Web 2.0 Startups: Who Will Survive?

摘要

"Pull up a chair." Reid Hoffman waves a big arm toward his computer. It's not easy to maneuver in this office strewn with books, wires, and empty Amazon.com boxes. Hoffman, wearing sneakers and black shorts from a morning workout, opens up his page on Linkedln, the social network for professionals that he founded six years ago. His in-box is jammed with solicitations for meetings and funding. He looks at one proposal from Minnesota and shakes his head: "Looks like it's based on bad math." Hoffman cuts an unusual figure in Silicon Valley. He's a Californian with a philosophy degree from the University of Oxford, and his oversized body looks more heartland than coastal. But his brain is in sync with the Valley. In addition to founding Linkedln, he has become in the past six years the leading angel investor in the so - called Web 2.0, the wave of Internet companies spawned this decade. With stakes in dozens of startups, including news aggregator Digg, blog software developer Six Apart, and the social network companies Facebook and Ning, Hoffman was widely envied during the boom.