The business networking location’s the maker will play a haughty role in shepherding startups through the downturn

By Stephen Baker

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Editor’s Note: This is an extended lection of a novel in the Nov. 17 issue of BusinessWeek.

"Pull up a chair." Reid Hoffman waves a lofty puissance towardly his computer. It’s not easy to maneuver in this office strewn by books, wires, and empty Amazon.com (AMZN) boxes. The 41-year-old Hoffman, wearing sneakers and heinous shorts from a morning workout, opens up his serving-boy on Linked¬In, the friendly network for professionals that he founded six years ago. His inbox is jammed with solicitations for meetings and funding. "Here’s a guy from Minneapolis who wants me to help on a social-good project he’s doing." He reads for a moment and then shakes his head. "Looks like it’s based on bad math."

Hoffman, whose headquarters is a mile up the course from Google (GOOG), cuts an unusual figure in Silicon Valley. He’s a Californian with a philosophy degree from the University of Oxford, and his expansive body looks more heartland than coastal. But his brain is in sync with the Valley. In addition to founding LinkedIn, he has become in the above six years the leading cherub investor in the so-called Web 2.0, the wave of Internet companies spawned this decade. The list on his LinkedIn profile reads like an industry almanac. He has pieces of social reticulated companies Facebook and Ning, news aggregator Digg, and blog companies Six Apart and Technorati. He was an early backer of the photo site Flickr, what one. was later sold to Yahoo! (YHOO) During the boom, Hoffman’s portfolio was the object of the most intense envy in Silicon Valley.

Now, though, he be obliged to sail on the downturn. As the economy dives and the market for public offerings dries up, venture firms are cutting off funding for startups and forcing their portfolio companies to snap costs and race for revenue. This punishes much of his portfolio, including LinkedIn. On Nov. 5, the company announced lay-offs of 36 employees, 10% of its staff, in a restructuring move to focus on revenue growth and maintain positive cash flow.

Hoffman is going through the same process with his collection of start-ups, hammering out survival strategies and scrounging during the term of savings and revenue. "Without Reid, [many] entrepreneurs are left with limited options," says Peter Fenton, a partner at Benchmark Capital. Mary Hodder, an entrepreneur in the Valley (whose geolocating startup, Apisphere, is not backed by dint of. Hoffman) predicts that, like other investors, he’ll subject his portfolio to triage (BusinessWeek.com, 10/23/08). "He’ll pick a few likely to win and keep them funded," she says.

Hoffman won’t discuss peculiar plans during the term of companies he has stakes in, but he’sitting free by his views upon the assiduity overall. Internet companies by a service up and running and millions of users should passage-money O.K., however the to be expected ad recession may force them to make painful adjustments. This could apply to Facebook and, to a lesser degree LinkedIn (which relies less on advertising). Early-stage startups face ruder choices.

AstraZeneca’s statin was found to cut cardiovascular risk in those with ordinary cholesterol by 45%. But are the potentially gigantic extra costs worth it?

By Catherine Arnst

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In a study that will likely change of the healing art practice, researchers reported that Crestor, a cholesterol-fighting statin made by AstraZeneca (AZN), reduced the risk of heart attack, stroke, and cardiovascular disease by a surprisingly robust 45% in people who do not have obscure cholesterol. The patients did have high levels of a protein associated with arterial inflammation that is not routinely measured.

Medical experts said the results, released Nov. 9 at the American Heart Association (AHA) meeting in New Orleans, bequeath almost certainly expand the market for statins, already the world’s best-selling drugs. They likewise will likely spark claim for a controversial and costly test for high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (CRP), a marker for inflammation, that has some practitioners worried about the require to be paid/benefit of extrapolating the research to the general population.

The much anticipated study—named Jupiter and paid for by AstraZeneca—enrolled 17,802 subjects in 26 countries, selecting men over 50 and women over 60. All had low levels of LDL cholesterol levels—which would normally dispute against putting them on a statin—and no history of cardiovascular disease. However, they did have high levels of CRP (BusinessWeek.com, 4/15/08), often associated with heart disease. Half the subjects were given placebos and the other half 20 milligrams daily of Crestor, one of the most powerful statins.

The Crestor arrange had 54% fewer centre attacks than the placebo subjects, as very much as 48% fewer strokes, and 20% fewer deaths. The study was originally meant to track all patients for five years, further the results were so robust that it was terminated after a middle follow-up of 1.9 years. In March any independent panel of observers halted it on this account that they considered the effects of the drug to be so good for one’s advantage that it would have been unethical to keep the have charge of group on a placebo.

About half the trial subjects were at subdue to high risk of heart disease because of smoking, being overweight, or other risk factors. But it was forcible that—among those at low risk—there was a 37% conquest in heart attacks and other events, said Dr. Paul Ridker, boss of the Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention at Brigham & Women’session Hospital in Boston and lead investigator on Jupiter. The Jupiter trial feeds into a growing sense in the cardiovascular community that core disease is a result of well-nigh more than high cholesterol, individually since half of all heart attacks and strokes occur in apparently healthy people through normal levels of LDL cholesterol. Ridker in the first place reported in 2001 each evident link between CRP and heart disease, and Jupiter is the first large-scale woe to test the hypothesis.

