Books Recommended by Reid Hoffman
Reid Hoffman is an entrepreneur, investor (partner at Greylock Partners, one of the oldest Silicon Valley venture capital firms), and author, best known for founding the professional social network LinkedIn.
Reid is also part of the so-called PayPal Mafia, the group of entrepreneurs who were members of the PayPal team and, after selling it to eBay, went on to create successful businesses, such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and others.
He studied at Stanford University, where he met his future business partner Peter Thiel, and graduated in 1990 with a B.S. in Symbolic Systems and Cognitive Science.
Reid decided he wants to influence the world. He first thought to become a professor, but then realized that an entrepreneurial career will likely make him able to change things on a larger scale.
In 1994, he worked at Apple as a Senior User Experience Architect, at an early attempt to create a social network. He left and joined Fujitsu where he held the title Director of Product Management and Development for WorldsAway, one of the earliest successful virtual worlds.
Before the dot-com boom, Reid co-founded SocialNet.com, a startup that matched people with similar interests, where he was responsible for vision, management and product development.
During the same period, he joined Peter Thiel at PayPal as an Executive Vice President and a member of board of directors, where he was responsible for all external relationships, PR, strategy, payment innovations and customers service.
Reid later co-founded and was the CEO of LinkedIn, the business-oriented social network that had over 500 million members by 2019. He sold the company to Microsoft in 2016, and in 2019 he was a board member of Microsoft and Executive Chairman of LinkedIn.
He is also an investor at Greylock Partners VC firm, whose portfolio includes companies like Facebook, Airbnb, Dropbox, Pandora, Instagram, Palo Alto Networks, Workday, Nextdoor, Rubrik, Okta, and others. Reid represents Greylock on the board of several startups.
Reid has co-authored several books, his first one being the bestselling career book The Start-Up of You. In 2018, his book Blitzscaling came out, which states that the secret to starting and scaling massively valuable companies is “blitzscaling”, a set of techniques for scaling up at a dizzying pace that blows competitors out of the water. In that book, he shares what he learned from the companies he invested in.
Books recommended by Reid Hoffman:
Books by Reid Hoffman
12 books recommended by Reid Hoffman
The Art of War
by Sun Tzu
Reid read Carl von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu as a boy, which informed his strategic thinking.
So Good They Can’t Ignore You
by Cal Newport
Entrepreneurial professionals must develop a competitive advantage by building valuable skills. This book offers advice based on research and reality--not meaningless platitudes-- on how to invest in yourself in order to stand out from the crowd. An important guide to starting up a remarkable career.
The Startup Way
by Eric Ries
Continuous innovation is the key to long-term impact and success. Eric shows how organizations of all kinds—not just startups—can be built to learn and adapt. In the pivot-or-perish networked world of twenty-first-century business, this is mission critical reading.
Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World With OKRs
by John Doerr
Whether you're a seasoned CEO or a first-time entrepreneur, you'll find valuable lessons, tools, and inspiration in the pages of Measure What Matters. I'm glad John invested the time to share these ideas with the world.
The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions . . . and Created Plenty of Controversy
Gallagher captures the remarkable journey of Airbnb exceedingly well; she takes readers from its earliest and scrappiest days through becoming an enduring company with a brand beloved by millions around the world.
Connected Strategy: Building Continuous Customer Relationships for Competitive Advantage
by Nicolaj Siggelkow, Christian Terwiesch
This insightful book blends academic rigor with practical, step-by-step tools that can help you design innovative business models for the Networked Age. Connected Strategy shows how to leverage continuous connectivity and emerging AI to make deep relationships that benefit customers and businesses alike. Read this book if you want to build a business model of the future.
On War
Reid read Carl von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu as a boy, which informed his strategic thinking.
The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us
This book is essential reading for any non-economist who wants to understand how markets shape our world, including transformational marketplaces like Amazon, Airbnb, and eBay.
The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks
In this hyper networked world remade fresh every day, with new perils and new opportunities, there is one book to be sure to read: Joshua Ramo's new book, a masterpiece, The Seventh Sense. To understand the tsunami of the networked age, you need history, biography,… Read the full quote
In this hyper networked world remade fresh every day, with new perils and new opportunities, there is one book to be sure to read: Joshua Ramo's new book, a masterpiece, The Seventh Sense. To understand the tsunami of the networked age, you need history, biography, tech, philosophy, politics--and you want a book that has a depth beyond whatever else you could be streaming, podcasting, or wiki-ing. This is that book.
