Overview

Gender

male

Investor Type

Angel

Investor Stage

Seed

Mr. Hoffman is a serial entrepreneur and former public company CEO. He has built and sold three companies to PGP, Inc., Vivendi-Universal, and Amdocs. From 2003 to 2016 he was co-founder, Chairman and CEO of Vindicia, a consumer subscription infrastructure company sold to Amdocs in 2016. From 2017 to 2019 he was an advisor to the board of Chia Network until he joined the Company full time in August of 2019. He has been a board member at eight different technology and energy companies and serves on two non-profit boards, one of which he co-founded. He has 21 years of working in high compliance security environments with 12 years of managing PCI and SSAE-16 compliance for the storage of 220,000,000 credit cards. Hoffman has built and scaled companies in enterprise software and SaaS, consumer subscriptions, cryptography, and software development. He has raised over $155,000,000 in public and private markets, acquired four companies and sold three. In 1997, he helped end US export controls on cryptography while at PGP, Inc. by personally exporting the PGP Source Code book. Hoffman is co-inventor on several patents and is currently an Advisor at Directly, and Iris.tv.

Recognized by the San Francisco Business Times with the “40 under 40 Emerging Leaders Award” in 2012, Gene has deep experience with building companies that disrupt markets. Prior to Vindicia, Gene co-founded eMusic in January 1998 and served as President, Chief Executive Officer, and a Director. As head of eMusic, Gene was featured on the cover of Forbes Magazine as a member of the July 1999 E-Gang, and named one of the 100 most influential entrepreneurs in technology in Upside Magazine’s November 2000 Elite 100. Gene led the acquisition of eMusic by Vivendi/Universal in June 2001.

Before founding eMusic Gene was Director of Business Development and Director of Interactive Marketing of Pretty Good Privacy. Gene joined Pretty Good Privacy after it acquired PrivNet, Inc., an Internet privacy software company, where he was co-founder, Director and Executive Vice President.