Posts Tagged ‘LinkedIn’

Mark Zuckerberg Isn’t the Role Model, Reid Hoffman Is.

May 19th, 2011

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Post from techcrunch written by Sarah Lacy

Forty-plus weeks traveling the emerging world has taught me many things. Chief among them is that most entrepreneurs outside Silicon Valley learn the wrong lessons looking in.

A lot of that is the fault of publications like TechCrunch: We get excited about new things. If it’s exploding like Groupon, all the better. But we even go nuts over things like Foursquare or Quora that have pretty muted user-bases. That’s what being evangelists and early adopters is all about. We tend not to write about all the apps that launch and go nowhere, with good reason: If we’re doing our job well, we probably thought they sucked to begin with.

But the bigger disservice we do is not writing enough about the boring companies who work every day to build something that becomes huge, giving the impression that starting a business is easy in the Valley. That somehow people wake up with an idea, and roll out of bed onto a pile of venture capital, press and adoration. A lot of times the companies we should be writing about more than we do are admittedly boring infrastructure or enterprise software names. But there’s a category of consumer names that should be sexy, but for whatever reason don’t get the hype.

I’ve always thought of Yelp in this category. Local plays like Foursquare and Groupon have always gotten more attention. Another one is Pandora. Spotify has gotten far more attention, despite Pandora pulling off what almost no other music startup has– surviving the full-barrel onslaught of the record labels. But the king of them all for the Web 2.0 crowd is LinkedIn.

You could understand if LinkedIn was just paling next to Facebook. I mean, who doesn’t? Facebook is one of those once-a-decade phenomenons. But LinkedIn started out as the less-sexy social network next to Friendster. And then it graduated to the also-ran next to MySpace. It has officially trounced both now that its IPO has priced at $45 a share, or $4 billion-plus valuation– the highest valuation for an Internet company debut since Google.

More than ten years ago, Reid Hoffman– LinkedIn’s founder– was one of the first people to believe in the comeback of the consumer Internet, investing in a host of startups, but putting the bulk of his money, personal brand, time and firepower behind LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is one of the only social networks that survived from the first social media frenzy. That’s quite an accomplishment when you think about it. Hoffman wasn’t exactly up against entrepreneurial slouches. All the big Valley venture capital guns were behind Friendster. Mark centerfold-of-Vanity-Fair-this-month Pincus was behind Tribe. And Sean You-Know-What’s-Cool? Parker was behind Plaxo.

One of the reasons LinkedIn outlasted that early generation of social networks was that it was boring and practical. In the early days of social networking, the only reason anyone could think to use these sites was for dating. But Hoffman knew that would always be a customer acquisition headache: Either a dating site solves your problem and you stop using it, or it doesn’t and you stop using it. LinkedIn on the other hand would be this thing in the background you would need your entire career.

You could argue the flaw with LinkedIn was the rational strategy that saved it worked too well. For many people, it became an indispensable tool for certain moments of professional panic, but not something you used daily or even monthly. I’ve always compared it to a AAA card, a comparison that visibly annoys Hoffman and usually results in suggestions of other ways I should be using it. But back in 2007, even he admitted the site’s biggest flaw was they weren’t giving people enough to do.

When the Web 2.0 craze took off in 2006 or so, Hoffman’s star soared, but shockingly it wasn’t really because of LinkedIn. It was his angel portfolio that got the bulk of media attention. That includes out-performers like Facebook, but also stars that shined bright and burned out like Digg and Six Apart. Ever the gracious interviewee, Hoffman would answer questions about the sexier companies, but always be sure to work in a LinkedIn plug. A favorite was regularly betting me an expensive dinner at the restaurant of my choice if LinkedIn couldn’t help me do a certain aspect of my job as a reporter better.

Hoffman wasn’t in his early twenties or a college dropout, and he’d be the first to admit he wasn’t a natural CEO. He’s said in previous interviews that he has a hard time firing people quickly enough– a skill that Mark Zuckerberg has excelled at. He’s left the CEO chair several times, only to come back when other candidates haven’t worked out. But even though he could easily throw out that old cop-out of “I’m just the guy who starts stuff; I’m not the CEO type” and wash his hands of the company, Hoffman cared about LinkedIn too much to ever be very far even when insanely sexier jobs were his for the taking. Even now in his role at Greylock, he spends the bulk of his time working on LinkedIn.

