Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn, has a premise about how the economic world will work from now on.Illustration by Stanley Chow

Early on a Monday evening in June, Reid Hoffman, the founder and executive chairman of the business-oriented networking site LinkedIn, met Mark Pincus, the founder and chief executive of the gaming site Zynga, for dinner at a casual restaurant in Portola Valley, California, a wealthy residential town at the western edge of Silicon Valley. Breakfasts and dinners are a big part of Hoffman’s life. He recently published two books on how to be successful in business, and is finishing a third, whose working title is “Blitzscaling.” His business is based on the idea of managing your career through relentless networking, which is something he enjoys.

If someone told you that Hoffman was the equipment manager for a Pearl Jam tour, it wouldn’t seem like a casting error. He is a big, broad-faced man with tousled brown hair, who typically dresses for work in black shorts, a black T-shirt, running shoes, and white socks. He befriended Pincus about twenty years ago, when the two met in the Bay Area to discuss business ideas, and discovered that they both believed that social media would be the next big thing in Silicon Valley. At dinner, Hoffman was wearing two watches, one on each wrist—an Apple Watch and a competing product—so he could see which one he liked better. He bustled in a few minutes late, sat down, and pulled out a small notebook filled with an indecipherable scrawl.

“Joss Whedon,” Hoffman said, referring to the film and television director who specializes in material about vampires and comic-book characters. “Is he somebody you think is cool and fun? No? I’m interviewing him on Wednesday.”

“I have a recruiting dinner,” Pincus said. “Actually a re-recruiting dinner.” He is a forty-nine-year-old triathlete, small and lithe, with a long flop of hair. He was wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers.

Hoffman shrugged. “Anything top of mind? ’Cause I have a list.” Hoffman tries to begin all meals with a ritual in which both parties write down a list of the topics they want to discuss.

“I made a connection between the things we were talking about with the President and the Summer of Love,” Pincus said.

During President Obama’s reëlection campaign, in 2012, Hoffman and Pincus each gave a million dollars to Priorities USA, the Democratic Super PAC. Since then, they have had the opportunity to spend time with Obama. In a private forty-five-minute meeting in the Oval Office in 2012, Pincus gave the President a PowerPoint presentation on what he calls “the product-management approach to government.” Obama telephones him now and then, sometimes at home, and Pincus and his wife have been Obama’s dinner guests.

In June, Hoffman helped organize the guest list for a dinner party for Obama in San Francisco, and he has had conversations with Obama at several meetings and dinners at the White House. One was for a small group that included Toni Morrison and the actress Eva Longoria, convened to give Obama advice about his post-Presidency. Hoffman and his wife, Michelle Yee, also attended the state dinner in late September for Xi Jinping, the President of China.

LinkedIn has provided the White House with some of the trove of data it has collected about its users’ activities in the job market; the data have been used in the annual Economic Report of the President. Earlier this year, a former LinkedIn executive, DJ Patil, was named to the new position of chief data scientist in the White House. In July, Hoffman organized a meeting for people involved with Obama’s new foundation on how to better harness the power of social networks. His list for dinner with Pincus included the question of what to discuss at that meeting.

The close relationship between Hoffman and the White House isn’t just about his being a major political donor. He and others like him have something more powerful than money to offer: a way for officials to connect with the largest possible audiences. In the nineteenth century, the bosses of political machines served this role; in the twentieth, it was media barons, especially in broadcasting and newspapers; in the twenty-first, it is people who have created vast online social networks.

This year’s Super Bowl attracted the biggest audience in the history of American network television—a hundred and fourteen million people. That represents an annual peak in the life of a declining medium. The three traditional evening broadcast news programs together draw twenty-two million viewers. Every day, a hundred and sixty-four million people in the U.S. and Canada, and up to a billion people worldwide, are active on Facebook.

Obama has said that he wants to encourage civic engagement after he leaves the White House. Silicon Valley can provide powerful tools to accomplish that. The same calculus draws people from Hollywood, such as Joss Whedon, on regular pilgrimages north to meet with Hoffman and others. And it’s why, when the launch of the HealthCare.gov Web site failed spectacularly in the fall of 2013, the White House’s chief technology officer (a friend of Hoffman’s) hired a team of Silicon Valley executives to help fix it.

In politics as in the rest of life, relationships move in two directions. Along with whatever help Obama gets in Silicon Valley, he will absorb some of its view of the world. In that view, humanity is a kind of Prometheus bound by a constricting web of old institutional arrangements that the Internet must clear away. Reid Hoffman and his friends have got very skillful at politics, nationally and globally, and their ideas have a good chance of being implemented.

“Why don’t we start with the Summer of Love?” Hoffman said.

Pincus shook his head. “No, let’s start with your list.”

“This jousting—I hope you’re not doing it on my account.”

Hoffman ticked off a few items: An upper-level undergraduate computer-science class he’s teaching at Stanford called “Technology-Enabled Blitzscaling.” Twitch, an online video platform for gamers. His recent meetings with George Osborne, the Chanceller of the Exchequer of the United Kingdom; Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary-General of the United Nations; the Duke of York; and the minister of cabinet affairs of the United Arab Emirates. How Hoffman and Pincus manage their wealth. (Hoffman is worth between three and four billion dollars, which puts him between twentieth and thirtieth place on the list of Silicon Valley’s richest people.)

“Oh, and one more,” he said. “Are you stacking A.I. at all?”

“I got that book ‘Superintelligence,’ ” Pincus said.

“I’ve actually decided it’s worth going deep on,” Hoffman said.

