Reid Hoffman, Trailblazer

It’s a simple numbers game for Reid Hoffman. 47 million users. Of which 2011 are personal connections. And that translates into over six million potential referrals. But Reid really isn’t a numbers guy. “I studied artificial intelligence and cognitive science. I wanted to build ecosystems and improve the ecosystem we all live in together. My strongest personal passion is how do you improve life for hundreds of millions of people.”

Reid realizes technology changes the way we connect with each other. He discovered one of the quickest ways to create more value for people was through building new software that has far greater reach beyond his sphere of influence.

 

“How do we stay in touch, how do we find each other, how do we collaborate, how do we communicate?” Reid asked. “Technology helps us solve these problems by quickly collaborating with the wide variety of people around us.”

 

The result is LinkedIn, where business professionals can connect to people they know and trust while at the same time establishing their own personal and professional brand. The key component to LinkedIn is the ability to leverage those relationships in order to connect with other people, information and resources.

Challenge: In 2004, Reid needed a technology partner that could grow and adapt as quickly as his business. “We selected Dell very early in our start up as a solution to a specific problem, which is Internet companies sometimes have the demands of scaling very fast.”

According to Reid, technology is critical to solving the problem of keeping on top of the latest innovations and being able to process that information while making informed decisions. From creating a configuration that’s easy to support to swapping out components, Dell has been able to help LinkedIn grow their business.

 

“What our Ops guys liked about Dell was it was very easy to get to the configuration that was right for the problems that a systems administrator, a financial analyst, or a project manager was trying to solve.” says Reid.

Reid expects to eventually see a huge percentage of the world’s business professionals on LinkedIn. “LinkedIn is currently growing at over one new professional every second. And at that rate we hope that in the next five or ten years to have all the professionals in the world together in this network.” This will only bring more technology challenges that Reid is confident LinkedIn is poised to handle.

 

Reid sees LinkedIn as a platform for all kinds of applications that can help business professionals with their companies and their careers. “For me the most important thing about taking your own path was building something that would make a difference to hundreds of millions of people.”

 

As far as a word to the wise goes, Reid says, “Most people try to control risk by taking none. All of life is risk. So it’s about taking intelligent risks.”