Kamla: This is Kamla Bhatt.
Today my guest is LinkedIn’s Chairman and President, Reid Hoffman. He is often described as the most connected person in Silicon Valley. Prior to LinkedIn, he was executive VP at PayPal, which is now a part of eBay. Reid is also an angel investor and has invested in over 60 companies including Facebook, Flickr, Kiva and Taggd among others. Reid found his first social networking company, SocialNet, in 1997.
Welcome to the show Reid.
Reid: Very glad to be here. Thank you for having me.
Kamla: How big is your rolodex?
Reid: My rolodex? I think it’s about some 1720 odd connections on LinkedIn.
Kamla: What did you use before you started using LinkedIn as your rolodex?
Reid: Well I’ve always been an electronic person. So in the early days it was Palm.
Kamla: Before Palm?
Reid: Before Palm just e-mails.
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Nothing other than e-mail, I think.
Kamla: The LA Times earlier wrote an article and they described that LinkedIn is a clone of your brain. It is a manifestation of how Reid’s brain works. How did the idea of for LinkedIn start? Did you have a formal business plan?
Reid: Actually in Silicon Valley, we don’t do formal business plans. We do 20 point slide PowerPoint deck. Because I was fortunate to have made a little bit of money from PayPal, I financed the money for the first ten months myself. And so I don’t have to construct the PowerPoint myself. I just went, ‘Oh, I think there is something here.’ Now the highline was, I believe that the internet is going to be extremely important with how people manage their work and careers and that everyone is going to have a public profile on the web. That is, a professional profile and that how they accomplish things will be central on the internet. Those were the kind of founding ideas which drove into the specifics of what we built LinkedIn into.
Kamla: So you were lucky.
You had money so you were able to fund the start up.
Reid: Yes, exactly.
Kamla: Tell us; is it a clone of your brain?
Reid: Well if it is a clone of my brain -- we have a lot of work still to do with LinkedIn. We’ve built some things we liked but we’re working on a lot more. I hope that eventually maybe it will be a clone of my brain.
I do think that each of these networks mirrors to some degree their founders. For example, I am very focused with how professionals manage their careers, leverage, and work together to collaborate in order to be more effective. Other networks are more heavily oriented to dating or heavily oriented to college buddies. . Each of these actually are designed by the aspirations of their founder.
Kamla: Talking about aspirations, let us switch to India where there is a huge aspiration revolution going on with the mobile phone. LinkedIn is right now available for desktop users. What plans do you have for LinkedIn in India, keeping in mind the mobile revolution and the number of people that are switching to mobile?