LinkedIn Founder & CEO, Reid Hoffman.

I was happy to read that Reid Hoffman, Founder and CEO of LinkedIn, also studied Philosophy before entering the business world.

I studied Architecture with a supplementary major in Philosophy at Notre Dame, and Reid earned a masters in Philosophy at Oxford. Some of my favorite thinkers are Socrates, Ayn Rand, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Reid is a great role model. He has dominated in Silicon Valley, helping to finance over 60 companies, 25+ from initial conception. He has been an angel investor for:

facebook.com, digg.com, bioscale.com, nanosolar.com, lulan.com, taxipass.com, naseeb.com, technorati.com, grassroots.com, friendster.com, socialtext.com, realtravel.com, rhythmnetworks.com, ravenflow.com, targetedgrowth.com, wink.com, wikia.com, adventsolar.com, bioscale.com, ning.com, tagged.com, tinypictures.us, etology.com, winster.com, rupture.com, jaxtr.com, kongregate.com, powerset.com, care.com, funnyordie.com, ironport.com, flixster.com, flickr.com, last.fm, grockit.com, and sixapart.com

These are some major Internet powerhouses. Ironically, I had a temp position at Ironport in 2006 before they were acquired by Cisco. I was living in Oakland at the time and temping in “The City.” It was a fun experience — data entry into Excel spreadsheets for eight hours at a time, hahah…. I also temped at Wired magazine during that period (answering the phone at the reception desk = BIG TIME BABY!) before I moved to Los Angeles in 2007.

Getting Reid Hoffman to invest in Vverdant, would be the equivalent of an up-and-coming rapper getting a co-sign from Jay-Z. Let me go brush my shoulders off….

This is a screenshot of Mark Zuckerberg's personal Facebook profile.

I’m interested in what Mark Zuckerberg, 25-year-old founder and CEO at Facebook, has to say about his company’s focus on money. Skip to 3:33 in this video if you want to get straight to it: Mark Zuckerberg Speaks @ SXSW.

Zuckerberg says he’s not concerned about being ranked as the youngest billionaire on the Forbes list, but about user experience. Of course, he is thinking about money, he just understands that monetary success comes from creating the best user experience possible.

I think he has the formula right, what do you think?