They finished the items on Hoffman’s list. “So let’s go to the President,” Hoffman said. “Start with my view or your view?”

“He’s coming back to his strength, being an orator to the people,” Pincus said. “When I had my one-on-one with him, I said, ‘Where’s Preacher Obama? And Obama the fighter? Scrappy with Congress, in the fray.’ When he’s Preacher Obama, he goes back to that J.F.K. place. My favorite moment was at the end, when he said, ‘Unless we solve governance, you’re not going to have the impact you want to have.’ ”

They talked for a while about ways the political system might be fixed through online activism. Last year, Hoffman contributed a million dollars to Mayday, the crowdfunded Super Pac founded by Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard law professor who is now running for President. Mayday is designed to end all Super PACs, removing big money from politics.

Pincus had one idea he was especially excited about. “In this election, we’d want a million people to raise one billion dollars to run Mike Bloomberg for President,” he said. Pincus and Hoffman know and admire Bloomberg. “Through Kickstarter. Say the minimum is five hundred million. I think he’d be the best. It’d be pretty cool. That would change politics forever.”

He tightened his body into a coil and leaned toward Hoffman. “Why couldn’t that happen? A million people, buying the Presidency. Look at Star Citizen,” he said, referring to an upcoming online multiplayer simulation game about the governance of the United Empire of Earth in the thirtieth century. Through crowdfunding appeals, Star Citizen has brought in some eighty million dollars to finance further game development.

“It’s a game that runs for two years, they have a hundred million users a year, two to three hundred thousand a day. People are passionate about the game, and the guy who does it”—Chris Roberts—“is a star. If you can do that, why can’t people buy the Presidency?” He meant modest voluntary contributors, not big-money donors like Hoffman and him. “A million people give a thousand dollars apiece. I believe there’s a million people who’d like to give a ‘fuck you’ to both political parties.”

Hoffman often finds himself providing a reality check to his wild-eyed friends. “I think Bloomberg had his people look at it,” he said, meaning that Bloomberg had thought about running and decided not to. But Pincus wasn’t convinced.

“He’s not seventy-per-cent sure he’d win,” Pincus said. “If he thought he’d win, he’d run. If he knew this would work, he’d do it. The media attention would be so massive! I think he’s, like, shy. Maybe a little risk-averse. He’s the opposite of Trump.”

“To some extent, that’s what happened with Obama,” Hoffman said. Thinking about how suddenly the Obama campaign had taken off in 2007 and 2008, he was warming up to the idea.

“I start with ‘What’s a fun story?’ ” Pincus said. “And fun stories wind up with money. Wouldn’t it be cool? And wouldn’t it change politics forever?”

Hoffman’s dinners gain altitude and velocity as they go on. It’s not about the food and drink. He is on a perpetual diet and seems barely to notice what is put before him. The conversation provides the stimulus: the grander the ideas, the more voluble he becomes.

It was time to get to Pincus’s list. “Summer of Love,” Hoffman said.

“Summer of Love. Should I remind you of the concept? The idea is that, in 2017, it’s the fiftieth anniversary of the original Summer of Love in San Francisco. Can we use that to generate a year-long summer of service?” Pincus explained that a series of rock concerts might be organized, offering tickets competitively through a new app. “Start in San Francisco. It could be gamified civic engagement. It’s a different narrative for tech. It’s not the narrative that’s been written for us. It’s disruption on an establishment level, not a tech level. I spoke to Bono about it, and he went nuts!”

“I’ll give it more thought,” Hoffman said.

“It’d be interesting to see what Obama thinks about it.”

“For sure. We’ll add that to the July meeting.”

Everything about Reid Hoffman—his business, his political activities, his philanthropy, and his social life—is based on a premise about how the economic world will work from now on. In the decades immediately after the Second World War, people thought about the economy in terms of corporations, government agencies, labor unions, and so on; middle-class Americans often aspired to a life spent at a big organization that offered job security, health care, and a pension. Beginning in the mid-nineteen-seventies, this social order fell apart, as economic life became much more uncertain and more favorable to Wall Street than to Main Street. The idea that companies should be run primarily to keep their stock price as high as possible came to the fore, the goal of lifetime employment faded, and bright people who wanted business careers were more attracted to finance than to industry. It was at this time that the growth of middle-class incomes began to slow, and inequality began to increase.

“The enemies of America will know that we mean business when we sell them a fleet of these sweet babies.”

Hoffman is convinced that we can fix the problem through Internet-enabled networks. Work is already becoming more temporary, sporadic, and informal, and this change should be embraced. Many more people will become entrepreneurial, if not entrepreneurs. The keeper of your career will be not your employer but your personal network—so you’d better put a lot of effort into making it as extensive and as vital as possible. A twenty-first-century version of William H. Whyte’s memorably titled 1956 book “The Organization Man” would, by Hoffman’s logic, be called “The Network Man,” and this virtual structure would define the age as fully as the big corporation defined the earlier age.

LinkedIn, which has more than three hundred and eighty million members, is meant to be the enabling device for the emerging era. Although outsiders tend to see the company as an inexhaustible source of nuisance e-mails, its members constantly bulk up their personal networks and post new material to their profiles, to be ready for the next job switch. Still, Silicon Valley is obsessed with “scale,” and LinkedIn is, as yet, insufficiently enormous.

Last year, Jeff Weiner, Hoffman’s successor as C.E.O., announced a plan to have LinkedIn create something he calls “the economic graph,” which would track all employment activity in the world, for the 3.3 billion people who work, with LinkedIn as the platform.

