Matt Cohler
Matt Cohler, January 2008
Born	March 27, 1977 (1977-03-27) (age 35) New York, NY
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Yale University
Occupation	venture capitalist
Employer	general partner at Benchmark Capital
Known for	former VP of Product Management, Facebook

Matt Cohler (born March 27, 1977) is an American venture capitalist based in Silicon Valley. He worked as Vice President of Product Management for Facebook until June 2008^[1] and is currently a general partner at Benchmark Capital.^[2]

Cohler was one of the first five employees hired at Facebook^[1] and worked with the team during many of its critical growth phases. He continues to act as a "special advisor" to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.^[3] Prior to Facebook, Cohler was Vice President and General Manager at LinkedIn and was a member of the founding team.^[4] At LinkedIn, Cohler was considered CEO Reid Hoffman's right-hand man.^[5] Cohler also worked in China and was a management consultant at McKinsey & Company.^[6] On August 24, 2011, Cohler announced that he will join the board of the newly for-profit community website CouchSurfing.^[7]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Matt Cohler profile on LittleSis.org

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Reid Hoffman
Hoffman in 2011
Born	Reid Garrett Hoffman August 5, 1967 (1967-08-05) (age 44) Stanford, California, USA
Alma mater	Stanford University Oxford University
Occupation	Entrepreneur and investor
Known for	Executive VP of PayPal Founder of LinkedIn
Net worth	US $1.8 billion[1]
Spouse	Michelle Yee[2]
Children	None as of 2011[3]

Reid Garrett Hoffman^[4] (born August 5, 1967) is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist and author. Hoffman is best known as the co-founder of LinkedIn, a social network used primarily for business connections and job searching.

Early education and career[link]

Hoffman was born in Stanford, California, the son of Deanna Ruth Rutter and William Parker Hoffman, Jr.,^[5][6] and grew up in Berkeley, California. His paternal great-great-great-grandfather was Presbyterian minister and Indiana University president pro tempore Theophilus Adam Wylie.^[6] He attended high school at The Putney School.^[7] He graduated from Stanford University in 1990 (where he won both a Marshall Scholarship and a Dinkelspiel Award) with a B.S. in Symbolic Systems and Cognitive Science.^[8] He went on to earn an M.A. in philosophy from Oxford University in 1993.

Hoffman says he saw academia as an opportunity to make an "impact", but later realized that an entrepreneurial career would provide him with a bigger platform. "When I graduated from Stanford my plan was to become a professor and public intellectual. That is not about quoting Kant. It's about holding up a lens to society and asking 'who are we?' and 'who should we be, as individuals and a society?' But I realised academics write books that 50 or 60 people read and I wanted more impact."^[9]

So Hoffman pursued a career in business and entrepreneurship. After working at Apple Computer and Fujitsu in product management, Hoffman co-founded his first company, SocialNet.com, an online dating service.

PayPal[link]

While at SocialNet, Hoffman was a member of the board of directors at the founding of PayPal, an electronic money transmission service, and later joined the firm as a full-time employee. At the time of PayPal's acquisition by eBay in 2002, he was Executive Vice President of PayPal. He was responsible for all external relationships for PayPal, including Payments Infrastructure (VISA, MasterCard, ACH, WellsFargo), Business Development (eBay, Intuit, others), Government (Regulatory, Judicial), and Legal.

LinkedIn[link]

Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn in December 2002. It was one of the first business-oriented online social networks. He was LinkedIn’s founding CEO for the first four years before becoming Chairman and President, Products in February 2007. Currently he is Executive Chairman. LinkedIn currently has over 135 million members in over 200 countries.^[10] With the IPO of LinkedIn on May 19, 2011, Hoffman owns a stake worth an estimated $2.34 billion dollars, not including any potential benefits from Greylock Partners, where he was named a Partner in 2009.^[11]

Investing[link]

After the PayPal sale to eBay, Hoffman became one of Silicon Valley's most prolific and successful angel investors. According to venture capitalist David Sze, Hoffman "is arguably the most successful angel investor in the past decade."^[12] He made 80 angel investments in technology companies. In 2010 Hoffman joined Greylock Partners and runs their $20 million Discovery Fund.^[13]

Facebook[link]

According to David Kirkpatrick's book The Facebook Effect, Hoffman arranged the first meeting between Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel, which led to Thiel's initial $500,000 angel investment in the company. Hoffman invested alongside Thiel in Facebook's very first financing round.^[14][15]

Zynga[link]

Hoffman personally invested and joined the board of directors in Zynga's first round of funding. Hoffman and Zynga CEO Mark Pincus co-own the Six Degrees Patent.^[16] Zynga is now a publicly traded company with a market capitalization of $8.43 billion as of February 2012. ^[17]

Other investments[link]

His other investments include Wikia, Permuto, SixApart, thesixtyone, Tagged, IronPort, Flickr, Digg, Ping.fm, Nanosolar, Care.com, Knewton, Kongregate, Last.fm, Technetto, OneKingsLane, Wrapp, Edmodo and shopkick.^[18]

Book: The Start-Up of You[link]

Hoffman is co-author, with Ben Casnocha, of a book titled The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform your Career.

