An Open Letter to Washington
We’ve all had the good fortune to found Internet companies and nonprofits in a regulatory climate that promotes entrepreneurship, innovation, the creation of content and free expression online.
However we’re worried that the PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act–which started out as well-meaning efforts to control piracy online–will undermine that framework.
These two pieces of legislation threaten to:
* Require web services, like the ones we helped found, to monitor what users link to, or upload. This would have a chilling effect on innovation;
* Deny website owners the right to due process of law;
* Give the U.S. Government the power to censor the web using techniques similar to those used by China, Malaysia and Iran; and
* Undermine security online by changing the basic structure of the Internet.
We urge Congress to think hard before changing the regulation that underpins the Internet. Let’s not deny the next generation of entrepreneurs and founders the same opportunities that we all had.
Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz
Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google
Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and Square
Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and Hunch
David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo!
Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn
Arianna Huffington, co-founder of The Huffington Post
Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube
Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and co-founder of Alexa Internet
Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal
Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist
Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay
Biz Stone, co-founder of Obvious and Twitter
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation
Evan Williams, co-founder of Blogger and Twitter
Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo!

Students on Edmodo can take quizzes and interact with the website. However students cannot direct message each other.

“Both Matt and I have seen networks grow spectacularly once they hit their tipping point. It’s clear to us that Edmodo is well on its way to becoming one of the key networks in our lives. Just as LinkedIn is the professional graph for work and Facebook is the social graph for your friends, Edmodo is the educational graph for learning. The graph provides the platform for teachers to bring selections of the web to the classroom…Edmodo is the third social graph network that Greylock has invested in, after Linkedin and Facebook,” stated Reid Hoffman.

Currently Edmodo has 5 million users in 60,000 schools, which is up from 500,000 users at the end of 2010. The funding will be used for hiring engineering talent and scaling Edmodo.

[TechCrunch]

Hoffman also currently serves on the board of 8 companies including Mozilla and Zynga. Hoffman also divides his time amongst three non-profits.

“I’ve never made a significant move, decision, without consulting him,” said Shopkick founder Cyriac Roeding about Hoffman.

Although Hoffman often received B’s and C’s in middle school, Hoffman was extremely focused as a child. When he was 5, he made his dad keep reading “The Lord of the Rings” to him in bed. His dad said “Apparently, I wasn’t reading fast enough” so the “bookmark moved further and further ahead.”

When Hoffman was 12, he showed up on a Friday at the offices of Chaosium, the game development company behind RuneQuest. RuneQuest was a fantasy role-playing game that was published in 1978. Hoffman gave the company a manual marked with suggestions in red ink. Hoffman was given a job and received a check a few weeks later for $127. “It changed my father’s view of what I was doing,” said Hoffman. “He realized I could make a living out of this.”

In 1985 when Hoffman enrolled at Stanford, he decided to major in symbolic systems. This was the studio between computing and human intelligence. He became friends with fellow student Peter Thiel at Stanford. When Netscape went public in 1995, Hoffman and Thiel watched what happened closely. Hoffman knew that social media was going to be huge, but his first company flopped. In 1997 Hoffman launched a company called SocialNet, which focused on online dating. SocialNet would pair people with similar interests, but nobody was interested in signing up. After Hoffman partnered with a newspaper in Arizona, only 2 customers had signed up.

Frustrated by the lack of growth, Hoffman quit SocialNet in 1999 to join Thiel at PayPal. At PayPal, Hoffman was the go-to guy for meeting with the credit card company executives that was not sure whether they trusted the payment services company or not. Hoffman managed all external relations. “He was the firefighter in chief at PayPal,” said Thiel. “Though that diminishes his role because there were many, many fires.”

After PayPal went public, Thiel and Hoffman both became multimillionaires. Thiel went out and bought a Ferrari, while Hoffman bought an Acura instead. He still drives that same Acura today. Hoffman decided to take the money he earned and invest in other start-ups.

LinkedIn currently has 135 million registered users across 200 countries. The company has been able to turn a profit in six out of the last seven quarters. However it took the company five years to turn its first profit. The first year was the hardest for LinkedIn because Friendster was the most popular social network and LinkedIn was considered dull.

“One of the things I thought of every week was, ‘What happens if we don’t make this? How do we die gracefully?’ ” said Hoffman.

In 2008 when the economy was tanking, a lot of people joined LinkedIn for their premium job and recruiting services. It was around then that Hoffman decided to replace former LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye with Jeff Weiner, a former Yahoo! executive.

LinkedIn has grown quite a bit in value since going public. LinkedIn’s membership has doubled annually for each of the last seven years. However LinkedIn cannot afford another bad quarter otherwise its share price would be slammed and they would lose talent to the next big thing in tech. Hoffman tries not to pay attention to the markets though. He said he has checked LinkedIn’s stock price only six times since May.

Rumor has it that AOL, Demand Media, and GoDaddy approached Ning with interest in an acquisition. The companies are interested in Ning’s technology, which has the ability to create custom social networks. Ning had 400% year-on-year revenue growth. They went from 17,000 to more than 100,000 subscribers with about 60 million monthly active users.

Qwiki’s management will retain a majority control of the company. None of the voting board seats were given to any of the investors, but Saverin will get an observer seat along with seed investor Pejman Nozad. Qwiki was co-founded by Doug Imbruce and Louis Monier. The other seed investors are Shervin Pishever, Keith Rabois, Elad Gil, and Mike Brown.

“I am in a situation today where I can do what I love, which is help other entrepreneurs,” said Saverin in an interview. “Facebook has been a big thing and will be a big thing. Qwiki is early stage, but they are on the path to be a game changer.”

Qwiki can turn data about a topic into a series of multimedia presentations on-the-fly. For example, if you type in San Francisco, the result will return an audiovisual presentation about the city including facts and sights across the city.

[AllThingsD]

“Gowalla has rapidly attracted a passionate user base by creating an innovative, useful service that is also a lot of fun,” stated Greylock’s David Thacker. “It’s exciting to discover new places and earn stamps for your passport from places as diverse as Buckingham Palace and the Sydney Opera House to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the coffee shop down the street. Gowalla also connects you with your friends, letting you share your travels and meet up with others in real time.” Thacker has joined the Gowalla Board of Directors as part of the investment.

LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman also joined Gowalla’s board of directors as an observer.

Other investors in Gowalla include Jason Calacanis, Kevin Rose, Maples Investments, Shasta Ventures, Ron Conway, Gary Vaynerchuk, Shervin Pishevar, and Chris Sacca. Previous investors Alsop-Louie Partners and Founders Fund also participated in this round.