If ringing the bell at the NASDAQ or NYSE is a momentary victory dance for a Silicon Valley CEO (or, you know, a has-been cartoon character from my youth that may or may not represent a veiled argument for communism), the first earnings announcement can be the cold splash of reality: You are now Wall Street’s bitch. And Wall Street was not in a happy mood yesterday.
Thankfully for LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, the company made its debut on the quarterly conference call with surprisingly good earnings– particularly profits no one was expecting and significant jumps in user growth. (Wall Street, only impressed for a few hours, has been trading the stock down this morning; still LinkedIn has held up decently compared to others.)
We spent some time with Weiner at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View yesterday to talk about a lot of things: The quarter, that valuation, whether LinkedIn has opened the market or proven you have to be a $5 billion-$10 billion whopper of a company to get out and sustain a good price, and the debate over whether people still want everything relating to their professional life siloed on one social network, or mixed in to Facebook and Twitter. We’ll be posting chunks of the interview throughout the day.
Up first: What happened this quarter that Wall Street wasn’t counting on, the surprising strength of its hiring services business given the brutal national unemployment, whether LinkedIn is too reliant on that business and how its international expansion strategy is 180 degrees different than Groupon’s.
With over 100 million users representing over 200 countries around the world, LinkedIn is a fast-growing professional networking site that allows members to create business contacts, search for jobs, and find potential clients. Individuals have the ability to create their own professional profile that can be viewed by others in their network, and also view the profiles of their own contacts. Competitors to LinkedIn include sites such as XING, Doostang and Ecademy. Of note, LinkedIn won...
Jeff Weiner is the CEO of LinkedIn, where he started in December of 2008 as Interim President. He came to LinkedIn from positions as an Executive-in-Residence for leading Venture Capital firms Accel Partners and Greylock Partners. Prior to joining Accel and Greylock, Weiner served in various leadership roles at Yahoo for over seven years, most recently as the Executive Vice President of Yahoo’s Network Division. In this position he led a team of over 3,000 employees, managing products reaching...
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