Venture capitalist Reid Hoffman, product designer Allen Blue, marketing professional Konstantin Guericke, engineer Eric Ly, and engineer Jean-Luc Vaillant has founded LinkedIn. LinkedIn, a business-oriented social networking website was founded in 2002; and has been headquartered in Mountain View, California. Getting a job in those days wasn’t as straightforward as it is now. All thanks to LinkedIn. But have you ever wondered why is LinkedIn called LinkedIn?
This company was launched back in 2003. Growth was quite slow at first but after time, it has gained huge popularity and faith. In 2005, LinkedIn introduced many services like ProFinder and others that allowed the companies to post job listings on the site in order to fetch out employees who can work with dedication. LinkedIn also allowed the companies to advertise themselves on the site. They made it way more professional than other job-fetching apps.
Reid Hoffman knew the importance of the rapidly growing internet in the early 90s. He said to CNN Money –
I realized I wanted to have much broader relevance in people’s lives. Because I had been at Stanford; I thought about starting a software company. Software reaches millions of people. I networked my way to a couple of different venture capitalists. They said, ‘Have you shipped software before? You’re asking us to invest millions of dollars in your company. You’ve done this before?’ I said, ‘No, not really.’ And they said, ‘Go get a job first.
Why Is It Called LinkedIn?
It is quite interesting to know that why LinkedIn has been named LinkedIn. They basically joined “Linked” + “In”, which means connected to professionalism. According to the four founders of the company, Hoffman, Blue, Guericke, Ly, and Vaillant –
LinkedIn was one interesting platform as it gave some professional space to the people where they said, joining allows you to stay linked and connected to the professional network that can allow you to pursue more opportunities through your connections.
Success of LinkedIn
LinkedIn is now a very successful platform and became quite profitable in 2007. By this year, LinkedIn had 15 million users. By 2011, LinkedIn is having almost 100 million users worldwide. In 2016; LinkedIn taken by Microsoft for approximately $26 billion. The next year; it reported having more than 500 million members in about 200 countries.
LinkedIn Startup Story
LinkedIn has a really interesting startup story –
- 1993 – Entrepreneur Reid Hoffman was studying at Oxford when he had thought of starting a software company; so he approached venture capitalists for funding but unfortunately got rejected. He got a job at Apple – worked on eWorld, Apple’s version of AOL and after Apple, worked at Fujitsu for product management.
- 1997 – He confidently resigned job at Fujitsu in order to start his plan – Socialnet. It was an online dating, professional networking, finding roommates app. He learned a lot from it and made him realize the value of focusing on one single domain.
- 2002 – Sold PayPal, an electronic payment service to eBay for 1.5 billion USD, and later he met his friends Peter Theil (Who offered him a job at PayPal) and Max Levchin.
- 2003 – Inspirations are taken from Socialnet; they launched LinkedIn and attracted investment from Sequoia.
- 2007 – Dan Nye took the position of CEO of the company.
- 2009 – Jeff Weiner has joined LinkedIn as president and CEO.
- 2014 – LinkedIn launched itself officially in China.
- 2015 – Became one of the top 10 most renowned websites in the world.
- 2017 – LinkedIn has already 500 million users and 10 million job postings.
About the Founders
Reid Hoffman – Reid Hoffman was born on 5 August. He was the chairman and co-founder of LinkedIn; and he was ranked at 630th position in the billionaire list of the world in 2017.
Allen Blue – Alen Blue has two jobs as chairman of the board of directors and vice president in LinkedIn. He is one of the billionaires and has a lot of contributions in developing LinkedIn.
Konstantin Guericke – He was born on 19 September 1967. He completed his education at Stanford University. Konstantin Guericke is the most recent CEO of Jaxtr, a Palo alto social communications startup with over 10 million registered users.
Eric Ly – Eric Ly was born on 15 January 1969. He is basically from Vietnam and he was the co-founder of LinkedIn. Eric Ly was the founding chief officer at LinkedIn. He is currently the CEO and founder of a blockchain-based trust protocol Hub.
Conclusion
LinkedIn is one of the most trustable and successful apps that has helped many people find a job without much hardship. So, let us know how did you like the topic “why is LinkedIn called LinkedIn?”