Published: Mon, Jan. 21, 2008 12:30AM

Modified Mon, Jan. 21, 2008 01:20AM

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As a countermeasure, LinkedIn in recent months has been adopting more Facebook-like features. The changes have allowed LinkedIn users to display pictures next to their personal profiles and opened up the site for outsiders to post mini-applications, known as widgets, designed to help people with common connections to share information.

Despite those copycat moves, Hoffman insists he isn't worried about Facebook, which he views as being far too casual and goofy for the ambitious professionals drawn to LinkedIn.

Hoffman credits his own connections for his successful investment streak.

"Any time there were some really good people involved with a potentially good product, I thought I should probably throw in at least a little bit of money if I had the option," he said.

That doesn't mean he invests in every venture started by people he knows, sometimes to his regret.

Missed out on YouTube

For instance, Hoffman hadn't felt compelled to invest in YouTube when he had the chance, depriving him of a huge payday when Google bought the popular video-sharing site for $1.76 billion in 2006. Instead, LinkedIn provided some initial office space to YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who worked with Hoffman at PayPal.

Hoffman hasn't been wrong too often.

Since 2005, three of his startup investments have been sold for more than $1.1 billion combined, although Hoffman got only a sliver of that. They are the photo-sharing site Flickr, bought by Yahoo; music network Last.fm, bought by CBS; and computer security specialist IronPort Systems; bought by Cisco Systems.

Besides Facebook, the list of other promising prospects in Hoffman's portfolio include blogging software maker Six Apart, blogging search engine Technorati, online content-ranking site Digg and another online social networking service, Ning.

Hoffman's connections and investments frequently have ties to PayPal, where he accumulated stock as a director and then as a top executive. He first met PayPal's co-founder and chief executive, Peter Thiel, while both were attending Stanford University in the 1980s.

Thiel, an early LinkedIn investor who is now a venture capitalist and Facebook director, is one of the more than 1,500 connections that Hoffman lists on LinkedIn's Web site.

"I pay a lot of attention to building relationships," he said. "Part of how to create a lot of value and good will in the system is by doing something that is a little bit of work for me and massively valuable for you."