Auren Raphael Hoffman is an American entrepreneur, angel investor and author, known as the co-founder of RapLeaf and Retargeter.
Early life and education
Auren Raphael Hoffman was born in 1974, a son of Edward M. Hoffman and Amalia Hoffman. His mother was an illustrator and author of children’s books, while his father worked in New York as a software consultant and software engineer to the financial industry.
Hoffman attended Mamaroneck High School from 1988 – 1992. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1996, with a degree in Industrial Engineering.
Hoffman married to Hallie Alexandra Mitchell in 2011 and they live in San Francisco, California, United States.
Bridgepath & GetRelevant
Hoffman started Kyber Systems in his junior year at UC Berkeley, as his way to pay for school. Human Ingenuity bought Kyber in 1997. Hoffman founded Bridgepath Inc. in 1998, which was obtained by Bullhorn, Inc. in October 2002. In the same year, Hoffman sold a website GetRelevant to Lycos. Hoffman became the chairman of the Stonebrick Group through 2006, which supported networking events in the San Francisco area like the Silicon Forum. Sometimes Hoffman is described as a networker because of his business style. Hoffman is also a speaker in the technology industry.
Rapleaf
In March 2005, Rapleaf was co-founded in San Francisco by Auren Hoffman and Manish Shah. In May 2006, the Founders Fund led a seed round of about $1 million, including angel investors such as Ron Conway and Peter Thiel. In June 2007, a second round included Rembrandt Venture Partners, Founders Fund, and included Conway.
A meta-reputation system was the company’s first product, which grants users to create ratings and reviews of consumer transactions, which they then provide to multiple e-commerce websites. On January 2007, Rapleaf published Upscoop, a service that allowed users to search for and administer their contacts by email address across multiple social networking sites.
In 2011, Rapleaf designed LiveRamp, a data onboarding division, which later spun out into an independent company which was then bought by Acxiom in 2014 for $310 million. In 2012, Rapleaf began marketing segmented data tied to email addresses for marketers to personalize email communications. Around September of the same year, the company relocated its headquarters from San Francisco to Chicago, and Phil Davis became the chief executive, replacing Hoffman.
TowerData was acquired Rapleaf in 2013. Services that TowerData offers can develop the scope and quality of data. Marketers can reach the right time at the right place.
In July 2008, Rapleaf changed its interface to prohibit users to search for people using email addresses. Instead, the service only agrees a registered user view their reputation and the websites to which their own e-mail address is registered. There was an instant undesirable backlash by companies and individuals who had been using Rapleaf to both manage reputations and consider the authenticity of people.
The Wall Street Journal reported in October 2010 that Rapleaf has sent out personally identifiable information, including MySpace IDs and Facebook. Rapleaf said it had unintentionally transferred that information and had stopped the practice. Facebook restricted Rapleaf from scraping data on their website, and Rapleaf said to delete the Facebook IDs it had gathered. A 2011 report also stated that the company could even tell the food preferences of employees of the most important companies.
Rapleaf received momentous backlash over the data collection practices and sale of individuals’ personal information to advertisers from 2007 to 2013. As a public spokesman for the company, much of the criticism was pointed at the CEO Auren Hoffman personally. A 2010 investigation exposed the company in transferring identified information about personalities to at least 12 companies, breaching the terms of service of MySpace and Facebook. When confronted by the CNet and The Wall Street Journal, it quietly corrected its privacy policy both times. The CNNMoney showed RapLeaf as selling your identity, and TechCrunch pondered its method of identifiable data extraction of Microsoft and Google employees as creepy. RapLeaf later rebranded itself as LiveRamp after entering new markets. LiveRamp spun off RapLeaf business and sold it to TowerData in 2013. Hoffman left the company a little more than a year after the acquisition.
Hoffman is also an active angel investor or advisor in Zoom Systems, Yotify, VoxPop.tv, Structural Wealth Management, Socializr, SnapTalent, RichRelevance, RateItAll, Proclivity, Play Megaphone, OtherInbox, Offbeat Guides, MesmoTV, Merchant Circle, Meebo, Mechanical Zoo, Lefora, LabPixies, Huddler, Grouply, GoodRec, Delicious Brands, BrightRoll, Blip.TV, AdRocket, 750 Industries, and more.