Hoffman: Social networking sites make Silicon Valley "the King of Connections"

Hoffman (Sina Tech map) The seemingly slovenly Stanford has made several of the most important internet companies in the capital markets in recent years-whether it was LinkedIn, which he founded 10 years ago, or the social-game developers who later invested in Zynga and Facebook Shu Shi Hoffman's investment style is a wide net. At present, there are more than 80 IT industry projects known to the outside world. Some may think it's a bit of a business as a cabbage, but if you look closely at Hoffman's investment, he will find that he does have the ability to find diamonds in the sand heap. The 45-Year-old Hoffman (Reid Hoffman) is known as Silicon Valley's "King of Connections". Although not handsome, but for many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, he is a hall-level figure. If you look at it in terms of shape, it's a "heavyweight".　　Silicon Valley's peers say he is a rugged waist and often has disheveled hair, and his clothes are not on the table even in Silicon Valley standards. Outsiders seem to find it hard to hook up with a fat, good-natured guy like Hoffman, and those who are in suits and shrewd ventures, but Hoffman does what professional investors can't.　　The seemingly slovenly, birthdays Stanford has made several of the most important internet companies in the capital markets in recent years-whether it was LinkedIn, which he founded 10 years ago, or the social-game developers who later invested in Zynga and Facebook. Make the first bucket of gold from PayPal on the Forbes 2012 list of best performers, 39% have at least one degree from Stanford University, while Stanford startups accounted for 60% of Silicon Valley revenues in 1988 and 1996. Silicon Valley, Stanford, entrepreneurship and VCs are inextricably intertwined.　　And Hoffman merges the four.　　When he first walked out of the school, he went to Apple Computer and Fujitsu of Japan to do product management, and then he co-organized his first company,--socialnet.com, an online dating and dating website. While operating socialnet, Hoffman also served as a board member of PayPal, an electronic money trading platform operator. One of PayPal's founders, Peter Thiel, is Hoffman's college classmate, two like-minded but Thiel personalities.　　Thiel is a liberal, and in his eyes Hoffman is more like a sociologist. Hoffman's success in Socialnet is far less fascinating than the company he was working part-time at. In any case, Hoffman did use his socialnet (social relations) and finally joined PayPal.　　When the latter was bought for 1.5 billion dollars by ebay in 2002, he had risen to the executive vice president of PayPal. PayPal was listed in 2002, and Hoffman shook his body to become thousandMillionaire.　　When the New York Times interviewed Hoffman, he himself said that after getting the first bucket of gold, he bought a Ferrari sports car, he originally wanted to buy an Audi, but finally only bought a Acura (Acura), put most of the money into Silicon Valley's first solar panel company Nanosolar. "I will consider the value of the money," he said. If I had only 75,000 dollars, would I buy a luxury car or participate in changing the world? "The big Hoffman is still driving his green Acura, and Nanosolar has grown into a billions of dollar business."　　Whether Hoffman has the ability to change the world is a bad idea, but his vision of venture capital is really unique. After LinkedIn's success in buying PayPal on ebay, Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn with others, the first online social network in the business world, which was launched in 2003.　　He served as CEO before he became the chairman and president of LinkedIn in 2007. Unlike the Facebook that Hoffman later invested in, LinkedIn is a social-networking company for business customers. It primarily allows registered users to maintain contacts that they know and trust in business contacts, in the words of Chinese, "networks" or "connections" (50x15).　　Users can invite people he knows to become "relationship circles". LinkedIn, with its remarkable "communicative" capabilities, has more than 135 million users in more than 200 countries in less than 10. Now, on average, a new member is joining LinkedIn every second. Overseas analysts classify it as a site for job creation and networking, with both consumers and business users.　　Because it offers a "hunting solution", the company that hires talent is paired with a job seeker, so it can earn a related service charge. Industry analysts believe that LinkedIn's profit model is more like "Software as a Service" (Software-as-a-service), which provides software based on customer demand, and charges according to service functions and content, unlike Facebook and other consumer-focused social networking sites.　　