He was wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. “Actually a re-recruiting dinner.” He is a forty-nine-year-old triathlete, small and lithe, with a long flop of hair. “I have a recruiting dinner,” Pincus said.
“Is he somebody you think is cool and fun? No? I’m interviewing him on Wednesday.” “Joss Whedon,” Hoffman said, referring to the film and television director who specializes in material about vampires and comic-book characters. He bustled in a few minutes late, sat down, and pulled out a small notebook filled with an indecipherable scrawl.
At dinner, Hoffman was wearing two watches, one on each wrist-an Apple Watch and a competing product-so he could see which one he liked better. He befriended Pincus about twenty years ago, when the two met in the Bay Area to discuss business ideas, and discovered that they both believed that social media would be the next big thing in Silicon Valley. He is a big, broad-faced man with tousled brown hair, who typically dresses for work in black shorts, a black T-shirt, running shoes, and white socks. If someone told you that Hoffman was the equipment manager for a Pearl Jam tour, it wouldn’t seem like a casting error.
He recently published two books on how to be successful in business, and is finishing a third, whose working title is “Blitzscaling.” His business is based on the idea of managing your career through relentless networking, which is something he enjoys.
Breakfasts and dinners are a big part of Hoffman’s life. Illustration by Stanley ChowĮarly on a Monday evening in June, Reid Hoffman, the founder and executive chairman of the business-oriented networking site LinkedIn, met Mark Pincus, the founder and chief executive of the gaming site Zynga, for dinner at a casual restaurant in Portola Valley, California, a wealthy residential town at the western edge of Silicon Valley. Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn, has a premise about how the economic world will work from now on.