Marius Greeff, Turn Left Media. Photo: Karolina Komendera

In December, LinkedIn will celebrate its 20th birthday, although only in May next year will it be celebrating 20 years of its service being in operation. The platform was co-founded in Silicon Valley in 2002 by a collective that included Jean-Luc Vaillant, Allen Blue, Konstantin Guericke, Eric Ly, and, the most famous of the bunch and the person who brought them all together, Reid Hoffman.

Hoffman’s career included spells at Apple and Fujitsu in the mid-’90s, before co-founding his first company, called SocialNet, said to be one of the precursors of the social networking trend, in 1997. It was around that time he also joined the board of directors of PayPal. In 2000, he left SocialNet to become PayPal’s chief operating officer, then executive vice president, where he remained until 2002, when the payments company was acquired by eBay. After that buyout, the cofounders set up LinkedIn, and it’s notable that among the early investors in LinkedIn was Hoffman’s former PayPal colleague Peter Thiel, who was also an early investor in Facebook, Airbnb and SpaceX.