How the billionaire founder of LinkedIn turned his dream of being a 'public intellectual' into a life as one of Silicon Valley's most prominent investors

• Reid Hoffman is the billionaire cofounder of LinkedIn and an influential tech investor.
• He has a masters in philosophy from Oxford and considers it useful to his approach to business.
• His role as a prominent speaker and writer on entrepreneurship and careers is the result of a childhood ambition to be a "public intellectual."

The teenager who loved Dungeons and Dragons and philosophy is still a fundamental part of Reid Hoffman, one of the most influential people in Silicon Valley.

In an interview for Business Insider's podcast "Success! How I Did It," the billionaire founder of LinkedIn explained that the ability to strategize he honed playing complex board games and the intense analytical skills he acquired studying dense philosophical tracts are crucial to the way he approaches business, despite lacking a standard business education.

Hoffman took us through his remarkable and unusual path.