“The vision is to create economic opportunity for everyone on the globe,” Weiner, a small, peppy, bearded man of forty-five, told me when I visited him in his office. “We’ve built the infrastructure. It’s not fantasy.” LinkedIn would be a purveyor of education, in the form of online skill-building courses; Hoffman recently published an essay called “Disrupting the Diploma,” in which he argued that, in the future, people won’t think of higher education only as getting degrees from universities. (In April, LinkedIn acquired Lynda.com, the online education company.)

LinkedIn would also purvey business advice. Three years ago, it assembled a group of eight hundred “influencers”—Hoffman, Bill Gates, Deepak Chopra, Arianna Huffington—who began regularly posting on the LinkedIn site. (Counting the work of less rarefied figures, LinkedIn posts at least five hundred thousand new pieces of writing a month.) It would list every job everywhere and provide a profile for every member of the global workforce, including blue-collar workers. Every time you changed jobs or needed to acquire a new skill, you would use LinkedIn.

The wall of Hoffman’s office, along with photographs of him with Michael Bloomberg, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, contains a framed “network graph,” produced by the company’s data-analytics team, showing all the connections he makes to other people through LinkedIn. It’s a diagram of thousands of color-coded lines linking nodes on the network, with Hoffman at the center—by far the most densely connected node.

Hoffman has an uncanny ability to move seamlessly among the worlds of technology, investing, and politics and the worlds of games, science fiction, and comics. “Business is the systematic playing of games,” he says. He seems to conceive of himself as a self-invented superhero: the Ubernode, the world’s most networked person. He isn’t just another conventional networker or another greedy Silicon Valley prick. His project is to build a better world, whose outlines are much clearer to him than to most people.

Although he has become one of the informal rulers of the place he inhabits, the Ubernode is determined to be a kind of reverse exemplar of its culture. He and his wife live in a four-bedroom house in Palo Alto; he doesn’t own a private plane (though he sometimes rents one) or a vast rural estate; and his only obvious luxury, a Tesla, is a recent acquisition. He devotes much of his time to conducting Godfather-like meetings with friends, employees, tech aspirants, visiting dignitaries, and do-gooders who want advice or a favor. At some point, he will gently ask, “How can I be helpful?” All his activities are in the service of the same cause: to make it possible for more people to operate the way he does.

Hoffman likes to ask people, “Who’s in your tribe?” His tribe is entrepreneurs. Nancy Lublin, a “social entrepreneur” in New York (DoSomething.org, Crisis Text Line), says, “Reid introduced me to a different world, where for the first time I felt normal. This thing chose me. This thing chose Reid. I think our religion is entrepreneurship.” Hoffman calls himself “a mystical atheist,” but he says that he is “deeply engaged in religious questions.” The world he has created around himself has elaborate customs and rituals, and it has something to say about every part of life and every major issue. Not long ago, Hoffman worked with a branding company to devise a system of twenty-eight images—they look like the petroglyphs at ancient Native American sites in the West—one for each essential human virtue and one for Hoffman’s initials. Hoffman shares the meaning of the images with members of his tribe.

Hoffman was born during the Summer of Love, at Stanford Hospital, in Palo Alto, when his father was attending law school at the university. Bill Hoffman is the grandson of a Los Angeles newspaperman who wrote a series of pulp Westerns with titles like “Gun Gospel” and “Law of the Lash.” Hoffman’s mother, Deanna Ruth Rutter, grew up in Silicon Valley and also became a lawyer. The couple met as students at Foothill College, when he nominated her for a school beauty pageant. They married and promptly separated, leaving Hoffman the only child of estranged parents who were still in their early twenties.

Rutter brought him up for a few years in California and, briefly, in Alaska, where she had taken a job. Then, because “Mom was going through some hard times,” she and Hoffman moved in with her parents, back in Sunnyvale. He ended up with his father, who had remarried and was living in Mill Valley. When that marriage ended, he moved to Berkeley with his father, who had entered another relationship. “To have your parents get divorced at a young age, there’s a lot of turbulence,” Hoffman says. “We all grew up together, in some way. It was not idyllic. It was intense, vibrant, sometimes oppressive. I felt I was very much in a world of my own. I didn’t meld much in school. I was kind of a loner.”

Cartoon by George Booth

Hoffman thinks of his parents as having been sixties radicals. He has been told by relatives that he was teargassed as a child at demonstrations. His father worked for the federal War on Poverty in its dying days, and with the Black Panthers and other radical clients, though he wound up as a conventional business lawyer. At the age of twelve, Hoffman went to his first Grateful Dead concert with his father. Last summer, he took Bill Hoffman backstage to meet Mickey Hart at a reunion concert of the surviving Dead members.

A common origin story for tech tycoons entails a transforming youthful encounter with personal computers or the Internet. For Steve Jobs, it took place at the Homebrew Computer Club, in Menlo Park. For Hoffman, it was fantasy role-playing board games, especially Dungeons & Dragons, which he took up when he was nine. One day at Martin Luther King, Jr., Middle School, in Berkeley, a classmate told him that a game company called Chaosium had an office in Emeryville, a neighboring city, and that it occasionally invited groups of boys to come in and test its products.

Hoffman got himself into one of the groups, and then returned to Chaosium, offering to correct errors he had found in a set of role-playing scripts for Dungeons & Dragons that the company had published. He wrote a detailed memo and took it to Steve Perrin, a major game developer (All the World’s Monsters, RuneQuest, Elfquest) who was working at Chaosium at the time. “He looked at it and said, ‘This is good feedback,’ ” Hoffman says. “So they gave me another scenario pack to review.” He also began writing reviews for Different Worlds, a gaming magazine that Chaosium published, and getting modestly paid for his work.

