LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman: ‘Board games inspired my business strategy’
Since the company he co-founded was sold to Microsoft for $26bn, the tech billionaire has had more time to pursue his other passions.
By Richard Waters
“If you met Macron and Trudeau together, what would you ask them?” Reid Hoffman, billionaire tech entrepreneur and investor, breaks off from the board game he is playing to ask his fellow competitors an unexpected question.
Settlers of Catan, a strategy game with an economic flavour, has become a fad among Silicon Valley’s tech elite — and is a favourite of Hoffman’s. But his question has nothing to do with the game. Hoffman is seeing the French and Canadian leaders in a few days — and this is his idea of a conversational gambit. You get the feeling, though, that he’s not really short of ideas on what to ask them. Which is good because the rest of us are stumped. Hoffman switches back to board-game business: “Anyone have a wheat they want to trade? I’d give a rock or a sheep.”
In Hoffman’s world as a tech optimist, meetings with global leaders make perfect sense. These days he seems to pop up everywhere, as a kind of peripatetic diplomat for Silicon Valley, touring the…
