LinkedIn: Reid Hoffman

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 15 January 2018

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In the early 1990s, Reid Hoffman had a vision for the future of the Internet: people would connect through social networks using their real names, and their online lives would be completely merged with their real ones. After several early attempts, he co-founded LinkedIn – a social network focused on jobs and careers. In 2016, the company sold to Microsoft for $26 billion dollars, helping make Hoffman one of the wealthiest and most influential figures in Silicon Valley. PLUS for our postscript "How You Built That," how Danica Lause turned a knitting hobby into Peekaboos Ponytail hats, knit caps with strategically placed holes for a ponytail or bun. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.0	New Year's is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.
0:13.0	As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.
0:17.0	So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.
0:24.0	Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.
0:27.0	The folks who had been operating as VCs on the board were kind of operating in the classic kind of heavy handed way that a lot of VCs do.
0:37.0	The way that I learned that I was no longer going to be a board member was that the financing paperwork shut up, and that was just what was in the financing paperwork.
0:45.0	So I was like, okay, you guys are just essentially throwing me off the board, but now I just feel like I'm an employee, not a co-founder, not a director.
0:54.0	But it was like, look, I have a intense belief in myself. I believe I can go build something that I will.
1:00.0	Right, so I'm just going to go do that.
1:08.0	From NPR, it's how I built this.
1:10.0	A show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
1:17.0	I'm Guy Ross, and on today's show, how Reed Hoffman turned his obsession with social networking into the billion dollar company LinkedIn, and how he went on to become one of the most powerful investors in Silicon Valley.
1:37.0	You know how every actor is within six degrees of Kevin Bacon?
1:41.0	You can actually check this out. There's a website called the Oracle of Bacon.org. Here, let me show you.
1:48.0	So I'm going to try and connect Kevin Bacon with Dwayne the Rock Johnson.
1:55.0	And voila, Dwayne Johnson was in the game plan with Daryl Wooten, who was in Black Mass with Kevin Bacon. That is just two degrees of separation.
2:06.0	So if Silicon Valley was looking for its own Kevin Bacon, you could make a pretty strong case for Reed Hoffman.
2:13.0	Reed's buddies make up the who's who of Internet fame, people like Mark Andreessen, who created Netscape and Jerry Yang of Yahoo.
2:21.0	He knew Elon Musk and Chad Hurley before anyone would take their calls.
2:25.0	And what's amazing about his personal network is how it's connected to his thinking about networks in general, about social interactions.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Guy Raz | Wondery, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Guy Raz | Wondery and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.