The book was released in the United States on February 14, 2012. It argues that individuals should think of themselves as businesses-of-one - the “CEO of their own career” - and draws many parallels between lessons learned from the stories of successful Silicon Valley technology companies and an individual’s career.^[19]

Philanthropy[link]

He serves on the boards of Do Something (organization for young people taking action), Kiva.org (a micro-finance organization), Mozilla (creator of Firefox), and Endeavor Global an international non-profit development organization that finds and supports high-impact entrepreneurs in emerging markets.

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Reid Hoffman

• LinkedIn management page including a brief biography of Hoffman
• Hoffman's resume on LinkedIn
• Podcast and videos of Reid Hoffman, speaking at Stanford University
• The Start-Up of You book website
• WSJ: Venture Capitalist's New Frontier: Where Cellphones Meet Retailing
• Profile of Reid Hoffman on Endeavor's Board of Directors

Bill Gurley is a general partner at Benchmark Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm in Menlo Park, California. His current investments include: Avvo, Glassdoor, LiveOps, Move Networks, Nanosolar, Nextdoor, OpenTable, Red 5 Studios, Second Life,^[1] Tropos Networks, Vudu, Inc. and Zillow.com.^[2] His previous investments include: Avamar Technologies (acquired by EMC Corporation), Business.com (acquired by R.H. Donnelley), Clicker.com (acquired by CBS Interactive), Crossgain (acquired by BEA Systems), Employease (acquired by Automatic Data Processing), JAMDAT Mobile (IPO: JMDT; acquired by Electronic Arts), Nordstrom.com (acquired by Nordstrom), Shopping.com (IPO: SHOP, acquired by eBay), and The Knot (IPO: KNOT).^[3] Gurley was an early investor in green technology with a 2002 Series A investment in Nanosolar.^[4] He is listed consistently on the Forbes Midas List^[5] and is considered one of “technology’s top dealmakers.^[6]”

With the economic collapse in the fall of 2008, Gurley garnered attention^[7] when he sent a letter^[8] to his portfolio companies, advising CEOs to exercise caution in spending but to look for and take advantage of opportunities^[9] that become available during harsh economic times.

Before joining Benchmark, Gurley was a partner at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. He had also spent four years on Wall Street as a research analyst, including 3 years at CS First Boston. He was considered “one of Wall Street’s premier technology analysts.^[10]” He covered companies including Dell, Compaq and Microsoft and was the lead analyst on the Amazon.com IPO.^[11]

Prior to his investment career, Gurley was a design engineer at Compaq Computer, where he worked on products such as the 486/50 and Compaq's first multi-processor server. Before Compaq, he worked in the technical marketing group of Advanced Micro Devices' embedded processor division.^[3] With both a financial/business and engineering background he “has a way of sizing things up that makes him both intriguing and highly quotable.^[12]"

Gurley is known for his above average height; he is 6’9”.^[13] The title of the newsletter he once authored, “Above the Crowd,^[14]" and the book eBoys that profiles the Benchmark team, both reference his height. The subtitle of eBoys is “The true story of the six tall men who backed eBay, Webvan, and other billion-dollar start-ups.^[15]"

Gurley was born in Dickinson, Texas, outside of Houston, on May 10, 1966. Gurley received his MBA from the University of Texas in 1993 and his Bachelor of Science from the University of Florida in 1989, where he was a member of the men’s basketball team.^[13] He is married with three children and lives in the Bay Area.

References[link]

1. ^ Venture Summit: Has the Internet Jumped the Shark? | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD
2. ^ Benchmark Capital: Silicon Valley Team: General Partners: Bill Gurley
3. ^ ^{a b} Benchmark Capital: Silicon Valley Team: General Partners: Bill Gurley
4. ^ TECHNOLOGY; $6.5 Million Being Invested In a Venture On Solar Cells - New York Times
5. ^ The Midas List - Forbes.com
6. ^ Technology's Top Dealmakers - Forbes.com
7. ^ How To Survive Great Depression 2.0 Without Firing Everyone
8. ^ How Tech Start-ups Plan on Getting By
9. ^ Benchmark Capital Advises Startups To Conserve Capital, Look For Opportunities
10. ^ Jeffrey Pfeffer, The Human Equation. (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1998) p.82.
11. ^ Byran Eisenberg, Call to Action: Simple Formulas to Improve Online Results. (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishing, 2006) p. 27.
12. ^ Bill Gurley on flush VCs: "We’ve seen how this movie ends." - The Browser: Analyzing the tech biz
13. ^ ^{a b} 08/25/97 BILL GURLEY-Venture Capitalist, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
14. ^ abovethecrowd.com
15. ^ Amazon.com: eBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work: Randall E. Stross: Books

Further reading[link]

• Randall E. Stross, eBoys : The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work. (New York: Ballantine Books, 2000). ISBN 0-345-42889-7.

External links[link]

• Bill Gurley and Matt Cohler interview on TechCrunch
• PersonRatings Profile
• Bill Gurley on CNBC September 14, 2007 with Bill Griffeth