Reid Hoffman

Co-founder LinkedIn.

Hoffman joined Apple Computer in 1994, where he worked on E World, an early attempt at creating a Social Network. eWorld was acquired by AOL in 1996.[12] Hoffman later worked at Fujitsu before co-founding his first company, Social Net.com in 1997. It focused “on online dating and matching up people with similar interests, like golfers who were were looking for partners in their neighborhood.”[13] Peter Thiel has said Social Net.com was “literally an idea before its time. It was a social network 7 or 8 years before that became a trend.”... While at Social Net, Hoffman was a member of the board of directors at the founding of PayPal, an electronic money transmission service. In January 2000 he left Social Net and joined PayPal full-time as the company's COO. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid_Hoffman