Eric Thich Vi Ly (born January 15, 1969) is an American entrepreneur and investor. Ly was co-founder of LinkedIn, a social networking site designed specifically for the business community, where he served as its founding chief technology officer. He is currently the CEO and founder of a blockchain based trust protocol Hub. Ly was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and emigrated to the United States in 1975 as a result of the Vietnam War. He lived in San Francisco, California, for some years, and when his parents found jobs in Silicon Valley, his family moved to Sunnyvale, California. Ly attended Homestead High School, where he applied his interest in computers to journalism and the on-campus newspaper, The Epitaph. Through a sponsorship from Apple Inc., he transformed production methods for the publication, making Homestead one of the first schools in the country to use desktop publishing technology to publish its newspaper on the newly introduced Macintosh computers. Ly attended Stanford University and volunteered as a science writer for the Stanford Daily in addition to his studies. Ly was inspired by professor Terry Winograd's perspective that computers ultimately serve as communications tools for people. Ly graduated with distinction in 1991 with a Bachelor of Science in Symbolic Systems and as a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. His contemporaries included Scott Forstall, Reid Hoffman, and Marissa Mayer. Ly went on to earn a Master of Science in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab in 1993 with a research thesis ("Chatter: A Conversational Telephone Agent") on combining speech-user interfaces and artificial-intelligence agents. Ly returned to Stanford University to get his PhD in Computer Science but he would later drop out of the program.[ Ly started his professional career in technical positions at Steve Jobs' NeXT (acquired by Apple Inc.), IBM, Sun Microsystems (acquired by Oracle), and General Magic. In 1995, Ly co-founded Netmosphere, a software company enabling project management collaboration utilizing Internet technologies such as Java. Menlo Ventures invested in the firm, which was subsequently acquired by Critical Path, Inc. In 2000, Ly co-founded a mobile software company called Tresidder Networks in which Industry Ventures invested. In 2002, Ly co-founded LinkedIn with Reid Hoffman, a Stanford schoolmate, and several other co-founders, including Jean-Luc Vaillant, Allen Blue, and Konstantin Guericke. When Microsoft acquired LinkedIn in 2016 for $26.2B, it was the world's "largest social networking site focused on the working world" with more than 400 million registered users.[ As LinkedIn's founding CTO, Ly "helped create some of its core product features, which enabled the company to reach profitability and a quickly growing user base."