Tonight during Reid Hoffman’s interview with Steve Ballmer, the two talked about everything Microsoft. Now that Ballmer is talking about his competitors he let out a few bonzo words when it came to Google and Apple and the state of their phone ecosystems, especially when it comes to apps. → Read More
At the Churchill Club in Santa Clara, two tech titans sat down to have a conversation. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman interviewed Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer at an event with “tech influencers and innovators,” and a bunch of of us press folk. Ballmer is riding on the release of Windows 8, Surface and the Windows 8 Phone, so there is plenty to talk about. → Read More
Today, LinkedIn’s CEO Jeff Weiner tweeted out a link to a new initiative that his company is participating in. As I noted over the weekend, people really need to step up when it comes to those affected by Hurricane Sandy. Things aren’t kosher on the East Coast, and we all need to help. → Read More
With 75 companies pitching last Demo Day, Y Combinator is bigger than ever. The early-stage firm has gone from some very humble roots with about a dozen founders out of Boston seven years ago, to hosting what is arguably the highest-quality and most-anticipated demo day every season in Mountain View’s packed Computer History Museum.
But is it too big? Reid Hoffman, who co-founded LinkedIn and… → Read More
On stage today at Disrupt San Francisco 2012 TechCrunch Founder Michael Arrington asked LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman about the enterprise. Then Arrington yawned. He later said this:
“”I like Ferrari’s, not mufflers.”
Enterprise – it’s boring. It gets that rap all the time. And frankly, for the most part, the stereotype is true. But Hoffman put it in the right context by saying that the… → Read More
As one of Facebook’s very earliest backers (with a $37,500 investment at a $5 million valuation), LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman sounds neutral on the company for the next six months, but bullish over the very long-haul.
At TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference in San Francisco today, he said that he’s waiting to see how the broader market responds to employee lock-up dates over the next few… → Read More
LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman discussed the removal of Twitter’s feeds from its product, even though it was not their decision.
Hoffman says at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco that its product is better off without all of the noise that cross-posting from Twitter brought. When Michael Arrington pushed Hoffman on stage to call the move “bullshit”, Hoffman certainly didn’t disagree. Pushing… → Read More
On the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, Michael Arrington got LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman to open up about his initial investment into social networking giant Facebook. Apparently it was $37,500 at a $5 million valuation. Talk about getting in on the ground floor. → Read More
After a successful first Hackathon series, VC firm Greylock Partners Greylock has announced Hackfest II, to continue the mission of building a network of interns and talent to build great companies and products.
Greylock offers the typical mentor program that you’d find in other incubators and hackathons, but the caliber of those involved is unmatched. This isn’t your every day 24-hour… → Read More
“How you build the future is you motivate people to pay attention and act, to improve their circumstances and run their own lives”, LinkedIn co-founder and philanthropist Reid Hoffman tells me. That’s why his support of microlending platform Kiva’s kiva.org/free program has a double positive impact. He put up $1 million so 40,000 people could try helping the impoverished via microfinance… → Read More
Over nine years, Globant has been building one of the stronger and more reputable IT companies in South America. It’s no easy feat to build innovative software products for a global audience, but Globant seems to have hit the right note with its combination of open source and proprietary software, which have allowed it to become one of the go-to IT outsourcing firms for multinational… → Read More
A few weeks ago I was meeting with Peter Thiel and that pesky question of whether we’re in a bubble or not came up. In a debate both sides are getting bored with, Thiel made a point I hadn’t heard: That LinkedIn’s IPO wasn’t some Netscape moment that opened the markets up for everyone else. In fact, he argued, it was the opposite.
LinkedIn showed that you can have a compelling IPO and get an… → Read More
Forty-plus weeks traveling the emerging world has taught me many things. Chief among them is that most entrepreneurs outside Silicon Valley learn the wrong lessons looking in.
A lot of that is the fault of publications like TechCrunch: We get excited about new things. If it’s exploding like Groupon, all the better. But we even go nuts over things like Foursquare or Quora that have pretty muted… → Read More
In the 1990s, peer-to-peer networks were a revelation. They allowed people to pool together tiny parts of their computers, and those pooled together parts could do far more together than the average computer or connection could do on its own. It enabled everything from swapping pirated music to making cheap transcontinental calls via Skype.
But what if you could do the same thing with tiny parts… → Read More
Last week, we invited big-thinkers Reid Hoffman and Tim O’Reilly into the TechCrunch Studios to talk about Hoffman’s definition of “Web 3.0″– a torrent of innovation that’s going to be unleashed by all of this personal data being collected about us. In the first segment we talked about the scary implications of this wave of companies, and in the second segment we talked about the… → Read More
It’s time for the much-awaited part two of our sit down with Internet big-thinkers Reid Hoffman and Tim O’Reilly. We invited the two in the studio last week to talk about what Hoffman has called “Web 3.0″– the use of an explosion of data being collected about our real lives online.
