A few weeks ago I was meeting with Peter Thiel and that pesky question of whether we’re in a bubble or not came up. In a debate both sides are getting bored with, Thiel made a point I hadn’t heard: That LinkedIn’s IPO wasn’t some Netscape moment that opened the markets up for everyone else. In fact, he argued, it was the opposite.
LinkedIn showed that you can have a compelling IPO and get an insanely high P/E if you’re a 10-year-old, profitable company, growing revenues at more than 100% a year that can command a $5 billion-plus valuation. That, he argued, is what the market wants right now, and those companies are in short supply.
In our final segment with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner I asked him his view on what his company just did for Silicon Valley: Open the markets or close them for all but the big five or so private giants? → Read More
We caught up with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner yesterday, just after his first earnings call as a public company CEO. In an earlier segment we talked about the surprisingly good quarter LinkedIn had; in this one we talk about the company’s insane roller-coaster of an IPO.
I asked Weiner what that week was like for LinkedIn, a company that’s usually the boring social media giant with no pedophile scandals, privacy uproars or stories of meth pipes and abandoned cats. He insists the team wasn’t distracted amid the media frenzy….yeah, I have a hard time buying that too. But he points out that the added pride associated with working at a company worth upwards of $9 billion increased the intensity to execute. I wouldn’t be surprised if all that talk of the company being overvalued lit a spark in the company too.
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LinkedIn posted its first earnings as a public company yesterday and in true form as a social network, the company used a number of social media outlets to disseminate this information. LinkedIn posted earnings slides on a SlideShare Pro Channel at the close of the bell yesterday, which made it much easier for bloggers and others to then embed and share these slides on their sites (we did).
LinkedIn also partnered with StockTwits for the live-tweeting of the company’s earnings. StockTwits’ LinkedIn ticker page includes this stream of information as well as the earnings presentation. → Read More
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.
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. → Read More
In LinkedIn’s first earnings call as a public company, CEO Jeff Weiner revealed that LinkedIn is adding two new members every second, which is up from one member per second in November 2010. In Q2 alone, LinkedIn added 14 million members, after passing the 100 million mark earlier this year.
Weiner also said that the network is now north of 120 million members, so LinkedIn has added 5 million members in the past month. While LinkedIn’s IPO is a financial event for the company, some of this growth in membership could be the marketing influence of now being a public company. And LinkedIn’s IPO received a ton of media attention, as it was the first major social networking company to go public.
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In April, LinkedIn launched new customizable plug-ins, which are features from the professional social network that can be customized and embedded on websites with minimal effort. LinkedIn plug-ins launched with the ability to add Member Profiles, Company Info, and the LinkedIn share button to websites. And today, LinkedIn is rolling out a major plug-in to companies—Apply With LinkedIn.
The new plug-in (initial details on the feature were originally revealed by GigaOm in early June), puts an “Apply with LinkedIn” button to any company website. Companies can customize the look and feel of the “Apply with LinkedIn” module to feel like part of a specific branding. And companies can manage submissions by routing applications to email address or a web app for applying for a job. The plug-in can also integrate with Applicant Tracking Systems, and only involves a small snippet of code to embed on a site. → Read More
Editor’s note: Guest contributor Jon Bischke is a founder of RG Labs and is an advisor to Altius Education, Fatminds and Udemy. You can follow him @jonbischke.
For people who spend most of their days within a few blocks of tech start-up epicenters such as South Park in San Francisco, University Avenue in Palo Alto or the Flatiron district in New York, last week’s jobs report must have created some cognitive dissonance. After all, we’re in a boom/bubble right? It’s really hard to hire good people isn’t it? But take a moment to step outside the world of high technology and a dramatically different picture emerges of what’s going on in America. → Read More
Professional social network Linkedin surpassed Myspace in terms of traffic to become the No. 2 most visited social networking site in the U.S. in June. LinkedIn, which has seen a resurgence of traffic after its IPO in May, reached an all-time high of 33.9 million unique visitors in June compared to Myspace, which saw 33.5 million unique visitors (that’s down from 34.9 million in May). Hopefully Myspace’s new owners can recharge the troubled social network.
Twitter posted record U.S. traffic, with June as the first month the site saw over 30 million unique visitors. Twitter.com had 30.6 million unique visitors in June, compared to 27 million unique vistors in May. The increase in traffic is actually a big win for Twitter, which splits traffic between its own mobile clients and the many third-party clients that are used to access the network. → Read More
Google and Facebook are at war. This is old news. They both want to be the center of the Internet — but there can be only one center. For a while, it looked like things were quickly shifting Facebook’s way after years of dominance by Google. Then Google+ appeared — already the most compelling social experience Google has ever offered.
While it’s still far from clear what the actual impact of G+ will be on the Internet at large, it’s pretty clear already that it’s something Facebook is going to have to take seriously. And they are. Despite Mark Zuckerberg downplaying it, Facebook did just launch a video chat feature a week after Google did in G+. And last summer, Facebook rushed to get the new Groups done in time to beat Circles to the same punch. → Read More
Bubble or not, 2011 may go down as the year of the tech IPO. Not since the last bubble have we seen so many technology companies clamoring to go public. And halfway through the year, we still have many more companies who will be listing on either the NASDAQ or the NYSE in the next six months. Here’s a roundup of the tech companies that have gone public, where they are trading now, and who we can expect to see ringing the bell next.
