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….

A great note of encouragement (below) from my friend Faust, who is a Director at a major oil company. More reason to push forward….

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Drew Shula: Faust has sent you a message on LinkedIn.

Date: 6/17/2009

Subject: Your Vverdant Concept

Hi Drew–
Very good concept. I strongly believe in green in all aspects of living. If we can get the fuel issue under control in this world, we will have a better environment. A very complex issue as we found out by going into bio-diesel production in CA. Hopefully we can all strive for the greater good without profit as the sole motivator. Keep up the earnest work and with your motivation being the greater good, I can’t see how you can fail.

-Faust

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As an addendum, it’s amazing how prevalent social networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter have become in our professional lives. I communicate on these platforms daily and love the ability to easily network with friends and business associates all over the world. Eventually we will have all the green builders on one platform as well….Vverdant, coming soon….

I saw Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr. in The Soloist last month and was really inspired….Here is a true story of how one person can make an incredible impact in another’s life, simply by investing their time. This resonated with me, in my desire to positively affect people through green building. I think it’s important to invest our limited time in causes that we think will make the world a better place.

Success to me is defined as positively impacting others, or positively impacting as many people as possible. Financial success is a secondary result of this primary goal. But as I noticed with Facebook in a previous post, there appears to be a corollary effect between these definitions of success. The more you dominate on positively impacting people, the more loot you’re likely to rake in. Yet, it’s important to be focused on the order of operations of this philosophy to achieve the win-win.

It’s so easy to grow accustomed to turning away from problems: ignoring the homeless guy asking you for change, or continuing the status quo in our woefully inefficient building industry. And so important to remember that an individual can change the world.

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?