Hoffman persuaded his father to send him first to a private school in Berkeley, and then to the Putney School, a progressive boarding school in Vermont, which another classmate was planning to attend. He applied without telling his parents. “Vermont was the farthest place from California I could imagine that still seemed feasible, ” he said. Once he got there, his relationship with his friend from Berkeley turned sour and another student started a bullying campaign against him. He compared it to the organized cruelty in “Lord of the Flies,” saying, “Little harassments, the techniques of trying to demonstrate power and dominance—that was my first experience of betrayal.” Hoffman used game logic to solve the problem: “The way you deal with bullies is you change their economic equation. Make it more expensive for them to hassle you.” He went to the chief bully, and said that if he continued to hassle him, “ ‘I will break everything you own.’ He stopped.”

The miseries of Hoffman’s early life ended when he got to Stanford, in 1989. He enrolled in a new major called Symbolic Systems, a combination of philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and computer science. He met Michelle Yee in his freshman year. He also became close to Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley provocateur who specializes in starting companies and making impolitic public statements. He has come to embody the libertarianism that permeates much of Silicon Valley. They both won seats on Stanford’s student senate, with Hoffman as the left-winger and Thiel as the right-winger.

Hoffman decided to become a philosopher or a public intellectual, a term he likes to use. But after studying for three years at Oxford, on a Marshall scholarship, he decided against an academic career. His professors spent their time thinking about highly specific problems and publishing for an audience of their peers. Hoffman’s ambitions were almost diametrically opposed to that kind of thinking.

In the early nineties, when Hoffman returned from Oxford, he and Thiel spent a weekend at Hoffman’s grandparents’ house, in Mendocino County, talking about what they were going to do with their lives. Thiel told me that Hoffman was entranced by “Snow Crash,” a science-fiction novel by Neal Stephenson, published in 1992, which takes place in a twenty-first-century California where government has collapsed and people create avatars and try to find a new way to live through a technology-based virtual society called the Metaverse.

The term “Internet” was not yet in general circulation, and “social network” was an academic concept that psychologists and sociologists used to derive mathematical formulas that explained people’s patterns of friendships. But Hoffman was playing with a set of ingredients that he had first explored at Stanford, with Thiel and others—fantasy gaming, computer technology, philosophy—and thinking about whether there was a big idea that could enable him to have a major effect on the world, first through a business and then through the creation of an entire social system.

His first job was at a short-lived online service at Apple called eWorld. Then he worked at WorldsAway, a “virtual chat” community, owned by Fujitsu, where users interacted through fictionalized graphic representations of themselves. In 1997, Hoffman started his own company, called SocialNet, which created a way for people to connect with each other for various purposes, mainly dating, using pseudonyms.

SocialNet was soon acquired for a modest sum by a company called Spark Networks, which now owns the religious dating sites JDate and ChristianMingle. Hoffman and his friends had failed to realize that the most successful online networks would get people to use their real names. But in starting online software businesses based on the idea of connecting people, they had arrived at a key perception about the Internet.

Most traditional companies thought of the new medium as a potentially miraculous, and cheap, way to broadcast their products to much larger audiences. People like Hoffman, Pincus, and Thiel saw it as a way to, as Hoffman puts it, “configure the space in which people would interact” on their own: the analogy was more to the telephone than to television or radio. The members of the network would decide what information it carried, and communication would run between members, not from the center to the members. This was the theory; along with it went a super-aggressive mode of business behavior. The robber barons of the late nineteenth century often associated their drive to power with religious piety or with Darwin’s theory of natural selection. The equivalent for Internet entrepreneurs is a rhetoric of fighting established interests on behalf of ordinary people. Pincus coined the phrase “revolution of the ants” to describe what he and his friends believed they were fomenting.

“What’s the point of being filled with gifts if they can only be beaten out of you?”

Sarnoff’s law, a twentieth-century broadcasting maxim named after the founder of NBC, holds that the value of a network rises and falls in lockstep with audience size. Silicon Valley’s version is Metcalfe’s law, named after one of the inventors of Ethernet, a pivotal technology for computer-to-computer contact. The law says that the value of a network grows exponentially with the number of its users. (Hoffman prefers the word “superlinear” to indicate that some people in a network are much more connected than others.) His generation’s theory of the Internet means that you can get much bigger, much faster, without creating a conventional product at all.

Hoffman and Yee, who got married in 2004, have decided not to have children. “Our position is a reasoned position,” he says. “We both think children are delightful. For me, the projects I’m doing at major scale in the world—the project is the major driver. For her, she’s pretty focussed on the spiritual nature of life. It doesn’t have to be her own biology. As long as she can help people grow.” Yee is a clinical speech pathologist who has stopped seeing patients and is now, Hoffman says, trying to find a large philanthropic project to which she can devote herself. She rarely participates in his business and political dinners, and, to get away from the all-consuming Silicon Valley culture, she spends time on Buddhist retreats. She would like to do something to help people of the Navajo Nation, one of the most poverty-stricken of the major Native American tribes.

Once, I asked Hoffman whether he thought that having grown up without siblings or a conventional family, without roots in a neighborhood, had made especially intense his connections to friends, professional contacts, people he met online, society as a whole. He shrugged amiably and said that the thought had never occurred to him. “Is that the psychological origin story for my focus on networks?” he said. “Maybe.”