Professional social network LinkedIn probably had the biggest IPO in terms of hype this year because it was one of the first big social media companies to go public. After pricing its IPO at $45 per share on the New York Stock Exchange, LinkedIn began trading at $83.00 per share on May 19, giving the company a $7.8 billion market cap. In the first day of trading, shares popped up to as high as $122.70, soaring past a $10 billion valuation. → Read More
Exclusive: Professional social network LinkedIn has shut down API access to a number of developers for terms of service violations, according to the company. The six developers whose access to LinkedIn’s API include Facebook-focused professional network BranchOut, Monster’s social recruiting app Beknown, brand management app Visible.me, resume service Daxtra, professional reputation manager Mixtent and CRM-Gadget.
The shut down of access for BranchOut and Monster’s similar (and recently launched) app BeKnown are particularly surprising. According to LinkedIn, BranchOut, which has been compared to a LinkedIn for Facebook, violated the network’s API TOS with its plans for a premium enterprise recruiting search tool. Charging fees for access to LinkedIn’s content, is a no-no, says the network. → Read More
Zynga filed for its much awaited $1 billion IPO this morning, revealing some impressive revenue and profit numbers. And it looks like recent tech IPOs Pandora and LinkedIn are seeing some major increases in stock value in morning trading after a rocky few weeks.
LinkedIn, which opened at $83 per share in May, has hovered between $60 and $75 per share for the past month, dipping as low as $60 per share. Over the past few days, LinkedIn stock has climbed upwards, closing at $89.94 yesterday. And today, stock reached as high as $94.99 this morning, giving LinkedIn a $9 billion valuation. → Read More
If I asked you which of the major social sites you thought sent us the most traffic, you might think it was Twitter. After all, the TechCrunch Twitter account has over 1.7 million followers. When you compare this to the (just under) 250,000 fans our Facebook TechCrunch page has, it should be no contest, right? Wrong.
The truth is that if this were October of last year, you would have been right in thinking that Twitter was our top referrer in terms of social websites. But since that time, Facebook has far surpassed Twitter in terms of traffic coming our way each month. In fact, Facebook.com is now sends nearly double the traffic that Twitter.com does. This is probably due to the fact that last November, we added Elin, our excellent community manager, who curates and engages with people from our feed on Facebook. I also suspect it has to do with the rise of the Like button. Ever since it was released last year, Facebook has been steadily referring more readers our way.
But this info, while interesting, isn’t all that surprising. After all, Facebook is by far the largest social network in the world. With over 750 million active users, it still dwarfs Twitter. The really surprising thing is that Twitter isn’t even our number two social referrer in terms of websites anymore. As of this month, that distinction goes to LinkedIn. And it’s not even close. → Read More
Taking a page from Facebook’s ad formats, professional social network LinkedIn is launching new social ad formats today that will leverage members’ actions on the site to serve more targeted ads.
So if you follow a company, or recommend a product or company, LinkedIn will use this data in display ads to give you a more targeted advertisement. For example, LinkedIn could put up an ad for a Google job posting (sponsored by Google) that will show people in your network who work at Google and could refer you. → Read More
LinkedIn has taken another deep dive on its user data, comparing women and men’s networking skills on the 100 million-plus member professional network.
The verdict: LinkedIn says that that men are overall more savvy networkers than women, but men and women behave differently in online professional networking. To evaluate LinkedIn “networking savviness” index, the Analytics Team diced data of current industry, current company, and professional connections for members in the US. While users don’t have to designate whether they are a male or female on their LinkedIn profile, the networked had to guess a person’s gender using their first name and matching this against a database of baby names. → Read More
Klout, a startup that measures influence on Twitter and Facebook, is expanding its product today with the addition of LinkedIn. With the launch of Klout scoring for LinkedIn, you’ll be able to add your LinkedIn account to your Klout score and see your influence on the professional social network network itself.
For background, Klout evaluates users’ behavior with complex ranking algorithms and semantic analysis of content to measure the influence of individuals on social networks. → Read More
Twice a year (in June and in December), Vincenzo Cosenza creates a “world map of social networks”, showing the dominant social networks by country, based on traffic data gathered from Alexa and Google Trends for Websites.
In June 2009, Facebook was already quite big, and at the end of that year its accelerating growth became even more apparent. By December 2010, the map colored bluer than ever.
The trend shows no signs of stopping this year.
How long until it turns all blue? → Read More
LinkedIn and investment firm Tiger Global both filed separate SEC filings yesterday evening indicating that the firm loaded up on LinkedIn stock both before and after the company’s IPO in May.
According to the filing, a Tiger’s head Chase Coleman and Tiger fund, PIP V, acquired 2,436,001 shares of preferred and common stock of LinkedIn on secondary markst, from December 21, 2009 to August 10, 2010, for $31,740,600.70. Some of Tiger’s investment during this time was reported, but the filing shows Tiger had a much bigger stake. → Read More
In Silicon Valley the terms of venture capital deals, the prices of valuations and the real stories of ousters are routinely dished, whether they always show up in the press or not. Sure it’s all off the record or on background or whispered at a coffee shop, but people who live here love what they do and when companies and valuations grow this quickly, it’s hard to keep the juicy details under wraps.
So when they can’t dish, what do they do? Hide. → Read More
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