The Investor's Shelf — one person
Reid Hoffman
Co-founder and former executive chairman of LinkedIn; partner at Greylock Partners; co-founder of Inflection AI
Blitzscaling and The Start-up of You outlived their news cycles and gave the industry durable vocabulary, on top of a first-rate operating and investing record.
6 books of their own · 7 articles · 49 books they recommend
Books they wrote 6
Ben Casnocha, Chris Yeh · 2014 · Subtitled 'Managing Talent in the Networked Age'
June Cohen, Deron Triff · 2021 · Book drawn from the Masters of Scale podcast
Articles and essays 4
- Move fast and make things: the new career mantraThe San Francisco Standard, 2025
- No, AI isn't coming to destroy us. But it will transform the worldThe San Francisco Standard, 2025
- The Foundation to Successful BlitzscalingGreylock
- Our Investment in Aurora — a Safe Path to Scale Autonomous VehiclesGreylock
Blog posts 3
- Humanity's Hegelian Golden Braidreidhoffman.org, 2024
- AI, Society, and Our World Orderreidhoffman.org, 2024
- LinkedIn's Series B Pitch to Greylock: Pitch Advice for Entrepreneursreidhoffman.org, 2013
Blog
Reid Hoffman — Entrepreneur. Investor. Strategist.
Books they recommend 49
Hoffman's recommendations cluster around two obsessions: the mechanics of scale and the ethics of how technology reshapes human coordination. He returns often to books that deal with organizational theory from first principles — not management advice, but structural explanations for why some organizations compound while others plateau. A second thread is network theory applied to careers and strategy. Sources for this list draw primarily from the Masters of Scale podcast (where Hoffman has named books in guest conversations and solo episodes), his two-part LinkedIn newsletter series on blitzscaling, and interviews in which he discusses influences on his thinking about Silicon Valley's growth playbook.
Books Hoffman has recommended on LinkedIn and Masters of Scale 22
Entrepreneurship and Startups 3
General History 2
War and Strategy 2
Business and Management 2
Company Histories 2
Technology and Computing 2
Fiction 1
Psychology and Behaviour 1
Sociology and Culture 1
Medicine and Biology 1
Science 1
Productivity and Habits 1
Philosophy 1
Religion and Spirituality 1
Leadership 1
Superbook reading list 12
Not yet given a topic 4
Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh · not in an entry yet
“Hoffman's own framework for scaling companies faster than is conventionally prudent — accepting chaos in exchange for market capture. Referenced constantly in Masters of Scale episodes as the conceptual backbone for every case study he discusses.”
Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha
“Co-written with Ben Casnocha, this applies network logic to individual career development. Hoffman's argument is that careers should be managed like startup portfolios — adaptive, networked, and built on iterative bets rather than linear plans.”
Adam Grant · not in an entry yet
“Adam Grant's research on how givers, takers, and matchers perform across careers and organizations. Hoffman has discussed generosity as a structural feature of successful networks and recommended this as the empirical case for why reciprocity norms shape long-run outcomes.”
Reed Hastings, Erin Meyer · not in an entry yet
“Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer on Netflix's culture of radical candor and high talent density. Hoffman has referenced this as the clearest articulation of how to build an organization that can scale without bureaucratic drag.”
Business and Management 4
Andrew S. Grove
“Andy Grove's account of Intel navigating strategic inflection points. Hoffman has cited this as a foundational text for thinking about when the rules of competition change and why most incumbents fail to respond in time.”
Andrew S. Grove
“Andy Grove's operational manual for managing through leverage. Hoffman has described Grove's concept of managerial output — that a manager's work is the work of their team — as a foundational idea he returned to when building LinkedIn's leadership team.”
Geoffrey G. Parker, Marshall W. Van Alstyne, Sangeet Paul Choudary
“Parker, Van Alstyne, and Choudary lay out the economics of two-sided platforms — the same structural logic underpinning LinkedIn. Hoffman has pointed to platform dynamics as underappreciated by founders who think of their product as a service rather than an infrastructure layer.”
Clayton M. Christensen
“Clayton Christensen's theory of disruption. Hoffman has cited this in Masters of Scale discussions of why large companies consistently fail to respond to emerging competitors — particularly relevant for his arguments about why incumbents lose platform transitions.”
Entrepreneurship and Startups 4
Peter Thiel
“Peter Thiel's contrarian take on monopoly and competition. Hoffman and Thiel are longtime colleagues from the PayPal era; Hoffman has discussed Thiel's framework for secrets and differentiation as a productive counterpoint to his own network-effect thinking.”
Ben Horowitz
“Ben Horowitz on the unglamorous decisions founders face — layoffs, demotions, board conflicts. Hoffman has recommended this on Masters of Scale as one of the most honest accounts of what operating a scaling company actually requires.”
Andrew Chen
“Andrew Chen's detailed study of network effects — how to get them started, what kills them, and how they evolve at scale. Closely aligned with Hoffman's own frameworks on network bootstrapping and the cold-start dilemma LinkedIn itself faced in 2003.”
Brad Feld, Jason Mendelson · not in an entry yet
“Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson's practical guide to term sheets and VC mechanics. Hoffman has recommended this to founders as the baseline technical knowledge any entrepreneur needs before entering financing conversations — a tool for leveling information asymmetry.”
Book recommendations listed on their Good Books profile 11
Politics and Government 2
Productivity and Habits 1
War and Strategy 1
Science 1
Company Histories 1
Technology and Computing 1
Business and Management 1
Nicolaj Siggelkow, Christian Terwiesch · not in an entry yet aggregator only
Entrepreneurship and Startups 1
Investing 1
Economics 1
The Tim Ferriss Show #248 — 'The 10 Commandments of Startup Success with Reid Hoffman', episode page with the 'Books most gifted and influential' segment and its Selected Links 4
Fiction 1
Sociology and Culture 1
Joshua Cooper Ramo · not in an entry yet
General History 1
Biography and Memoir 1
Where they publish 8
- The Tim Ferriss Show #248 — 'The 10 Commandments of Startup Success with Reid Hoffman', episode page with the 'Books most gifted and influential' segment and its Selected Links
- Books recommended by Reid Hoffman
- Superbook reading list
- Masters of Scale podcast
- Blitzscaling book site
- Reid Hoffman on LinkedIn — Articles
- The Startup of You website
- reidhoffman.org/books — his own site (lists only the books he has written, not recommendations)