Hoffman spends every Monday at Greylock, the Silicon Valley venture-capital firm, where he is one of a small group of partners. Greylock’s headquarters are on Sand Hill Road, the Via Imperii of technology investing, close to the Stanford campus. LinkedIn, where Hoffman occupies another office for much of the week, has a six-building campus in the industrial flats of Mountain View, a few miles to the east, right next to Google’s.

His two jobs, his relentless round of breakfasts and dinners, his regular forays into the hipper north branch of Silicon Valley in San Francisco, and a great deal of travel put him at the nexus of the technology culture. As he once remarked to a visitor, “More or less, if there’s anything in the Valley I’m going to know about it.” One day when I was at Greylock, Bill Gates dropped by for a few hours to hear about the company’s portfolio. Greylock was an early investor in Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg now invests part of his fortune with Greylock.

When Hoffman is not in Silicon Valley, he’s often at gatherings like the annual TED conference in Vancouver; the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland (though Hoffman says he’s likely to eliminate that one because it takes too long to get there); the two annual Allen & Co. gatherings, one in Sun Valley and one in Tucson; Bilderberg, the venerable international-relations conference in Europe; a relatively new annual get-together in Montana hosted by Eric Schmidt, of Google, which includes such guests from outside Silicon Valley as, last year, Lady Gaga and Jeff Koons; Dialog, in Utah, which Peter Thiel hosts every other year with the entrepreneur Auren Hoffman (no relation to Reid); and an occasional series called Foo, which stands for Friends of O’Reilly, staged by Tim O’Reilly, a technology guru known as the coiner of the term Web 2.0. O’Reilly is planning an event this fall called WTF, which stands for What’s the Future?

The closest thing Hoffman has to an extended-family vacation is The Weekend to Be Named Later, a highly scripted annual conference held between Christmas and New Year’s at a Southern California resort. Ten years ago, Hoffman and Nancy Lublin, the social entrepreneur in New York, founded the conference, because they felt that Renaissance Weekend, the year-end networking conference in Hilton Head (whose most famous guests, in the nineteen-eighties, were the rising Clintons), didn’t speak to their generation. Hoffman and Lublin invite a hundred and fifty or so people roughly in their forties, along with their families—Yee goes on occasion. Days are devoted to panel discussions of life’s big issues, and evenings to games.

The master construct in Hoffman’s world is allocating capital to other entrepreneurs—a category that includes politicians (Senator Cory Booker, of New Jersey, is a favorite), people starting businesses, and founders of nonprofit organizations whom Hoffman considers to be members of his tribe. He told me that in Silicon Valley prestige is not especially important, which means that there is an assumed equivalence between numerically measurable performance and social value.

Technology investing, especially at this moment, represents a highly specialized form of hypercapitalism. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, businesses needed investment capital in order to build factories and stores and to acquire equipment and inventory. Only then could they begin to make money. Internet startups don’t require much in the way of physical assets beyond office space, and they can have global reach instantaneously.

It’s theoretically possible to make almost unimaginable amounts of money very quickly, on relatively small investments. Last year, Facebook bought WhatsApp for nineteen billion dollars, when it was less than five years old, with fifty-five employees and minimal revenues. The acquisition brought WhatsApp’s original venture funder a sixty-to-one return on its investment. Greylock was an early investor in Instagram, which sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, when it had only thirteen employees.

Even in this age of inequality, there’s nothing as unequal as the distribution of success in Silicon Valley. One of Hoffman’s venture-capital friends, Mike Maples, Jr., estimates that of the roughly thirty thousand tech startups a year, only ten will wind up representing ninety-seven per cent of the total value of all of them, and one will represent as much value as all the others combined.

“Louie, you apply for a loan while Rocco heads in through this door and files for bankruptcy.”

A rigorous study of twenty years’ worth of Silicon Valley startups by two economists—Robert Hall, of Stanford, and Susan Woodward, of Sand Hill Econometrics—found that almost three-quarters of company founders who get venture funding (a category that represents only a small minority of those who try to get venture funding) wind up making nothing. Venture capital is overwhelmingly oriented toward speed, big ideas, and the quest for the obsessive, super-smart, rule-breaking entrepreneur-hero.

There is some aesthetic variation within Silicon Valley—Sand Hill Road offices have hardwood floors and corporate art on the walls, San Francisco offices have exposed-brick walls and open workspaces—but everybody is intense, casual, sleep-deprived, and preoccupied with launches of companies and products. Meetings at Greylock have a suppressed ferocity, as if there were a competition for who among the partners comes across as the most low-key.

Does this founder have the right degree of fanatical commitment to his idea? How can the partners build out the team from the network of talent Greylock maintains? Can the user base double every month? How powerful are the company’s natural enemies, in government and business? How early can Greylock invest in a company, and how big a share can it get?

At the moment, Silicon Valley is preoccupied by companies such as Uber and Airbnb (where Hoffman is a board member), which use mobile devices to create marketplaces that instantly bring together buyers and sellers. The Greylock partners hear a lot of pitches from companies with cute one-word names and bright logos (Meerkat, Sprig, Nextdoor, Vessel, Operator) that aim at “disrupting” some existing set of economic arrangements. At least in conversation, nobody is safe: education, health-care delivery, media, national currencies.

In 1999, after Hoffman sold SocialNet, he went to work for PayPal, which Peter Thiel had just started. It still stands as a model for Silicon Valley businesses, partly because of the subsequent success of its executives—including Thiel, Hoffman, and Elon Musk, of Tesla and SpaceX—but mainly because it helped establish a number of lasting principles. One is extreme adaptability. PayPal began as a security system for the PalmPilot. It evolved into a system for processing transactions on eBay, the world’s first successful online marketplace.

