Reid Hoffman on tech sector issues

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This Reid Hoffman video stands in sharp comparison to the Ayn Rand-loving frat-bro culture that seems to infect technology  sector companies based in Silicon Valley. However Hoffman in his past has reflected at least some of their libertarian views.

However Reid Hoffman is cut from different cloth and represents a slightly older generation in the technology sector who pioneered the dot.com era.

He grew up in Berkeley, back when the technology sector was more hardware focused and Silicon Valley actually made micro-chips. Back then HP (now Agilent) and Techtronix made measurement equipment in the Valley and it was the centre of the cold war missile technology. The east coast from IBM in New York State to the Boston corridor represented a worthy adversary of Silicon Valley. The technology sector only opted to have Silicon Valley as its home during the move to personal computing.

eWorld

Hoffman worked at Apple on eWorld – an early way of connecting Macs to the nascent public internet. There was interesting ideas that came out of that at the time including work on object orientated programming. Apple later abandoned eWorld when they saw the ‘net taking off and instead collaborated with selected ISPs like ClaraNet and Demon in the UK.

Reid Hoffman later founded a prototype-social network and was part of the PayPal mafia before founding LinkedIn. The irony is that the PayPal mafia were ground zero for the current generation of technology company CEOs.

Reid Hoffman offers a more thoughtful considered viewpoint on the future of the technology sector.

How Technology is Shaping the Future of Human Society was filmed by the Aspen Institute.