MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF. — Reid Hoffman is a big man in Silicon Valley. And, try as he might to remain in the background, his stature just keeps growing -- literally and figuratively.
It all began in the bleak aftermath of the dot-com bust, when despondent entrepreneurs and investors were throwing in the towel. Hoffman, never one to shrink from a challenge, rolled up his sleeves.
The PayPal Inc. veteran took some of the $10 million he made in 2002, when EBay Inc. bought the online payment service, and started financing some of the biggest success stories of today's consumer Internet industry: social network Facebook Inc., user-submitted news site Digg Inc., photo-sharing service Flickr and blogging-tools powerhouse Six Apart Ltd., to name a few. Companies in which he made early investments have sold for a collective $1.4 billion, and he has many more in the pipeline.
Hoffman, who created one of the first social networking sites, Socialnet, followed up with another patterned on his vast network of professional contacts. That 5-year-old company, LinkedIn Corp., landed a fourth round of venture funding last month that pegged its value at a heady $1 billion.
"Reid sees the next move on the Internet better than anyone in Silicon Valley," said former PayPal and LinkedIn executive Keith Rabois, now an executive at San Francisco Internet company Slide Inc.
Hoffman's vision of the Internet as a way to connect people, not just computers, played a crucial role in the medium's roaring comeback -- as did his willingness to bet his own money. By the time the rest of the world caught Internet fever in 2005 or so, Hoffman had already solidified an investment portfolio that most venture capitalists today would swap for theirs in a nanosecond.
"Reid's big," said a longtime friend, venture capitalist David Siminoff. "His ideas are big. His vision is big. His heart and brain are big. He's almost one of those mythic characters like Babe Ruth who, when he ate, he ate nine hamburgers; when he drank, he couldn't see straight; and when he hit the baseball, it would keep going until Monday."
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At the age of 40, with what he calls his "active but sedentary start-up lifestyle," Hoffman just keeps getting bigger: about 10 pounds a year, he estimates. (He doesn't step on scales. He simply says he weighs "too much.")
There isn't much about this Oxford-trained philosopher turned hyperintellectual entrepreneur that's svelte.