Hoffman’s most important job at PayPal was to negotiate with the outside world. As he puts it, “Relative to the rest of the crew, I had a massively better idea of where another person was coming from and how to bridge the gap.” One of Silicon Valley’s favorite maxims is: “It’s better to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission.” PayPal invoked this maxim a lot.

The year Hoffman started at PayPal, eBay acquired a competing service and wanted PayPal to fail. Hoffman persuaded eBay that if it simply cut off PayPal’s access to its site the Justice Department’s antitrust division might step in. The division was suing Microsoft for cutting off Windows users’ access to Netscape Navigator, a competitor to its Internet browser.

Hoffman was especially good at finding some degree of moderation in relations with the world as it exists, without abandoning aggressive behavior. He learned from the negative example of Napster—the early music-file-sharing program, which was so indifferent to copyright law that it went out of business after two years—and opted for compromise rather than total defiance.

PayPal was not in a natural state of harmony with many banking laws and regulations, at home and abroad. In 2002, for example, Hoffman took care of one such problem by persuading an influential friend in Japan to arrange for PayPal to do business there through a Web browser instead of incorporating as a bank. In October, 2001, when the passage of the Patriot Act severely damaged PayPal’s second line of business—handling cash transactions for gamblers—Hoffman helped arrange a quick sale of PayPal to eBay.

Just a few years ago, it would have seemed fanciful to assume that one could algorithmically establish enough trust among total strangers for them to buy and sell things from each other without having any direct contact. Rating and reputation systems were new. Anything involving currency had to flow through regulated financial institutions. And it wasn’t yet clear that it was more important to build up a big user base than to make money. Early on, PayPal paid people five and then ten dollars for getting someone else to join the service, which produced losses in the tens of millions a year.

At PayPal, Hoffman helped invent the technique of converting a large user community into a political lobbying organization: users flood the authorities with e-mails protesting whatever contemplated action stands in the way of the company’s ambitions. Silicon Valley has since applied this method repeatedly, notably in Washington in 2012, when Congress was considering legislation to tighten copyright law, and in New York in 2015, when Mayor Bill de Blasio made a move to restrict Uber.

After eBay bought PayPal, Hoffman began investing in social networks. In 2003, for seven hundred thousand dollars, he and Pincus bought the Six Degrees patent, a methodology for constructing social networks. That year, Hoffman officially incorporated a new social network. It was like SocialNet, except that this time people would use their real names and focus on their professional lives. He called it LinkedIn.

Hoffman saw the enormous potential of Mark Zuckerberg’s invention, too. In June, 2004, he set up a meeting between Zuckerberg and Thiel, which led to Thiel’s first five-hundred-thousand-dollar investment in Facebook. The next year, just after Zuckerberg’s move from his Harvard dorm room to Silicon Valley, Hoffman and Pincus each bought half of one per cent of Facebook for thirty-seven thousand five hundred dollars. Hoffman could have been a lead investor, but he passed up the opportunity, because he thought it would look as if he were hedging his bet on LinkedIn. At the time, the most popular social-networking sites, like Friendster and MySpace, didn’t focus on business; and the most popular employment sites, like Monster.com, didn’t focus on social networks. It wasn’t as obvious to others as it was to Hoffman that a business-oriented social network could work.

“Sure, I wanted my hair back, but not my seventies hair.”

By 2008, Facebook had a hundred million members; LinkedIn had only thirty-two million. Facebook still has a far higher membership than LinkedIn. People at LinkedIn worried that Facebook might try to take over its niche, but Hoffman was convinced that people would want to have separate business and personal online networks. LinkedIn kept encouraging users to maintain detailed, regularly updated, elaborately connected public profiles as the permanent foundation of their careers. One of Hoffman’s investing mistakes came in 2013, when he passed up a chance for Greylock to meet with the team behind Snapchat, the wildly popular disappearing-message service. “I didn’t get the ephemerality,” he said.

For the first two years, Hoffman concentrated on growth, so LinkedIn had no revenues. (Today, most of ​LinkedIn’s $2.2 billion in annual income is from fees paid by recruiters for access to extra information about the site’s users.) Almost from the beginning, LinkedIn offered members the opportunity to upload their entire e-mail contact list, which generates large numbers of automatic invitations. Hoffman is aware that some people find this annoying, but that is a problem only if it impedes growth. As he puts it, “People may say, ‘I’m getting all these fucking invitations,’ but you don’t tune it too high or too low.”

In 2006, LinkedIn decided to make all profiles partly public, so that when you type someone’s name into a Google search, that person’s LinkedIn profile is one of the top results. LinkedIn uses every possible algorithm to suggest people you might want to add to your network, and constantly tweaks its products based on the data it receives about what’s popular among its users. LinkedIn also harnesses its members’ game-playing competitiveness by, for example, listing the users’ number of connections, up to a maximum of five hundred. (Every conference room in Hoffman’s building at LinkedIn is named after a canonical game: Pac-Man, Tetris, Space Invaders.) LinkedIn went public in the spring of 2011, just after it had exceeded a hundred million users, and Hoffman officially became a billionaire. He owns twelve per cent of the company and fifty-eight per cent of the voting shares.