Last week, we talked about the undeniably scary aspects of Web 3.0– data and privacy and how we can trust… → Read More
We invited Reid Hoffman and Tim O’Reilly — two of the biggest thinkers in the Valley– into the studio to talk about what Hoffman calls “Web 3.0.” He argues the next wave isn’t as simple as MOBILE! As he first discussed at SXSW, it’s about companies running on any platform or in the real world using the last few decades of data being gathered on our virtual and actual selves to build stunningly… → Read More
LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman said, recently, “that if Web 1.0 involved go search, get data and some limited interactivity, and if Web 2.0 involves real identities and real relationships, then Web 3.0 will be real identities generating massive amounts of data.”
Reid is a visionary and certainly had this right. But the information that Reid described is just the tip of the iceberg. We are… → Read More
Today at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman took the stage for a chat with NetworkEffect’s Liz Gannes. The main point of the discussion was Hoffman’s belief that “Web 3.0″ is data. More specifically, the platform part of data. But that’s old news, Hoffman gave that talk at SXSW a few weeks ago. More interesting were his thoughts on what Internet companies should do with… → Read More
Paul Carr and my jokes aside, the Crunchies is pretty much an unabashed love-fest. We even get along with our arch-competitors GigaOm and VentureBeat long enough to co-host the event.
But our annual love for Apple remains mostly unrequited. We shower them with awards and praise, and they don’t even send so much as an intern to accept their monkey statues. In the past, we’ve filled the sad… → Read More
First it was distribution. Then it was monetization. The next generation of Web entrepreneurs’ make-or-break challenge will be localization and a big part of that is language.
The Web is so powerful today and the valuations are so high, because it is a billion-person-audience and growing. But more of them speak Chinese than English, and critical masses are developing around Spanish, Portuguese… → Read More
In the venture business being ahead of your time can be almost as bad as being late to a market. But the other great thing about the venture business is there are exceptions to every rule. Craig Donato is hoping that Oodle is the exception to that one. He’s spent more than ten years building a social classified company, powering the marketplaces for Oodle.com, MySpace and Facebook and growing to… → Read More
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… → Read More
File this under “ask and ye shall receive part two.” Reid Hoffman– uber angel turned Greylock partner– will be my guest on Ask a VC this week.
There are plenty of things to ask Hoffman about. He was an angel investor in some of the most pivotal Web 2.0 companies, including Friendster, Facebook, Six Apart, Digg, Zynga and LinkedIn, which he co-founded.
Hoffman was heavily courted by most top… → Read More
Today, during our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Mike Arrington and Erick Schonfeld sat down with LinkedIn founder (and investor) Reid Hoffman and Greylock’s David Sze to talk a bit about investing. The big news was that Greylock was giving Hoffman a new $20 million seed fund. But the duo had some other interesting things to say.
When Mike asked how both Sze and Hoffman missed… → Read More
The last few weeks have been insane here at TechCrunch as we put the finishing touches on our next Disrupt conference, which begins September 27 in San Francisco. We’ve gone through more than 500 applicants to select the best two dozen to launch in our Startup Battlefield. Only one of them will win the coveted Disrupt Cup. The main event will be preceded by an awesome Hacakthon (sign up here). … → Read More
If there is a father of social media in Silicon Valley, it may be Reid Hoffman, the Stanford and Oxford educated entrepreneur best known for co-founding LinkedIn in December 2002. Hoffman, currently the executive chairman of LinkedIn and a partner in the venture firm of Greylock Partners, saw the future before almost anyone else.
Grasping the Internet’s shift from a platform for data to one for… → Read More
Today at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA host David Kirkpatrick sat down with Reid Hoffman and Sean Parker to talk about what comes after the social revolution. Both Parker and Hoffman made it clear that they don’t think social is going anywhere anytime soon. So Kirkpatrick asked what the most interesting social opportunity is that Facebook isn’t directly involved in?
Hoffman said that… → Read More
Today at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA host David Kirkpatrick sat down with Reid Hoffman and Sean Parker to talk about what follows social media. Specifically, Kirkpatrick asked the two what follows the social networks like Facebook?
Parker was quick to answer. “If I had an answer to that, I’d probably already be working on it,” he half-joked. But he elaborated to say that the idea… → Read More
The way venture capital firms are structured makes it almost impossible for outsiders to see what’s really going on inside those 1970s lodge-like Sand Hill Road offices. It’s an industry perfectly structured for sweeping problems under the rug, and as its fundamentals have declined over the last decade, that’s just what it’s been doing. But those big, lumpy problems are getting harder and… → Read More
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