“If you met Macron and Trudeau together, what would you ask them?” Reid Hoffman, billionaire tech entrepreneur and investor, breaks off from the board game he is playing to ask his fellow competitors an unexpected question.
Settlers of Catan, a strategy game with an economic flavour, has become a fad among Silicon Valley’s tech elite — and is a favourite of Hoffman’s. But his question has nothing to do with the game. Hoffman is seeing the French and Canadian leaders in a few days — and this is his idea of a conversational gambit. You get the feeling, though, that he’s not really short of ideas on what to ask them. Which is good because the rest of us are stumped. Hoffman switches back to board-game business: “Anyone have a wheat they want to trade? I’d give a rock or a sheep.”
In Hoffman’s world as a tech optimist, meetings with global leaders make perfect sense. These days he seems to pop up everywhere, as a kind of peripatetic diplomat for Silicon Valley, touring the international conference circuit and appearing on TV shows to discuss technology. But he has always had a wider perspective than the average start-up founder. And, since Microsoft paid $26bn last year to buy LinkedIn, the professional social network he co-founded in 2003, there has been more time — and wealth — to indulge it.
It’s a hot, late-summer afternoon in Palo Alto. The setting is an Airbnb house — recently refurbished — that has been rented for the occasion. There’s no air conditioning and a large portable fan is keeping things bearable (Hoffman is a general partner at Greylock Partners, an investor in Airbnb and Nauto). At Hoffman’s invitation, two friends have also absconded from work to join us. Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code for America, which promotes better use of technology in government, is amassing cards and laying roads across the board. She seems to be darting from one strategy to another, but I suspect it’s a clever bluff and she already has an endgame in mind.
500m
Number of LinkedIn users
Across the table is Stefan Heck, an old friend from Hoffman’s college years, now founder and head of a driverless-car technology company. He is keeping his cards close to his chest, both literally and metaphorically. His dry humour is a natural foil to the genial Hoffman, who is assiduously keeping track of how everyone is playing and giving advice.
Settlers of Catan is part of a group of so-called “German-style board games” which reward strategy rather than luck and are less centred on themes of conflict than many US board games. Devised in 1995 by designer Klaus Teuber, it has also been reimagined as a very popular app. Set on a fictional island in Viking times, the aim is to collect and trade commodity cards (such as wool, grain and brick), before exchanging them for plastic roads and settlements to occupy the board. Points are awarded for things like having the longest road, and the first player to reach 10 points wins.
To my simple-minded way of thinking, it’s something like Risk, with settlements rather than armies. But Hoffman is dismissive: “Risk, Monopoly, Clue — you can play those with kids. If a friend of mine’s kid wants to play, I’d play Risk.”
I am at a serious disadvantage, not least because I’ve never played before. In preparation, I tried to memorise the rule book — why do you need three ore cards and two grain to turn a settlement into a city? — but this turns out to have been as much use as eating a menu before visiting a fancy restaurant.
Games have always meant a lot to Hoffman. As a child, he says, he spent three years playing war games. These days he’s more interested in games that rely on interaction with other people. “I like the fact that you can’t win without trading,” he says of Settlers. It’s hard to tell how much connection there is between the game playing and the real-world strategising that occupies his working hours, though Hoffman himself doesn’t hesitate to make the link. “People say, ‘Where do I get my business strategy?’ It’s from game playing,” he says. Games such as Settlers approximate some of the decisions a start-up has to make: “How much do you build for yourself, how much do you position against other people? It’s the game that is closest of all the board games to entrepreneurship.” He concedes, though, that it is “still very far away” from running a business: start-ups demand constant creativity, while games never break out of a defined set of rules.
Hoffman, who recently turned 50, has enjoyed considerable success in the start-up world. After his attempt to build an online social network in the pre-Facebook days came to nothing, he held a top role at PayPal — a company whose other luminaries included Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. He went on to co-found LinkedIn, and held 11 per cent of the company — and majority voting control — when it was sold. He has also had a parallel life as a successful tech investor. He famously passed on making the first outside investment in Facebook, instead introducing Mark Zuckerberg to Thiel. But he was one of the first to back Airbnb (the reason he gives for choosing the venue for our game).
22m
Number of Settlers of Catan games sold as of 2015
I try to work out if Hoffman is a cut above the rest of us at game playing. His quickness is undeniable. But is this a sign of superior mental-processing power, or just the kind of pattern recognition that comes from having played the game a lot? Whatever, it turns out that Settlers really can turn on the luck of the dice. My laborious, one-track strategy has been to build the longest road across the board, and I shouldn’t have had a chance, but a few lucky rolls and suddenly I’m a point away from victory. Is that a momentary trace of irritation I see in our host’s face?
