The stated purpose of the gathering was to give Mr. Booker, already a Twitter fanatic, a seminar on social-networking technologies. But hanging in the air was an electrifying sense of being in the presence of an ascendant politician they believed understood the potential of the new digital world they were shaping.
"He's part of this tide," said Gina Bianchini, an entrepreneur who was at the meeting, in May 2009. "It feels like he's one of us."
Two and a half years later, some of those same Silicon Valley leaders joined forces again on Mr. Booker's behalf. But this time, their efforts resulted in giving Mr. Booker, until then an admired outsider, the equivalent of full-fledged membership in their elite circle: an Internet start-up of his own.
Mr. Booker personally has obtained money for the start-up, called Waywire, from influential investors, including Eric E. Schmidt, Google's executive chairman. A year after its debut, Waywire has already endured a round of layoffs and had just 2,207 visitors in June, according to Compete, a Web-tracking service. The company says it is still under development.
Yet in a financial disclosure filed last month, Mr. Booker, 44, revealed that his stake in the company was worth $1 million to $5 million. Taken together, his other assets were worth no more than $730,000.
That revelation, with just a week left in Mr. Booker's campaign for the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate, shows how a few tech moguls and entrepreneurs, many of them also campaign donors, not only made a financial bet on the mayor's political future but also provided the brainpower and financing to help create a company that could make him very rich.
Waywire has also provided jobs for associates of Mr. Booker: the son of a top campaign supporter and his social media consultant, who is now on his Senate campaign staff.
The company has a goal: making it easy to "collect, curate and share" videos from across the Web. But much about its operations and Mr. Booker's role as chairman appears ill defined.
Mr. Booker declined to answer questions about the details of Waywire's finances, including what percentage of the company he currently owns. A spokesman said Mr. Booker had invested some of his own money in the company but refused to say how much.
Though his involvement in Waywire has been public since July 2012, Mr. Booker did not disclose his ownership interest in the company on his financial report filed with the city and only recently amended the federal form he filed as a candidate for the Senate to reflect his ownership. The spokesman, James Allen, said that the city form was amended Tuesday.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Booker deflected questions about his financial interest. Instead he stressed that he was drawn to exploring technology because he believes it can be, among other things, a democratizing force.
"What was exciting to me was that it was expanding entrepreneurial, economic, and educational opportunities for so many," he said.
The value of his shares could rise significantly, analysts say, should the company outrace competitors now puzzling over how to let users sift through the billions of Web video clips to find those that they want to watch. "Curation is the next big thing to happen to video," said James L. McQuivey of Forrester Research.
Mr. Booker has made a national reputation in seven years as the chief executive of Newark, New Jersey's largest city and one of the country's poorest. But his involvement in founding, financing and promoting a private business highlights the significance of his other constituency in the tech industry, which is seeking a bigger voice in national policy in Washington. Such business activities are prohibited for senators and members of the House, but permissible for many elected officials in New Jersey.
A graduate of Stanford, Mr. Booker has nurtured close ties to Silicon Valley: he amassed more than $400,000 in campaign contributions from tech executives and employees for his 2010 mayoral re-election and nearly $700,000 this year for his Senate bid, an analysis of state and federal campaign finance records shows. This spring, the widow of Steve Jobs, Laurene Powell Jobs, and the power couple Marc Andreessen and Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen held a fund-raiser for him.
And as a social media enthusiast, with more than 30,000 Twitter posts, Mr. Booker has cast himself as an ambassador between the high-tech world and his beleaguered city. His aides noted that he had leveraged his relationships to Newark's benefit, including a pledge of $100 million to the city's schools from Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder.
It was during a fund-raising swing in Silicon Valley in 2009, when Mr. Booker was soliciting campaign contributions from Ms. Powell Jobs and the venture capitalists Ted Schlein and Fredric Harman, that the visit to LinkedIn headquarters was arranged. In attendance at the gathering were Jeff Weiner, the chief executive of LinkedIn, and its co-founder, Reid Hoffman (both of whom later invested in Waywire) along with John Ham of Ustream, the live-video service (Mr. Ham is now on Waywire's advisory board), and Sarah Ross, the marketing wizard behind Ashton Kutcher's record-setting Twitter following, who would become a principal in Waywire.
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