LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman did not always identify as an entrepreneur - here's why

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman aspired to be a public intellectual in college. He abandoned that notion and became an entrepreneur and investor in Silicon Valley instead. He founded an early social network called SocialNet.com in 1997, and he founded the professional networking website, LinkedIn, in 2002. Hoffman joined Business Insider's podcast, "Success! How I Did It," and shared how he came to identify as an entrepreneur.

Reid Hoffman: I actually never really thought about myself as an entrepreneur until years into LinkedIn, which is after I had founded my second company. What I had been focused on, almost from those early days at Putney, was just building stuff, being a public intellectual, making something happen, and then what's the way you do that?

Oh, well, you raise some money, you hire some people, you launch your product. It's what an entrepreneur does, but it wasn't like my identity was: "I aspire to be an entrepreneur. I think of myself as an entrepreneur." I was more thinking of myself as, "I'm a person who is helping create ecosystems, and what's the way that I can do that?" And I realized that one of the pieces of progress that we're making as a society and as a world is realizing that entrepreneurship isn't just the odd kid at school or the occasional or random thing, but, at least in some areas of the world like Silicon Valley and China - but also a number of others; entrepreneurship is spreading - to almost be a pattern that's a choice, not for everybody, but for a number of people. And the creation of these companies and these products and services is part of how we're going to create more products and services. We're going to create more jobs.

And so then I became an advocate for entrepreneurship, and, exactly, as you mentioned, in some sense, a substantial part of my kind of current expressions as a public intellectual is about why entrepreneurship is key, how to do it well, what are the key lessons for it, how to think about it from everything from as a government or as a corporation, but also entrepreneurs building new, interesting companies.