Reid Hoffman Bristles Being Called a VC, Answers Reader Questions Anyway [TCTV]

Sarah Lacy

Sarah Lacy writes for PandoDaily, a news site which she founded. She is also an award winning journalist and author of two critically acclaimed books, “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0” (Gotham Books, May 2008) and “Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos... → Learn More

Friday, October 15th, 2010

Reid Hoffman was my guest on Ask a VC this week, although he still considers himself more of an entrepreneur than a VC and did the call from LinkedIn, not Greylock. Oh well at least the question asking and answering was as advertised.

Among the questions he answered were who Facebook’s biggest competitive threat would be, why Google has failed in two attempts to build a social platform and whether the latest will succeed, whether micropayments can work for categories other than games (Hint: News media, we’re still out of luck), the few investments he’s made outside the United States and why he doesn’t do more and how his value add is different when he’s wearing a VC hat and when he’s wearing an angel hat.

We also play a fun game: If LinkedIn is the virtual office, Facebook is the virtual backyard BBQ, MySpace is the virtual nightclub, what are the real world analogs for Ping, FourSquare, Gowalla and Zynga?

The video is below.


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