Early Life and Career
Hoffman was born in Stanford, California, the son of Deanna Ruth Rutter and William Parker Hoffman, Jr., and grew up in Berkeley, California. His paternal great-great-great-grandfather was Presbyterian minister and Indiana University president pro tempore Theophilus Adam Wylie. He attended high school at The Putney School, where he farmed maple syrup, drove oxen and studied epistemology. He graduated from Stanford University in 1990 (where he won both a Marshall Scholarship and a Dinkelspiel Award) with a B.S. in Symbolic Systems and Cognitive Science. He went on to earn an M.A. in philosophy from Oxford University in 1993.
Hoffman says that in college he formed a conviction that he wanted to try to impact the world at scale. He saw academia as an opportunity to make an "impact", but later realized that an entrepreneurial career would provide him with a larger platform. "When I graduated from Stanford my plan was to become a professor and public intellectual. That is not about quoting Kant. It's about holding up a lens to society and asking 'who are we?' and 'who should we be, as individuals and a society?' But I realised academics write books that 50 or 60 people read and I wanted more impact."
With that in mind, Hoffman pursued a career in business and entrepreneurship. Hoffman joined Apple Computer in 1994, where he worked on eWorld, an early attempt at creating a social network. eWorld was acquired by AOL in 1996. Hoffman later worked at Fujitsu before co-founding his first company, SocialNet.com in 1997. It focused “on online dating and matching up people with similar interests, like golfers who were looking for partners in their neighborhood.” Peter Thiel has said SocialNet.com was “literally an idea before its time. It was a social network 7 or 8 years before that became a trend.”
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