Hanging with the Elite

Tyler Cowen interviews Reid Hoffman, who got an MA in philosophy before co-founding PayPal with  Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and then founding LinkedIn:

COWEN: How did your interest in late Wittgenstein influence the construction and design of LinkedIn?

HOFFMAN: I would say that the notion of thinking about — a central part of later Wittgenstein is to think that we play language games, that the way that we form identity and community, both of ourselves and as individuals, is the way that we discourse and the way that we see each other and the way that we elaborate language.

That pattern of which ways we communicate with each other, what’s the channel we do, and what’s the environment that we’re in comes from insights from — including later Wittgenstein, who I think was one of the best modern philosophers in thinking about how language is core to the people that we are and that we become.