Fortt Knox

There is no one in Silicon Valley who's more connected than Reid Hoffman. That might be because he plays all of the connector roles, sometimes at once. He's a venture capitalist, at Greylock. He's an entrepreneur who co-founded LinkedIn, and sold it for 26 billion dollars last year. Reid's net worth is estimated to be north of 3 billion dollars. Now he has a seat on the board of directors at Microsoft. After teaching a class at Stanford, Reid started a podcast, Masters of Scale, that's about the art and craft of building monster businesses. Reid is deeply qualified on that subject. He was a founding board member at PayPal, and early on became its chief operating officer. That also makes him part of an eclectic group of characters known as the "PayPal Mafia" former PayPal employees who went on to dizzying success. Members include Elon Musk, YouTube founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, investor Peter Theil, and entrepreneur Max Levchin, to name a few. I spent some time with Reid Hoffman last week when I flew ou