LinkedIn’s story has come to a close — being acquired by Microsoft for $26.2 billion — and its rise and finale is thanks to a laundry list of people. Two of those who were instrumental to its growth are now investors at Greylock Partners: Josh Elman and Reid Hoffman.
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Beyond the two of them, Greylock Partners more broadly has invested in startups that have risen to incredible valuations and exits, like Instagram and Dropbox. (The latter is probably a bit more debatable, given questions about its core business — but maybe there’s more we can learn from the two of them on stage.)
It’s an interesting time for Greylock Partners and the investor community as a whole. Later-stage startups have been hit with markdowns from institutional investors and there has been a bit of a lack of high-profile IPOs — with it seeming like companies like Uber and Airbnb are in no rush to get out the door. Venture capital can be a frustratingly long waiting game for LPs, but even so it does seem like the model may be in a bit of a different place than it once was.
Then again, LinkedIn sold for $26.2 billion. So it does seem like there’s plenty of appetite for M&A, with other recent big exits with Intel snapping up Nervana Systems for $350 million and Salesforce picking up Quip for $750 million (the latter of which was also a Greylock investment).
Hoffman was a very accomplished and prolific angel investor, getting in early on Facebook. One of the starting lineup in the PayPal mafia, Hoffman joined Greylock Partners in 2009.
Elman and Hoffman met in the early days of LinkedIn, when Elman took on a role as a product manager in 2004. They connected once again when Elman joined Greylock in 2011
There’s another connection between the two as well: both are Stanford alumni. That’s not entirely surprising — the Stanford alumni network is massive in Silicon Valley. Josh holds a BS in Symbolic Systems with a focus on Human Computer Interaction from Stanford University. Reid earned a master’s degree in philosophy from Oxford University and a bachelor’s degree — also in symbolic systems — from Stanford University.
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