To imagine that at this point the people at LinkedIn would have semiretired in order to spend time trekking in Bhutan would be to misunderstand the culture of Silicon Valley. One former LinkedIn executive told me that six years ago, when Hoffman appointed Jeff Weiner C.E.O., the engineers were initially suspicious, because Weiner wasn’t one of them. But somebody analyzed his presence on the LinkedIn site and discovered that usually the only time he wasn’t on it was between 3:30 and 4 a.m. (Weiner’s office insists that today he stays offline between 11 P.M. and 5 A.M.) Hoffman travels three or four times a year to China, LinkedIn’s fastest-growing market, and he is impressed by the Chinese work ethic. He told one conference audience about a startup in Beijing that was able to ship its first product in just six months, by renting a block of hotel rooms and requiring all employees to live there, taking breaks only to eat, sleep, and exercise. LinkedIn’s forced march toward the economic graph and the network age continues.

These dreams may never be fully realized. But what if they are? Hoffman and LinkedIn represent the distilled essence of Silicon Valley’s vision of the economic future. People will switch jobs every two or three years; indeed, the challenge is to prevent them from switching more often. Hoffman’s friend Evan Williams, the co-founder of Twitter and the founder of Medium, showed me around Medium’s San Francisco office. Gesturing toward the open workspace, he said, “Everyone out there has had a call from a recruiter this week.” Hoffman’s most recent book, “The Alliance,” argues that it should be considered honorable to remain in a job for as unthinkably long as four years.

Because Silicon Valley jobs don’t carry with them twentieth-century expectations about security and benefits, employers compensate people as much as possible with stock, so that they think of themselves as owners rather than employees. It’s assumed that what everybody really wants is to quit and create a startup, and, for those who aren’t in tech, the future as imagined in Silicon Valley may not entail full-time employment at all. Instead, people would assemble their economic lives through elements provided by online marketplace companies from Silicon Valley: a little Uber driving here, a little TaskRabbiting there.

If you grant Hoffman’s premise that the networked economy is the new model, you can view its advent with excitement or with unease. Hoffman likes to cite a statistic from a United Nations paper on sustainable development goals: the global economy will need six hundred million new jobs over the next twenty years, and existing business can provide only ten to twenty million of them. The rest, he claims, will have to come from startups, so societies everywhere will have to reorient themselves significantly in order to make entrepreneurship easier.

That is the object of all Hoffman’s political and philanthropic activity. As he told one visitor, “I’m trying to get politicians to understand that solving this problem is about facilitation of a network, as opposed to”—sarcastically—“the New Deal.” He has a soaring optimism in the power of his model to make life better for everybody, and believes that the pre-Internet arrangements can’t do that. He told me that he has concluded over the past year that the American political parties are too entrenched to solve the country’s problems, so he’s unlikely, in this election cycle, to be making another big contribution to Priorities USA, the Democratic Super PAC he supported in 2012. (Thus far, among the Presidential candidates, he has had private meetings with Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, but has not made up his mind whom to support for President.) What he’s trying to achieve, he says, is “massive, outsize, discontinuous impact.”

Not everyone in Silicon Valley is as sanguine about the technology-enabled economic revolution. There is an ongoing conversation about the uncertain economic future for middle-class and working-class Americans who don’t have technology skills. Joe Kraus, an old friend of Hoffman’s who works for Google’s venture-capital division, told me, “My instinct is that creating the valley elsewhere hasn’t been successful. It would be presumptuous to say, ‘Of course it will work elsewhere.’ I just don’t know.”

“Why didn’t you bring a cardigan or lightweight jacket?”

John Lilly, one of Hoffman’s partners at Greylock, was openly pessimistic: “I’m more lefty than your typical Silicon Valley guy. I believe actions have consequences, and shit like that. Clearly, wealth is becoming more concentrated, and the network takes a larger and larger share.” He suspects that the twentieth century was an anomaly. “There was no middle class, then there was a middle class, now we’re back where we started—it’s hollowed out. I don’t see where the middle class is going to come from. You’ll start seeing more conversation about a guaranteed income. Right now, there’s an absolute belief that markets can solve everything—software can.”

Even Mike Maples, who describes himself as someone who believes in “free people and the free market,” told me that when he went to Dallas to talk to Glenn Beck, the conservative talk-show host, he was surprised to find that Beck was concerned about how his audience would be affected by the economic future that Maples was describing. “He said, ‘What do you say to a guy like me? How do you answer the argument that there are forty million people in red states who are going to get displaced?’ ”

Hoffman’s new world of online platforms, marketplaces, and networks produces companies that emerge from the brutal competition among startups as big top-down organizations with quasi-monopoly status: Amazon in retailing, Facebook in social networking, Google in search, LinkedIn in business networking. Once network effects really kick in, they create a powerful barrier to entry for potential rivals: the more effort you’ve put into your identity on Facebook or LinkedIn or YouTube, the more difficult it becomes for you to switch to a competitor. One of Peter Thiel’s favorite bad-boy notions is that competition is “antipodal to capitalism”: once a company becomes successful, it should try to establish a monopoly position, so that it can charge the kind of prices and make the kind of profits that are available only to companies without meaningful competitors.

Perhaps one class of people will live inside big companies, and a larger class will be part of a looser networked community. The more sincerely you believe that a better world is emerging from this process—a world of rapid improvement in the lives of billions of people—the more wholeheartedly you can work to hasten its advent. It’s hard to imagine that there could be a truer believer than Reid Hoffman.

