He's a venture capitalist, at Greylock. He's an entrepreneur who co-founded LinkedIn, and sold it for 26 billion dollars last year. Reid's net worth is estimated to be north of 3 billion dollars. Now he has a seat on the board of directors at Microsoft. After teaching a class at Stanford, Reid started a podcast, Masters of Scale, that's about the art and craft of building monster businesses.

Reid is deeply qualified on that subject. He was a founding board member at PayPal, and early on became its chief operating officer. That also makes him part of an eclectic group of characters known as the "PayPal Mafia" former PayPal employees who went on to dizzying success. Members include Elon Musk, YouTube founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, investor Peter Theil, and entrepreneur Max Levchin, to name a few.

I spent some time with Reid Hoffman last week when I flew out to San Francisco to moderate a debate. It wasn't politics: Reid was debating his friend Tim O'Reilly on the merits of spending gobs of investor money to build startups into dominant forces.

You can watch the debate on Twitter. Look up my @jonfortt. Or head over to YouTube and watch at the Fortt Knox channel.

After the debate, Reid sat down with me on the 17th floor of LinkedIn headquarters to talk about how he scaled from a pre-teen who was ambivalent about school into one of tech's most prolific builders.