School of Information Commencement 2011

The commencement ceremony honors the class of 2011 with student speakers, keynote speaker Reid Hoffman, and presentation of the James R. Chen Awards.

Reception on the South Hall lawn immediately following the ceremony.

Keynote Speaker: Reid Hoffman

Reid Hoffman is a Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur, executive, and investor who has been integral to building many of today's leading Internet-based consumer technology businesses, including LinkedIn and PayPal. He co-founded LinkedIn and served as CEO for four years, and he served as executive vice-president and a founding board member at PayPal.

Hoffman is currently a partner at Greylock Partners, where his areas of focus include consumer Internet, enterprise 2.0, mobile, social gaming, online marketplaces, payments, and social networks. Hoffman likes to work with products that can reach hundreds of millions of participants that have network effects. He is an advisor to Groupon, a director at Zyna, Mozilla, Six Apart, and Kiva.org; and he is an angel investor in many Internet companies, includine Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Lastfm, Ning, Six Apart, and Zynga. Hoffman earned a master's degree in philosophy at Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a BA in symbolic systems at Stanford University.