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.”
Read more about this topic: Reid Hoffman
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or career:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Early education can only promise to help make the third and fourth and fifth years of life good ones. It cannot insure without fail that any tomorrow will be successful. Nothing “fixes” a child for life, no matter what happens next. But exciting, pleasing early experiences are seldom sloughed off. They go with the child, on into first grade, on into the child’s long life ahead.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“We attempt to remember our collective American childhood, the way it was, but what we often remember is a combination of real past, pieces reshaped by bitterness and love, and, of course, the video past—the portrayals of family life on such television programs as “Leave it to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best” and all the rest.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)