On an early autumn afternoon about 21 years ago, a group of Silicon Valley nerds gathered at the one-bedroom of flat of Reid Hoffman in Mountain View, a featureless city south of San Francisco notable only as the home of Alphabet’s HQ, the Googleplex.
Stephen Beitzel, who worked with Hoffman at Apple, recalled sitting on a second-hand couch and listening to his friend lay out a vision for a new business. He wanted to replace and digitise the Rolodex, a physical desktop tool that was used by office workers to document details of their professional contacts.
Hoffman, who’d studied symbolic systems at Stanford and then philosophy at Oxford, had worked at Fujitsu and PayPal, and been a co-founder of the unsuccessful online dating site SocialNet.
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