From a functional perspective, it is similar to the customer management software vendor Salesforce, sales of online human resources management software successfactors or to provide online accounting program NetSuite. In short, LinkedIn can rely not only on advertising revenue and online services, but also on many other ways to make money. In 2010, for example, 56% of LinkedIn's revenue came from active search for clients, and only 44% of the revenue came from online sales. This compares with LinkedIn and Facebook, where users spend 18 minutes a month on the former and 6.4 hours in the second. But if from the incomeLook, the results are very different--linkedin average of 1.3 dollars from each user, and Facebook only 6.2 cents from the user, a full difference of 20 times times. Under the impetus of international investment banks such as Merrill Lynch, LinkedIn finally landed on the New York Stock Exchange on May 19, 2011, successfully raising 350 million of dollars to become the first large social networking site to be listed. LinkedIn, which was priced at only $32 trillion, rose to $45 in the heat, rising to $83 in the opening hours, closing at $94.25 a day, up 109.44% from its share price. At the current closing price, the company's market value exceeded $8.9 billion trillion, becoming the largest internet company IPO since Google's listing.　　Hoffman, who has a stake of nearly 20% per cent, apparently once again enjoyed the angel's earning pleasure. The net-throwing venture Hoffman is trying to extend the success of PayPal and LinkedIn to other Internet companies. He was invited to join the GRELOC Partnership (Greylock Partners), a nearly 40-year veteran venture company, to manage a 20 million-dollar development fund in 2010.　　His investment style is wide net, of course, the target is still social networking sites. How far did he cast his net? At present, there are more than 80 IT industry projects known to the outside world. One might think that he had so many angel projects to buy a business as cabbage.　　But if you look closely at Hoffman's investment, he has the ability to find diamonds in the sand heap. The most compelling example is Facebook.　　In fact, when Facebook first raised money, Hoffman had joined, and it was he who introduced Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to meet his old classmate Thiel, which led to the first 500,000 dollar angel investment that Thiel made to Facebook. In 2004, Hoffman invested 40,000 dollars in Facebook.　　He and his wife now hold 4.7 million shares. After Facebook, Hoffman's investment in social gaming company Zynga was also a delight to outsiders. Founded in June 2007, the company is mainly developing web games and posting them on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. Like the Facebook investment, Hoffman himself joined the Zynga first round of funding and became a board member. In its 2011 IPO, Zynga revealed that the 4-year independent user of the company has reached 148 million, covering 166 countries and regions.　　Zynga also launched an IPO about two months after LinkedIn's listing, a breakthrough of $10.8 billion in market capitalisation this March. Hoffman's Cabbage list also has many well-known websites, including Wikia, Permuto, SiXapart, Thesixtyone and Shopkick. Hoffman is involved because of the creation of almost all the promising social media start-ups.　　No wonder he ranks among the top three in Forbes ' 2012 world's top ten venture capitalists rankings. Related Hoffman Small file Shurikhofman has the complex of transforming society.　　Industry insiders say that he is not quite the same as many Silicon Valley people, and that what he excels at is not technology and detail, but strategy and thinking about the world in a broader context. Hoffman's sociological sentiments may be related to his family background and growing experience. He was born in Stanford, California, and grew up in Berkeley. According to his elders Hoffman, Hoffman showed a strong focus as a child. At the age of 5, he can read the novel The Lord of the Rings. Like other kids, Hoffman was addicted to the game, but the difference was that he started thinking about the mechanics of the game and even joined a gaming company at the age of 12. He likes to think about how these games relate to society, and how they connect people together-a question that is still a topic of interest to Hoffman.　　The first company he founded was a social networking site, and in that sense Hoffman was a veritable "communicative" venture capitalist. 23-Year-old Hoffman, who graduated from Stanford University in 1990, specializes in symbolic systems and cognitive science (symbolic bae and cognitive), a discipline that specializes in the relationship between computers and human intelligence.　　He received his master's degree in philosophy from Oxford University in 1993. After graduating from school, Hoffman had hoped to influence society by academics, but soon he realized that ivory towers were synonymous with highbrow.　　To influence society to a greater extent, one should become an entrepreneur. "When I first graduated from college, I was going to be a professor and a public intellectual, to explore ' who we are ' and ' what kind of people we should be and how to build a society '?" But when I realized that there might be only fifty or sixty people in the study of academics, I thought I should influence society more broadly through other means.　　"he said. Based on this philosophy, Hoffman joined the Silicon Valley and became an entrepreneur. It turned out that he was a successful transition.