Business card? He has your profile

Hoffman returned to Silicon Valley to pursue his calling as a "public intellectual" in a different way. He built up his resume at such large companies as Apple Inc. and Fujitsu Software Corp., then started one of his own, Socialnet.com, in 1997, years before the social networking boom. Too far ahead of its time, the company was ultimately sold. But it still captured Hoffman's vision of the Internet "as a place for massively social applications" and cemented his reputation as an original thinker.

"Reid's got wax wings and flirts with the sun a lot," his friend Siminoff said. "He likes to take risks, to do things no one else thinks can be done."

After Socialnet, Hoffman joined a college chum, PayPal CEO Peter Thiel (the two met as classmates in a sophomore philosophy course), on the PayPal board. Thiel soon persuaded Hoffman to sign on as an executive in charge of the company's challenging relationships with EBay, financial institutions and government regulators.

After EBay bought the company, many PayPal executives scattered. Thiel started a hedge fund and former top executive David Sacks headed to Los Angeles to make movies. But Hoffman doubled down, using his PayPal payout to finance the dreams of young entrepreneurs as well as his own.

Hoffman's style of investing is "almost an extension of his Democratic convictions," like his support of Sen. Barack Obama's presidential candidacy, Levchin said. "He invests in things that need nurturing at a very early stage."

It proved to be a winning strategy. Hoffman did miss out on some biggies. For example, he gave office space but no money to YouTube, the video site that Google Inc. bought for $1.65 billion.

But one of his biggest scores may be coming. Hoffman was one of the earliest investors in Facebook, which landed a $15-billion valuation during its recent funding round and is moving toward an initial public stock offering in the next few years.

The irony for Silicon Valley's top social networker? He doesn't see himself as one. With his overloaded life, Hoffman has no time to be social.

"A networker likes to meet people. I don't," he said. "I like accomplishing things in the world. You meet people when you want to accomplish something."

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jessica.guynn@latimes.com

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Quite a resume

Name: Reid Hoffman

Age: 40

Title: Founder, chairman and president of products at LinkedIn, a professional networking website

Education: Bachelor's degree in symbolic systems, Stanford University; master's in philosophy, Oxford University

Career: Former executive vice president and board member of PayPal Inc.; co-founder, board member and vice president of products at Socialnet.com; director of product management and development at Fujitsu Software Corp.; senior user experience architect at Apple Inc.

Investments: Social networking sites Facebook, Ning and Tagged; blogging software company Six Apart; blog search engine Technorati; social news site Digg, among others

Corporate boards: Kiva.org, Tagged, Mozilla Corp., Vendio, Grassroots, Six Apart, Lulan

Pastimes: Playing Settlers of Catan, a German board game; watching movies on Blu-ray DVDs; buying and reading books from Amazon.com

Source: Times research