And yet, given all this, it’s LinkedIn that is the first social network to go public, the first multi-billion Web 2.0 IPO. It’s more than double the exit of sexy YouTube. And, in a rare case of startup justice, his day-in, day-out work building the social network no one ever wanted to get excited about has paid him handsomely: Netting him a boost of nearly $1 billion to his net worth. Few entrepreneurs who’ve spent a decade building a company get that kind of personal return, because few personally invest so much of their own cash along the journey.

Hoffman can’t comment on any of this of course. I haven’t talked to him in weeks. These are all my observations after ten years of interviewing him about LinkedIn, watching him shake his head at the unfairness of the hype cycle and keep slogging away at building LinkedIn regardless. Hoffman should be the role model for entrepreneurs star-struck by the seeming glamour and ease of Silicon Valley’s consumer Internet world. He’s the living incarnation of the reality of the Valley: It may be easier than ever to start a product, but building a company is just as hard as its ever been.

As for the brain-dead commentators wondering if LinkedIn’s IPO represents a bubble, somewhere Hoffman has to be laughing and shaking his head again. What part of spending a decade of building a business with more than 100 million users that no one hyped, that represents one of the few large-scale working examples of a freemium business model screams “BUBBLE” to you people? These are the same people that said Google was wildly overvalued when it priced at under $100 a share.

As most people with common sense have argued, we’re not in an Internet bubble now, because the soaring valuations are mostly contained within the frothy insider ecosystem. Secondary markets are starting to change that, but so far, there are exactly two $1 billion + Web 2.0 exits that I can count: YouTube and LinkedIn. Maybe you count a few more. It depends on your definition of “Web 2.0.” I count it as the wave of consumer Web social media companies started with the Friendster explosion. Some could count Skype (twice,) but I’d argue Skype is more of a sandwich generation company. But even if your definition is more generous, I bet you can count them on one hand. Five or fewer isn’t a bubble.

There’s exactly one aspect of Silicon Valley right now that I will concede does feel like 1999: It’s easy to start a company. Stupidly easy. And entrepreneurs like Hoffman are the antithesis of that archetype not a symptom of it.

Source:- http://techcrunch.com

  • Attn Entrepreneurs: Mark Zuckerberg Isn’t the Role Model. Reid Hoffman Is. (techcrunch.com)
  • LinkedIn boss poised for $600m payout from sale of shares (guardian.co.uk)
  • LinkedIn Founder Could Net $855 Million in Thursday’s IPO (mashable.com)
  • You: LinkedIn set for $350 million IPO – CNN (news.google.com)
  • LinkedIn Raises $352.8 Million in Initial Public Offering (businessweek.com)
  • Today, LinkedIn’s IPO is tipped to set off at a staggering $4.3 billion! (dominicatimes.wordpress.com)
  • LinkedIn Hikes IPO Price Range (online.wsj.com)
  • “LinkedIn on Tuesday raised the expected price range of its IPO by 30 percent to $42 to $45 per share from $32 to $35.” and related posts (rocketnews.com)
  • LinkedIn IPO Prices Value Company at Over $4 Billion (webpronews.com)
  • Infographic: A Look At LinkedIn On Its 8th Birthday (paidcontent.org)
  • LinkedIn’s IPO: A proxy for an eventual Facebook IPO (zdnet.com)
  • LinkedIn IPO likely a success, but risks real (business.financialpost.com)
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LinkedIn Launches Personalised News Aggregator

April 24th, 2011
Image representing LinkedIn as depicted in Cru...

Image via CrunchBase

Uses your profile information to give you news relevant to your profession

LinkedIn unveiled its brand new service  LinkedIn Today at a press conference today in California. The new service is a news aggregator that uses your LinkedIn account information to generate a feed of relevant news stories.  The service uses an algorithm to analyze the details in your profile to determine the kind of stories that would be conducive to your profession.

