Reid Hoffman is an interesting guy. He’s head honcho at LinkedIn, and an investor in Facebook, Digg, Flickr and Six Apart.
According to Los Angeles Times, he’s also an Oxford-trained philosopher who peppers his conversations with lively references to literature and film.
Hoffman became self-reliant at an early age, persuading his father to send him to boarding school in Vermont, where, in addition to classwork, he learned how to blacksmith, drive oxen and farm maple syrup.
At Stanford University, he studied symbolic systems and was fascinated by the scientific examination of human and artificial intelligence. A Marshall Scholarship took him to Oxford. But he decided that academia didn’t touch enough people’s lives.
“I lose interest when things don’t have scale,” he said.
