Venture Voice

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman was one of my first guests on Venture Voice, back in 2006. Even though LinkedIn had 7.2 million users by then, it was still very much a niche platform and had only 56 employees. Putting your resumé online for all the world to see was pretty uncommon at that time. But Reid was driven by a simple goal: to change the world. Revisiting this interview now, you can pick up on some of the clues as to why he would become so successful. He takes an almost philosophical approach to business, putting himself in the user’s shoes and focusing on creating valuable media objects that would have a transformative effect on society. He also discusses the value of PR, something that stuck with me as I later launched Muck Rack. And he talks a lot about his peers — Mark Pincus, Peter Thiel, Stewart Butterfield — fellow entrepreneurs who hadn’t yet made it big but went on to do big things and continue to support each other. I was a fledgling entrepreneur when I spoke with Reid back in 2006, and these