At a Starbucks in downtown Mountain View, Calif., two 30-something men anxiously await the arrival of Reid Hoffman, one of Silicon Valley’s most sought-after angel investors. It’s 4:30 on a Sunday afternoon, the day Hoffman fields pitches from entrepreneurs.

The coffeehouse is brimming inside and out with laptops jockeyed by students and startup specialists. Hoffman arrives, his cell phone clasped to one ear as he walks toward the table dressed in Birkenstock sandals, khaki shorts, and a black polo shirt with the word “In” embroidered on the chest.

That’s “In” as in LinkedIn, the company that Hoffman co-founded and that he runs the other six days of the week.

LinkedIn is a three-year-old service that takes your personal business network online. People don’t use it to discover new bands or track down a date - there’s nothing social about this network.

LinkedIn is all about business: recruiting, sales, investment. It’s not exactly a marketplace or a job site but rather a community of more than 8 million people who rely on one another to get things done.

And not just any 8 million people, but leading venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, along with tens of thousands of employees from Google (Charts), Microsoft (Charts), and other tech giants that use LinkedIn to find the best and brightest workers.

“For many, it’s become irresponsible to not invite business associates into your LinkedIn network,” says Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School who specializes in sociology and strategy. “When that kind of cultural inflection point occurs, which is what LinkedIn is going through now, that is when things really begin to take off.”

Read Complete Article at CNN Money

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