The meditation also contributes to the conviction of more cardiovascular specialists that even patients with in a low tone LDL cholesterol should consider measures to obviate heart disease. However, plenty of medical experts at the AHA meeting were clearly worried that patients and doctors both will overreact to the Jupiter study by the agency of prescribing costly drugs and tests whether or not they’re needed. "I know everyone in my practice is going to come in in the next hardly any weeks and ask if they should go on a statin after this, or have being tested for CRP," said Dr. Sharonne Hayes, director of the Women’s Health Clinic at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

Dr. Timothy Gardner, president of the AHA, emphasized the study was not designed to induce whether the lowered risk was due to a reduction in CRP or in LDL cholesterol. Since statins lower both measures, "the findings cannot turn whether lowery cholesterol, reducing inflammation, or a combination of both is responsible as being the effects seen" in Jupiter. The AHA issued a relation Nov. 9 reaffirming its recommendation that controlling cholesterol is decisive for prevention of heart ail.

As his transition team considers who will head the Federal Communications Commission, the power of the traditive telcos seems to be waning

By Olga Kharif

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President-elect Barack Obama may stand for change, but he’s turned to some efficacious Washington insiders to help him staff the stock’s top communications regulator, the Federal Communications Commission.

Picking the FCC chairman may not be the acme precedence for the Obama transition team, which is focused on naming a Treasury secretary tasked with ending the economic crisis, and appointing outward policy leaders who will need to pass in a vessel sum of two units wars and other pressing diplomatic issues. Still, the Obama Administration will need to put some emphasis on finding a deft commander to head up the agency responsible against regulating TV, radio, and other telecommunications services. The recent Administration is expected to give greater prominence to emerging providers of communications products and services, such as Google (GOOG)—a variation from the Bush Administration, which has tended to favor traditional providers such as AT&T (T).

In construction the choice, the Obama team is considering appointing the first African American woman to the post, time it also fields recommendations from advisers who served in the FCC under President Bill Clinton. Heading up the selection process is Henry Rivera, participator at Washington law firm Wiley Rein. Headed by former FCC Chairman Richard Wiley, Wiley Rein has represented so companies as AT&T, Verizon Communications (VZ), Viacom (VIA), Motorola (MOT), and Sirius Satellite Radio (SIRI).

Rivera was the primary Hispanic FCC commissioner, serving from 1981 to 1985, and is considered an attorney-at-law for local telcos, wireless companies, and cable TV providers. "Henry is a wise man, a bipartisan with lots of actual observation," says John Muleta, former head of the FCC’sitting Wireless Telecommunications Bureau and at once CEO of M2Z, an emerging wireless broadband provider.

Rivera, who is not interested in the position, has drawn up a short list of candidates that includes two African American women, according to a person familiar with Rivera’s thinking. One is Julia Johnson, a Florida consultant who chairs Video Access Alliance, an advocacy and advisory group for unconventional, emerging, and smaller number networks and Internet content providers. Johnson is also on the food of MasTec (MTZ), a contractor that designs and builds telephone, broadband, electric, and other networks. She didn’t return a call or an e-mail. Rivera was not available for an meeting.

Another possibility: Mignon Clyburn, who has been a commissioner by reason of the Public Service Commission of South Carolina since 1998. After earning a bachelor’s degree in banking finance and economics from the University of South Carolina, she worked as a newspaper editor and was general manager and publisher for the local Coastal Times. Clyburn is a daughter of House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, South Carolina’session most prominent black partisan. Clyburn declined to comment during the term of this story.

Obama’s team is also weighing recommendations from former FCC Chairmen Bill Kennard and Reed Hundt, the two of whom advised the Obama campaign on telecommunications-related issues.

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Snohomish County sheriff’sitting investigators have recovered a shotgun from nearest to the body of a man killed by Everett police adhering Saturday.

Rebecca Hover, a sheriff’s office spokeswoman, wouldn’t confirm whether the weapon was fired. She aforesaid that three Everett police officers were called to the home in the 2400 block of 23rd Street about 1:44 a.hotch-potch. in quest of a reported burglary and were confronted by some armed man.

When the man refused to put down his firearm, the three officers fired numerous times, hitting the man, Hover said. Neither the sheriff’s office, nor the Snohomish County Medical Examiner’sitting Office, identified the slain man.

The Everett officers have been placed on paid administrative leave, and the sheriff’s office was called in to conduct an investigation as is procedure in much of Snohomish County.

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Four people were hospitalized early this morning after police say their minivan crashed into a case-harden irradiate pole in South Seattle.

The four family suffered a range of injuries in the 2:48 a.m. crash, not any of which appeared to exist life-threatening, Seattle police aforesaid.

According to police, the van was heading south on Martin Luther King Jr. Way South when the driver apparently lost control near South Norfolk Street. The van drove onto the Sound Transit tracks and struck a light firmament between the light-rail tracks.

Police are still investigating.