Reid Hoffman

Photograph by Brigitte Sire

THE CONNECTOR | Hoffman (pictured in his Silicon Valley office) is a newly minted billionaire, courtesy of his LinkedIn IPO.

Reid Hoffman founded his first social site, called SocialNet, before Mark Zuckerberg had even started high school and has been in the vanguard of the social-media movement ever since. The 44-year-old venture capitalist, known as "the most connected person in Silicon Valley," has invested in some 114 tech startups since 1995, including juggernauts like Facebook, Flickr, Groupon and Zynga, both on his own and as a partner in the venture firm Greylock Partners. One of his earliest strikes was PayPal, where he served on the executive team and cashed out millions when it was bought by eBay in 2002. He also co-founded the professional networking site LinkedIn, which has over 100 million users and a market cap of $8 billion thanks to its recent red-hot IPO.

Hoffman is a self-diagnosed "CrackBerry" addict (five smartphones, two Macs, a PC, an iPad and an Android Tablet) who rarely vacations, spending most weekends fielding ideas from young entrepreneurs. He believes social networking will remain the dominant platform on which to build new apps and services and looking ahead (yes, Web 3.0 is already being discussed) sees data—especially personal data derived from people's activities online—as fueling the next boom. Privacy, he claims, is primarily an issue with old people.

--By Peter Newcomb

“Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins. Facebook is ego. Zynga is sloth. LinkedIn is greed.”

Silicon Valley has two speeds: full speed ahead and not going anywhere. Now we're in full-forward motion. There is a lot of interest and a lot of capital out here. And there are a lot of companies being created. When you have a thousand companies getting started, ma