Cowritten with fellow entrepreneur Ben Casnocha, the book argues that "every individual is a small business." It urges readers to "craft iterative, flexible plans," to be in "permanent beta." It cites as case studies the rise of Netflix and the fall of Detroit, the pivots of Flickr and PayPal, the arc of George Clooney's acting career. In February Hoffman published his first book, The Start-Up of You, which does in fact try to help us figure out who we all should be. "The future," he says, "is sooner and stranger than you think." He elaborates at length on why he sees data as "Web 3.0" and why every business needs a "big data strategy." In the session after that, he explains why the potential of mobile computing would likely take three more years to be realized and why "biology as code" would soon spur extraordinary innovations. On this November afternoon, Hoffman is here to cochair a four-day conference called " Silicon Valley Comes to the UK." At the podium, the would-be philosopher proves that he still has some very big ideas to discuss. So I decided I would be a software entrepreneur instead." "Academia wasn't the right platform," he says. "I'd write books and essays to help us figure out who we all should be." Within months of starting his term, though, Hoffman concluded that spending decades answering a single philosophical question might not have sufficient impact on the world. "What I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture," the 44-year-old LinkedIn cofounder reflects over lunch during one of his regular trips back to the UK. After Stanford, he took a Marshall scholarship so he could ponder the great ideas at Oxford. Reid Hoffman dreamed of becoming a philosopher.
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