![]() John Lilly, who works with Hoffman in his current role as an investor at Greylock Partners, told “The Brave Ones” that LinkedIn is “a bit like putting (Hoffman’s) brain online and enabling everybody to work that way.” I'll take six weeks off and then I'll come back and I'll start the company that I'd been thinking about, LinkedIn, and I'll invest in a bunch of other interesting companies.’” We're doing enterprise software … And I went, ‘They're wrong. “It was like, ‘OK, the consumer internet's done. “I looked around and I realized Silicon Valley had gone crazy, that everyone had thought the consumer internet was over,” he said. PayPal’s alumni include Elon Musk, founder of X.com, which bought the company that became PayPal in 1999, Steve Chen, one of YouTube’s founders and Yishan Wong, who went on to be CEO of Reddit.Īfter PayPal was sold to eBay in a $1.5 billion deal in 2002, Hoffman planned to take a year off. “There was a whole set of fires at PayPal where if you didn't solve them, (the) value of the company is zero, out of business.”. Persuade the federal government that it's okay that we're not a bank.’” Make sure eBay doesn't drive us off of service. “I very quickly became Thiel's ‘firefighter in chief,’ which was: ‘I want you to solve this problem, I want you to solve this problem, I want you to solve this problem. This is the company that later became known as PayPal.”Īs the company grew, they needed a chief operating officer, so Hoffman stepped off the board. “And they said, ‘We had this great idea, it's encryption on mobile phones.’ And I say, ‘Well, that's a terrible idea, but you're a very good friend of mine, so I'll come help you with this.’ And so I join the board. ![]() While running SocialNet, Hoffman got a call from Peter Thiel, a friend from Stanford, to say that he and computer science graduate Max Levchin were starting a company and wanted his input. In 1985, he initially decided to study structured liberal education at Stanford University, a course covering philosophy, literature, art and history, but then realized a new major called symbolic systems would better suit him. And I didn't really realize that those were philosophical questions until, maybe, I got to college,” he said. “I didn't realize it was actually philosophy, it was always a question of who are we and who should we become and what is the meaning of life. Hoffman’s interest in philosophy grew over time. “Boarding schools are a lot like ‘Lord of the Flies’ … I learned a lot about how do I think about human nature, conflict between people … The first year of boarding school was probably one of the hardest years of my life, but also I think, it was one of my most instructive.” “With both my parents being lawyers … from a very early age whenever I wanted something, I’d have to make a case.” They let him go based on the school’s mix of academic studies and work experience.īut putting a bunch of young people in a semi-supervised place was challenging, Hoffman said. “It was, drive oxen through the woods, and you know, kind of do blacksmithing and woodworking and all these things I’d never had experience with before.” He applied and got in without his parents knowing but had to push them to let him go, given the school was so far from the family home in Berkeley, California. “You actually have to have a flexible and adaptive strategy because not everything is controllable.”Īnother fascination was where he should study, and Hoffman was keen on the Putney School in Vermont, where students mix academic classes with working jobs such as oven stoker and looking after the school’s sheep. Random outcomes based on the roll of a dice also influenced him. Personal Loans for 670 Credit Score or Lower ![]() Personal Loans for 580 Credit Score or Lower Best Debt Consolidation Loans for Bad Credit ![]()
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