Reid Hoffman
Age: 53
Estimated Net Worth: More than $1 billion
The Moneymaker: LinkedIn
Hoffman is also an angel investor in many other major website successes including Facebook, Zynga and Flickr.
Background: From his living room in 2002, Reid Hoffman set out to create a social networking site for the business world. At the end of the first month in operation, LinkedIn had a total of 4,500 members and has only grown since – approximately one million new members join LinkedIn every week. Hoffman graduated from Stanford University in 1990 with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Symbolic Systems and Cognitive Science. He then went on to earn a Master’s Degree in Philosophy from Oxford University in 1993. Four years later he founded SocialNet, an online dating service, a predecessor to the extensive list of current online dating services today. Hoffman held a variety of positions at PayPal, including Executive Vice President.
Notable Accomplishments: At Stanford University he received numerous awards as well as a Marshall Scholarship. Hoffman is also an angel investor in many other major website successes including Facebook, Zynga and Flickr. Overall, Hoffman has invested in over 80 start-ups. In 2009 he went corporate, joining venture capital firm Greylock Partners where he has led investments in Groupon, Shopkick and online rental website Airbnb.
Current Position: Executive Chairman and co-Founder at LinkedIn; Partner at Greylock; Member, Board of Directors at Zynga; Member, Board of Directors at Kiva.org; Member, Board of Directors Mozilla Corporation; Chair, West Coast Advisory Board at QuestBridge; Member, Provost Council at College Eight, UCSC. He also oversees the Greylock Discovery Fund, which has already dished out 20 seed investments between $25,000 and $500,000 since it launched last September.
Mark Pincus
Age: 45
Estimated Net worth: $1 billion
The Moneymaker: Zynga
Background: A true child at heart, Mark Pincus clearly knows how to play the game. Just four years ago, Pincus founded Zynga, the social media gaming system he named after his late much-loved bulldog. Millions of fans of all ages log on daily to enter into animated worlds via games like Pincus’ FarmVille, FrontierVille, CityVille and Mafia Wars, made increasingly popular as a result of their connection to Facebook. The Internet gaming visionary graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and received his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. Pincus is married with two children and resides in San Francisco, California.
Notable Accomplishments: Forbes named Pincus number 412 on their list of billionaires in the United States. Pincus has been an angel investor to a various Silicon Valley startups and he frequently gives lectures to entrepreneurial hopefuls.
Current Position: Chief Executive of Zynga.
Adam D’Angelo
Age: 26
Estimated Net Worth: Around $680 million, though he is notoriously tight – lipped.
The Moneymaker: Quora
Background: A Facebook alum, D’Angelo met Mark Zuckerberg while attending the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Before launching Quora, an online question – and – answer database, D’Angelo worked as Facebook’s Director of Data Mining and Distributed Systems for ad targeting, spam detection and collaborative filtering. He then moved on to serve as Chief Technology Officer where he led platform development, data teams and oversaw new product design and architecture; he also guided the site’s infrastructure to ensure expansion and scalability. The California Institute of Technology grad moved on after two years to embark upon his own technological adventure – Quora, a website providing a collection of questions and answers created, edited and organized by users
Notable Accomplishments: D’Angelo placed second in North America in the ACM International Computer Programming Contest in 2004, first in the same contest in 2003, and was honored with a Silver Medal in the International Olympiad in Informatics in 2002. He was one of the top 24 finalists in the TopCoder Collegiate Challenge in 2005, which tests the ability to design and implement complex algorithms in a timed environment.
Current position: Co-founder of Quora.