On the evening after his dinner with Mark Pincus, Hoffman met another member of his network at a popular Silicon Valley restaurant called Fuki Sushi. Hoffman had hoped to gather a number of friends to play his favorite board game, Settlers of Catan, in which the players compete to create the fastest-growing notional settlements. (He has produced a version for his friends called Startups of Silicon Valley, with the same rules but different nomenclature: products instead of settlements, disrupters instead of robbers, talent instead of wheat.) But people were too busy, so he had dinner instead with James Manyika, who works in Silicon Valley for McKinsey, the consulting firm. Usually, Hoffman does not make reservations under his own name, lest he be assailed by supplicants, but in this case he had, and he had been given a small private dining room. Manyika, a tall, elegant man of forty-nine who grew up in Zimbabwe and became an engineering faculty member at Oxford, arrived a little late from a meeting with Marissa Mayer, the chief executive of Yahoo.

“They seem to have decided this is my room,” Hoffman said. “I’ve eaten here with Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.”

“How’s Michelle?” Manyika said.

“She’s trying to figure out the cadence of her life—spirituality versus the rhythms of Silicon Valley.”

Even before the list-making ritual had taken place, Hoffman and Manyika were off. Did Manyika know of a caterer who specializes in African-diaspora food, whom Hoffman could use at one of the monthly dinners he gives for a group of chief executives of technology companies? (Yes.) How could Hoffman be helpful to Ashish Thakkar, a bright young man who runs businesses in Africa from a base in Dubai, whom Hoffman had met at Davos and who had visited him at Greylock? (Hoffman and Manyika would co-host a dinner for Thakkar.) Would Hoffman join President Obama’s Global Development Council, of which Manyika is vice-chairman? (Yes.) How was Hoffman’s next book, on friendship, coming along? (It would follow the book on “blitzscaling.”)

A waiter entered. “I have an algorithm,” Hoffman said. “If it’s a good place, order the special. If it’s a bad place, order what they can’t screw up.” They ordered the special.

After a brisk trot through a few other topics, Hoffman said, “I’ve started spinning up on the whole A.I. and ethics thing.”

“You’re one of the few people thinking about this,” Manyika said. He had recently arranged a meeting between Hoffman and a delegation of Catholic priests. “They found the conversation very interesting. They’re going to have a meeting in Rome soon.”

“I owe Michelle a trip to Rome.”

That would be great, Manyika said, because then Hoffman could also meet Ignazio Marino, the mayor of Rome, who wants to “digitize” the Eternal City. “He’s going to come here,” Manyika said. “He came once and had dinner with Larry Page. He’d like to create a small group here.”

Hoffman said he’d loved the meeting with the priests. “I thought it would be only about social media. Instead, it was about A.I.” Artificial intelligence touches all his most passionate interests: philosophy, science fiction, potential business ventures, the coming shape of society—or, if society implies human beings, the coming shape of world civilization post-society. “My high-line answer was we’re so far from the subject it’s hard to know. The challenge is figuring out the unknown unknowns. We are the model of an intelligent being. But any form of A.I. is actually a different species. It’s not copies of human beings. You’re really seriously jumping into the deep end. How do we create ethical A.I.? We have to address this in a more spiritual way. How is the ethical algorithm developed?”

“For some reason, the earthlings are not regarding us with the level of awe we were told to expect.”

Hoffman told Manyika he’d think about giving a talk on artificial intelligence. It would give him the chance to address some big questions that have been on his mind lately: “What are the ethical outcomes of life systems? Could you imagine a system that decided it would be better to eliminate human beings? You could make an argument. You’re screwing up the climate, you’re killing off other species.”

It was the end of a long day of meetings at LinkedIn—philanthropy, product reviews, a visitor from Hollywood—but Hoffman had lit on a scalable topic. His arms rose above his head, as if pulled by invisible wires. “Is what we can create an ethical system, or a system that doesn’t contravene humans? There will be some people who think whatever’s right is to let the next step in evolution play out. That’s a scary thought.”

“There’s a nonzero chance that A.I. will be smarter than humans,” Manyika said.

“Isn’t that one hundred per cent? Isn’t it just a time coefficient? If we survive at all. Nobody knowledgeable thinks it’s zero. Everyone knows it’s ten to a hundred years.”

“There are people looking at this,” Manyika said. He and Hoffman were hoping that this was the kind of issue that might engage Pope Francis.

It was time for the next item on Manyika’s list: “Jobs. Middle class.” Manyika was one of a roster of people, including five Nobel Prize-winning economists, who, in June, had signed a statement called “Open Letter on the Digital Economy,” which called attention to the problem of dramatic technological advances and stagnant growth in income or wages for most Americans. The letter called for an ambitious program of new research and changes in the policies of government and business.

Although Hoffman usually likes being associated with big liberal-minded reformist efforts, he had not signed the letter. “My LinkedIn team was hesitant,” he said, a little apologetically.

“Eric didn’t sign, either,” Manyika said.

“I agree with the thrust of it. We should do something.”

Manyika understood that not every chief executive in Silicon Valley could sign the statement, but he was gently trying to pull Hoffman to the left, and he knew how to frame the argument so that it would appeal to him. He went on, “We cannot ignore this problem. Right now, everybody’s punting. We know the share of income that goes to wages is a declining portion, compared with capital expenditures. What does that mean for jobs? Entrepreneurship is part of the answer. Mass-scale entrepreneurship. Before you even get to A.I.”

“You have to be able to let people adapt,” Hoffman said. “You have to have cheap resources to put across the whole system. How do you get inclusion within the tech ecosystem?”

“Very few of the programs have scale,” Manyika said.

“You have to scale to infinite,” Hoffman said. ♦