Up close at LinkedIn

Reid Hoffman is the chairman and founder of the popular social networking site, a sort of six degrees of separation for anyone in business. He expects a quarter of the planet's population to eventually sign up, hardly an outlandish goal considering that there's a new member every second. The company has been profitable since 2006 and has attracted more than $100 million in venture capital funding (he's very tight with the VC crowd in Silicon Valley). I interviewed Hoffman in this month's Inc. magazine. Some snippets:

--I got a scholarship to Oxford University to study philosophy, but after about a year, I decided I didn't want academics. So I went to some venture capitalists and told them that I'd like to start a company. I had a couple of ideas that I was playing with. A better PIM (personal information manager for hand-held devices), a few others. They said, Go ship a product and then come back. So I got a job at Apple Computer in '93. After that, Fujitsu Software. I had a plan. What's the minimum amount of time I can work for companies before starting out on my own? I had a check-off list: need experience designing, need experience in product management, need experience shipping product, need experience in building a team. I wanted to make sure I learned everything I needed.

--My first start-up was a networking site called Socialnet. It was based on the theory that you have this new medium in which everyone is a publisher. So what are the ways in which people can live quality lives? Well, people have particular kinds of relationships. I'm looking to be dating somebody, I'm looking for a roommate, tennis partners. The idea was that you can actually be put electronically nearby to the people you'd be interested in, say, playing golf with. Maybe they're in the next building over, but you'd never know it.

--The trick to doing well with these things is to be in a place where people are saying, Hey, that's a crazy idea. If you're right, there's the opportunity to produce something really big. You want to be one to three years early. You want to start before others think it's an easy idea. It's much harder to be successful when 10 similar things are all being financed.

--The modern world is moving fast, and you have to move at that speed. This is true even for a restaurant owner. How do you get customer flow? How do you compete with the other restaurants? How do you run your restaurant? The world is accelerating not just for the Microsofts and Googles; it's accelerating for individuals and their careers, and in that acceleration, how do you adapt quickly?