This seems unlikely. He explains later that gaming is a way of relaxing for him. “I play board games as a way of hanging out. It’s an easy way to be doing something while your conversation is roaming, anything from business, politics, philosophy, what’s going on in society.” He says he prefers games to that other great standby of American males, hanging out watching sports. “People are bad about social stuff. They get uncomfortable in silence. One of the benefits of a board game is it replaces the silence, it keeps the momentum of the conversation going.”
3
Minimum number of players for Settlers of Catan
Our own conversation turns to politics. Hoffman has become a prominent donor to Democratic and progressive causes. That has included supporting individual candidates but, since the rise of Trump, he has given more of his attention to backing start-ups that promote civic awareness and more effective governance. These include Win the Future, which uses crowdsourcing to tap into voters’ concerns and to find new political leaders to represent them, and Vote.org, which works on getting everyone to vote.
He says he’s currently backing a number of progressive politicians across the US, including Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, Rhode Island governor Gina Raimondo and New Jersey senator Cory Booker — people who, he says, trade in “hope and aspiration rather than fear and hatred”. Hoffman’s dislike of Trump seems intense. During last year’s election he even invented a satirical game, Trumped Up Cards, where players compete to create the most entertaining responses to questions using cards printed with Trumpian phrases.
Hoffman’s old friend Peter Thiel is now Trump’s leading adviser from the tech world. But while Thiel is intellectually combative, Hoffman is constantly looking for common ground. Discussing books he has read recently, he enthuses about Nonzero by Robert Wright — “one of my favourite intellectual authors. Basically, his theory is you have cultural evolution because you have a preference for non-zero sum games.” As society evolves, there are more and more interactions where both sides come out a winner.
“You’re constructing a lot more value,” he adds. “It’s fundamentally one of the truths about human progress. It may not be the only truth. But it’s one of them.” It is Hoffman’s own view of how society advances. Left unnamed, but not out of mind, is the famous exponent of zero-sum thinking who now occupies the White House.
I am beginning to suspect that the level of casual banter at Hoffman’s board-game sessions is usually more elevated than we are managing this afternoon. My host, who has an MA in philosophy from Oxford and a degree in symbolic systems from Stanford, admits he invites friends who he thinks will make for stimulating conversation. The last time he played Settlers, the discussion was about “the cultural implications of AI”. As in: “What kinds of art will be created? If people start having really great personal tutors, what will that change in terms of social dynamics, if we each have a personal companion that goes with us our entire life? Like each one is a unique version of [the AI assistant in the movie] Her or something.”
$1.4m
Amount donated by Hoffman to cross-political groups that encourage people to vote
These days, all conversations on tech seem to turn, inevitably, back to AI. Days before our game, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin had predicted that any country that secures a meaningful lead in AI will “rule the world”. Hoffman plays down the risk of an AI arms race, though he doesn’t rule it out. “I don’t know that any technology will be more fundamental. We’ve gone through cycles like this before, with nuclear weapons or tanks and armour, machine guns, steam engines, the industrial revolution. Technologies alter the power and capabilities of society and AI is definitely the modern one of those.”
Despite that, he doesn’t subscribe to the kind of alarmist take on AI of people such as Musk. “I’m not a techno-determinist. I think we shape the future,” he says. Nothing is inevitable: “There will be more and more computation, more and more algorithms, and more and more of those algorithms will be learning off data sets. There are a lot of futures that can play out that way, there isn’t one future.”
So will it take regulation to steer the technology in the right direction? He isn’t a fan of the idea. When people talk about regulating technology, “usually what they mean is, slow down,” he says. “But unless you get the whole human race to slow down at the same time, which I think is unachievable, slowing down is not the right answer.” Instead, he argues for a more open discussion about AI, to make sure “we get to the right outcomes. Many, many more decisions are going to be driven by machine-learning algorithms. Let’s try to figure out how those algorithms are pro-humanity in the right ways.”
Back in the game, things are — after nearly two hours — coming to a surprisingly sudden end. It turns out that all the cards Pahlka has been storing up lift her past my floundering effort (as well as Hoffman, who is on the verge of winning). It takes our host to untangle her hand and point out the combinations of cards that will give her the points needed for victory.
“Thanks for letting me win,” she says to Hoffman.
“I pointed out how you could,” he replies, ever the diplomat.
When the others have left, Hoffman admits to harbouring an ambition to invent “a real, new game” of his own. “I’m interested in how we collaborate together in playing a game. That’s the kind of thing I’ve been thinking about since high school,” he says. It might even be a video game, pitting human against the computer. “How do we collaborate against the machine?” he muses. But then: “Right now I am primarily focused on Silicon Valley technology. How can we do these major, world-changing things?”
Our board game is finished. Silicon Valley’s grand contest to shape the future is only getting started.
Richard Waters is the FT’s US West Coast editor
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Photographs: Nicholas Albrecht
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2017
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