11/2/2023 0 Comments Hoffman paypal![]() ![]() ![]() “It was like, ‘OK, anyone got morphine?’”Īnd we talk about LinkedIn’s life story: Not quite as cool as Friendster, not quite as cool as MySpace, not quite as cool as Facebook… and yet, it became a $26 billion homerun. “It wasn’t like we rolled in, and it was like ‘Oh, that was fun and easy,’” he says. Hoffman says the IPO was a relief more than a celebration. ![]() We talk about how hardfought the success at PayPal was, and the explosive characters building that company at the very peak of the dot com bubble. In this 2012 interview we talked about the company he doesn’t typically get asked about: Socialnet, his failure. Roughly a decade later, that insight made him a billionaire.īut success was never “easy” for Hoffman. He put off his year-long trip around the world, started LinkedIn and started investing in every interesting thing he could find. You spend your life as an entrepreneur and investor trying to find a time you can be both contrarian and right. He was planning on taking a vacation after PayPal sold to eBay, when he noticed everyone else had moved on to cleantech and other areas. Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel and a lot of the early Web 2.0 investors have all admitted there was at least a time they went bearish… but not Hoffman. And Hoffman is the only person I’m aware of who never stopped believing it. It all came from one insight: The consumer Internet wasn’t over after the dot com crash. He was the most prolific early investor backing nearly every major hit that would go on to become public except Twitter, and he created the second largest company to come out of the social media wave, LinkedIn. Almost nobody rode the “Web 2.0” wave better than Reid Hoffman. ![]()
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