Reid Garrett Hoffman: Net Worth, Money and More
Net Worth: $3.4 Billion
profession: Investor and Entrepreneur
You should probably be thanking this man as because of him today you are able to use the successful site that has helped many people to remain connected- LinkedIn. Yes! This article is about Reid Garrett Hoffman. He was born on 5th August in the year 1967 and since this man has invested in many start-up ventures which have proved to be successful for him. If you are searching for job opportunity and wants to make business connection use the site founded by Reid. People call him social networking guru as he has invested in almost every social networking site you must have heard about. A successful investor, executive at PayPal, founder as well as CEO of LinkedIn and an entrepreneur he is counted as one of the richest men on the earth.
JOURNEY TO BECOMING THE SOCIAL NETWORKING GURU
Born in Stanford in California, Reid is raised in Berkeley in California by father, William Parker Hoffman and mother, Deanna Ruth Rutter. He did his high schooling from The Putney School. During his high school days he farmed maple syrup, studied for epistemology and drove oxen. He did BS in “Symbolic Systems and Cognitive Science from Stanford University in the year 1990. During his days at Stanford he got Dinkelspiel Award and also received the Marshall Scholarship. In the year 1993 he went to Wolfson College to do his M.A. in philosophy.
Reid wanted to create impact on the society and he realised that career in teaching or bering a professor won’t help him to achieve his goal. So finally with that goal in mind, in the year 1994, he joined Apple Computer. After working on eWorld and Fujitsu he founded his own company in the year 1997 called SocialNet.com.
NET WORTH
Reid is known to be one of the most triumphant angle investor and through these investments he has managed to earn a net worth of 3.4 billion US dollars. He owns major amount of his wealth to his social networking site LinkedIn which when started helped him to make a profit of around 1.7 billion US dollars. Apart from this big slice of personal share, he also got a small piece from the share Greylock Partners have in dot.com business. The day the site went public, it has a net worth of 4.3 billion uS dollar which is said to be the highest market price for any networking venture. Since then the shares of his company has multiplied six times. Apart from this, his other sources of income are the investments he has made in different networking companies which are mentioned below:
Investments
People call Reid one of the most productive and victorious investor one might have seen in past few decades. According to the CEO of SurveyMonkey, David Goldberg Reid “is the person you want to talk to when you are starting a company”. Reid has till date made investment in around 80 start-ups. Reid in the year 2010 joined Greylock Partners and currently he is running their 20 million US dollars seed Fund.
It is said that it was Reid who helped Mark ZUckerberg to broker his first investment in the famous social networking site- Facebook. He himself made an investment of $40,000.
Zynga
In the first round of funding in the Zynga company, Reid made a personal investment as well as he joined the director of boards that time. He owns a six degree patent in the company that has a market cxapitalisation of around 2.48 billion along with the CEO of the company, Mark Pincus.
Apart from investing in these companies, he has also invested in Flicker, Care.vom, SixApart, Tagged, Digg, Knewton, Last.fm and many more. Hoffman is among the board members in many public as well as private companies.
SUCCESS CREDITS
PayPal
Reid was the member of founding directors of the electronic money transmission site called PayPal. In the year 2000 after leaving SocialNet he became the COO of PayPal. He controlled over the external relationship the company had, business development, and legal and government issues. In the year 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for 1.5 billion US dollars.
Alongwith his collegue from SocialNet and Fujitsu, Reid founded LinedIn in the year 2002. It was launched in the year 2003 and it was the first buiseness focused online site. It has around 187 million users all around the globe as of the year 2012. According to the reports of 2011, he owns a stake worth 2.34 billion US dollars in the company which does not include the benefits he has for being the partner of Greylock Partners.
HONOURS AND REWARDS
- In the year 2010, he was on the no. 17 in the list of top 100 most creative people in business on the list of Fast Company.
- In the year 2012, Reid was ranked no. 3 in the list of “100 most significant people in digital world” in the list released by “Newsweek and The Daily Beast”.
- In the year 2012, he was ranked on the third position on the list of Top tech Investor by released by Forbes.
- In the year 2012, for his work and contribution in advancement of tech industry he was given David Packard Medal of Achievement by Tech America.
