Reid Hoffman Explains Putting His Angel Days Behind Him
LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman may be the busiest man in Silicon Valley. Alhough he made former Yahoo exec Jeff Weiner the CEO of his company last June, his role as executive board chairman is very much a full-time gig. Yet Hoffman now has a second job. Last November, he became a partner at Greylock Partners, which led LinkedIn’s Series B round. It’s no wonder Hoffman was recruited into venture capital. He's led an astonishingly successful career as an angel investor throughout the past decade. Among his dozens of investments, he bought stakes in Flickr, IronPort Systems and Last.fm -- sold to Yahoo for $35 million, to Cisco for $830 million and to CBS for $280 million, respectively. Hoffman, who typically invested between $25,000 and $75,000, also has the hottest portfolio on the planet right now. Not only does he presumably have a sizable chunk of LinkedIn -- expected to have a multibillion dollar IPO in the next couple of years --but he also owns pieces of Zynga; Facebook (which received its first check from Hoffman); and, through the sale of his portfolio company Mixer Labs, Twitter. Ultimately, the question isn't why Greylock pursued Hoffman; it's why he said yes.
