LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman has been immersed in Silicon Valley since his August 1967 birth in Palo Alto, California, in the shadow of Stanford University, where he and fellow technology luminary Peter Thiel became friends as college students during the 1980s.
They went on to start PayPal during the late 1990s while working alongside a coterie of other bright-eyed entrepreneurs who went on to even bigger things, just as Hoffman did. That group — dubbed the “PayPal Mafia” — included Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, and YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.
