinkedIn, where he had 2,536 connections at last count.

These days, Mr. Hoffman finds himself, a bit to his own surprise, at the center of the social media universe. He has a second full-time job as a partner at Greylock, the venture capital firm. He serves on the boards of eight companies, including Zynga, the hottest game company on the Web, and Mozilla, of Firefox fame. He is also involved in three nonprofits.

Oh, and there’s that little company called LinkedIn, which, as of Friday, was worth about $7.9 billion in the stock market. Amid all the meetings and messages and tweets, Mr. Hoffman, the executive chairman, must persuade Wall Street that LinkedIn will prosper and that its lofty valuation is not just another sign of Internet mania.

For the moment, Mr. Hoffman seems to give off a golden aura, at least to many in Silicon Valley. Everyone wants a piece of him.

“He’s the first stop for every hot deal,” says David Siminoff, a technology investor.

Gina Bianchini, the founder of the Internet start-ups Ning and Mightybell, says: “He’s like an early warning system for something great in Silicon Valley.”

Cyriac Roeding, the founder of Shopkick, a mobile shopping app that has been bankrolled by Greylock, adds: “I’ve never made a significant move, decision, without consulting him.”

Hearing Mr. Hoffman wax philosophical about technology, it’s easy to understand why so many here seem to view him as something of a yoda. When he talks about “scale” — Internet-speak for having enough people use a network to make the network actually useful — he often invokes Archimedes, the great mathematician and inventor in ancient Greece.

According to lore, Archimedes created a device with a revolving screw-shaped blade to pump water against gravity: the Archimedes screw. Mr. Hoffman urges his followers to find their own levers and devices to encourage people to adopt their technologies. Entrepreneurs, he says, often spend too much time creating products and too little figuring out how to get people to use them.

Archimedes is reputed to have said that, given a lever big enough and a place to stand, he could move the world.

“It’s not really quite true, once you understand Newtonian physics, but it is an accurate metaphor,” Mr. Hoffman says.  “Build a compact piece of work with the right leverage, and you can solve a very big problem.”

LONG before LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman was just another kid in California obsessed with playing games. He grew up in Berkeley, bright and precocious, despite B’s and C’s in middle school. His father, William Hoffman, a real estate lawyer, recalls that his son always showed remarkable focus.

When Reid was 5, for instance, his father read to him from “The Lord of the Rings” before bed.

“Apparently, I wasn’t reading fast enough,” William Hoffman recalls. “Whenever I picked up the book, the bookmark moved further and further ahead.”

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