Auren Hoffman

Personal life

Hoffman is a son of Amalia Hoffman of Larchmont, New York, and Edward M. Hoffman of Montvale, New Jersey. Amalia Hoffman is an author and illustrator of children’s books. Edward M. Hoffman works in New York as a software engineer and software consultant to the financial industry. Hoffman graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in Industrial Engineering in 1996.

In 2011, Hoffman married an assistant U.S. Attorney, Hallie Alexandra Mitchell who graduated from Princeton University, and received a law degree from Northwestern University. Federal judge Barry G. Silverman of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Phoenix, Arizona officiated the wedding which was held in Nashotah, Wisconsin.

Business

Hoffman founded Kyber Systems in his junior year at UC Berkeley, as a way to pay for school. Kyber was sold to Human Ingenuity in 1997. Hoffman founded Bridgepath Inc. in 1998, which was acquired by Bullhorn, Inc. in October 2002. In 2002 he sold a website GetRelevant to Lycos. He then became chair of the Stonebrick Group through 2006, which sponsored networking events in the San Francisco area such as one called the Silicon Forum. He reportedly once showed up to a meeting in a rented truck, and parked blocks away to reduce his chances of being seen. Hoffman business style is sometimes referred to as a networker. Hoffman is a speaker at events in the technology industry.

In 2006 Hoffman cofounded Rapleaf, and served as its CEO until 2012, and left the company to run a Rapleaf spinoff called Liveramp after Rapleaf was acquired by email marketing company TowerData. On May 14, 2014 Acxiom announced that it had acquired Liveramp, for $310 Million. Gawker mentioned a controversy surrounding privacy practices at Rapleaf. Hoffman left LiveRamp a little more than a year after it was acquired. As of December 2016 Hoffman is chairman of Siftery, and was listed as CEO of a company called SafeGraph.

Writer

Hoffman was a contributor to the Huffington Post, often on political subjects, as well as Business Week and his own blog called Summation. Hoffman is a Republican and a political contributor. Hoffman contributed to Council on Foreign Relations papers in 2004.

Investments

Hoffman is an angel investor and briefly worked as a venture capitalist with the Founders Fund in the 2011 to 2012 timeframe.

Some of Hoffman's investments include: Aardvark (search engine) (sold to Google), BackTweets by Backtype (sold to Twitter), Blip.tv, BrightRoll, Chomp (search engine) (sold to Apple), CrowdFlower, Flowtown (sold to Demandforce which was sold to Intuit), Founders Fund, LabPixies (sold to Google), Meebo (sold to Google), MerchantCircle (sold to Reply.com), mob.ly (sold to GroupOn), Pingboard, Scopely, Thumbtack (website), Zoom Systems., and others.