Its not about ideas. Its about making ideas happen. Scott Belsky

Reid Hoffman is one to surely vouch for that. Hoffman started LinkedIn towards the end of 2002 as a social networking site for professionals and the working ones. It currently stands at more than 300 million acquired users in more than 200 countries and executives from every Fortune 500 company.As of 2013, Linkedin is one of Silicon Valley's stalwarts, with 5000 employees and a brand recognized throughout corporate America. LinkedIn is currently at $7.5 billion as of 2013.Since beginning, Hoffman, a graduate from Stanford, has understood the importance of building and leveraging his network community. Apart from LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, an avid entrepreneur is also an active investor, working in the capacity of an adviser and fund raiser for around 70 Silicon Valley startups & businesses, including Facebook. Hoffman pursued philosophy at Oxford 1990s but gave it up and returned to the Silicon Valley. Once there, he immediately started networking with his connections with the ultimate goal of pursuing his dream to start a software company.His story is an ideal example of the road to become a successful entrepreneur. He networked his way to a couple of different venture capitalists. All of them rejected his proposal as he did not have any prior experience in either running a company or handling softwares. He then joined Apple as a software developer to get hands on experience dealing with softwares. After Apple, he went to Fujitsu for product management and the business side. He watched the whole online market getting heated up, so I resigned from Fujitsu in July 1997. In early August 1997, he started his first company, Socialnet. The idea of Socialnet was to find out ways to connect people online. Socialnet focused on online dating. It also had some activities like finding golf partners and roommates and that kind of stuff. Once, Socialnet took off, venture capitalists started themselves approaching Hoffman. Hoffman approached his close friend Peter Thiel, who is a famous venture capitalist and one of the co-founder of PayPal. Thiel counteroffered Hoffman an opportunity to work for PayPal as an executive Vice-Pesident in charge of business development. After PayPal was sold to eBay, he decided to start LinkedIn as according to him, the professional space was really interesting. He financed the early portion of it from the money he got out from PayPal. The company started with 13 people who in turn invited 112 people to join the newly established webpage of Linkedin. And the rest, as they say, is history