The service also allows news stories to be flagged in either from LinkedIn or from Twitter for those who have linked their Twitter accounts with LinkedIn. A similar effort is under way to incorporate Facebook likes to flag stories in a similar manner, but no immediate Facebook support is available at the moment. There’s also a plan to place LinkedIn share buttons on major news websites. LinkedIn’s iPhone app will also get Today service.

Check out the screenshot to see how the top story slideshow looks like. As expected the stories are relevant to your industry, so a tech journalist will get geeky feeds while someone more politically inclined will be have his feed full of scams and the likes. The stories get the typical LinkedIn networking tweak by displaying who shared the story and along with “Sections” of the main being created from each users’ LinkedIn profiles. You can add news stories from other fields as well.

LinkedIn Today seems to be more than a mere aggregator. It’s smart algorithm based feed uses your professional details to provide relevant news and also adds a social twist to the mix by letting professionals interact by sharing news stories, leading to conversations, contacts and hence job/business opportunities.

Source -: Techtree.com

  • LinkedIn launches personalised news feed (telegraph.co.uk)
  • LinkedIn launches news aggregation service, LinkedIn Today (facebeyond.wordpress.com)
  • LinkedIn Launches News Aggregator (mediabistro.com)
  • Today On LinkedIn Today (searchenginepeople.com)
  • LinkedIn reaches 100 million members (telegraph.co.uk)
  • LinkedIn Launches “LinkedIn Today” – Tips Marketers Need to Know (hubspot.com)
  • LinkedIn Launches Social News Service (huffingtonpost.com)
  • LinkedIn launches personal news service (news.cnet.com)
  • LinkedIn Launches Social News Site for Professionals (readwriteweb.com)
  • How LinkedIn Today Will Change Your Social Media Life (fastcompany.com)
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Google Social Search gets Tweaked

February 19th, 2011

Now has more control over adding accounts privately

Search giant Google has made yet another tweak to its search engine and added Social Search results to its main search results. Earlier, Social Search results used to appear at the bottom of the page but now they will appear anywhere in the search results based on the relevance of the links.

Two years back, Google had introduced the integration of relevant public content based on the user’s social circle and called that experimental feature Social Search. This social circle comprises of social networks like Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed or LinkedIn along with websites linked in user’s Google Profile, and also the Contacts list in Gmail.

Adding Social Network links and content was already started with Bing and then immediately Google followed the same. In order to throw more personalized search results, Google has been making changes in its search engine and pretty much everything that is connected to it like the user’s account and location.

Google Social Search gets three major changes which would be reflected in the search results. Firstly, you get better control to connect your accounts to Google Profiles privately. This would certainly help many users to connect their Twitter and/or LinkedIn profiles to get more relevant search results based the social circle.

And finally, users would see annotations for the links that have been shared users of Twitter and other sites. For instance, if Techtree has shared a link via Twitter, then the annotation will appear with a small thumbnail of Techtree’s display image and text Techtree has shared this link via Twitter.

To conclude it all, Google Social Search has been tweaked to be a part of the main lot of search results with clear annotations about user who shared the link and finally more privacy control is enabled for connecting other site accounts. The update will appear in English only for the time being and Google will be rolling it out through this week.

  • Google Social Search Update is Live (crenk.com)
  • Google Social Search Results Now More Integrated (seroundtable.com)
  • Google Social Search, a Recommendation Engine (mt-soft.com.ar)
  • New Google Social Search [Video] (quickonlinetips.com)
  • Google Enhances Social Search Engine & Slaps Facebook (globalthoughtz.com)
  • Google Enhances Social Search, Excludes Facebook (smedio.com)
  • Google Social Search Goes Mainstream (techie-buzz.com)
  • Google Makes Social Search More Relevant (fastgush.com)
  • Google Updates Social Search, Your Friends Opinions May Now Affect Your Search Results (slashgear.com)
  • Google Integrates Social Into Search Results (searchenginewatch.com)
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