Startup Stories of LinkedIn

LinkedIn was founded by famous Silicon Valley entrepreneur Reid Hoffman. Reid Hoffman was graduated from famous University Stanford and then done a MS in philosophy from Oxford University. Reid wanted to make a positive impact on people's life and influence the world. Year 1993 was the beginning of internet revolution. So Reid Hoffman thought a software which reaches millions of people, then creating a useful software could be a way to make impact on mass. Reid got in touch with few investors and everyone advised him to get a job first as he didn't had any experience in software's yet. So he decided to learn all the things need to become a successful entrepreneur. Some of those things were software development, product management and marketing.

In July 1997, he resigned to start his first startup social nets basically it was based on online dating website then he raised money for his company but eventually things weren't working out for social net and he decided to leave and joined PayPal which was started by his close friends from Stanford as executive vice president. Reid learned a lot in PayPal and in 2002 eBay acquired PayPal for 1.5 billion dollars, now he had enough money from PayPal that he don't need to worry about financing his new idea. So without any worries he started to work on LinkedIn as he was interested in professional space then he hired team of around him people from social net and PayPal to work on his new idea. In 2003 they launched LinkedIn, starting response was slow sometimes it reaches 220 sign ups a day but it was good enough to get investment from Sequoia Capital and since then LinkedIn kept on growing.

So 2003 was a year dedicated to viral growth and they actually started achieving this once they added the new feature of uploading your address book. The following year they introduced groups and started working with American Express to help network small businesses. Hoffman believed that in order to be successful they needed 1 million users and then, they would track the engagement of those users and build a business model around that engagement.

And so, in 2005 LinkedIn launched three revenue streams –

The first was job listings.
The second was subscriptions, to get profitability fast.
The third was advertising which actually wasn't even planned, but because they had such a strong business demographic, it seemed like a natural choice.

The growth kept on going and in 2006 LinkedIn hit over 4 million users and introduced the "public profiles", which introduced LinkedIn as the professional social network. And in 2010 the company enters into hyper-growth and grows to 90 million users with over a thousand employees. And in 2011 LinkedIn went public, and in December 2016 LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft for roughly 26 billion dollars.

Today one in every three professionals has a LinkedIn profile, and two new people sign up for LinkedIn every second. LinkedIn has over 12,000 employees and over 530+ million users

Now Reid Hoffman is also known as a well-known investor who invested in companies like Facebook Zynga Airbnb Flickr and many more.

SmartlyMonetize