Big changes at fast growing professional social network LinkedIn this afternoon. Founder Reid Hoffman has retaken the CEO role, which he relinquished to former Intuit exec Dan Nye in early 2007. Nye is leaving LinkedIn in January, although the company says he will stay on as an advisor.
Former Yahoo executive Jeff Weiner is joining the company full time as interim President. Weiner is currently an Executive-in-Residence for venture capital firms firms Accel Partners and Greylock Partners, and he will maintain a loose relationship with the firms, he says. Weiner left his position at Yahoo in the early summer.
Last week the company grabbed a Google executive, Deep Nishar, to take over Hoffman’s current role as head of the products group at LinkedIn.
LinkedIn has raised $103 million in venture capital to date and has 11.2 million monthly worldwide visitors according to Comscore (October 2008).
What’s not clear is why all this is happening. LinkedIn says their revenues continue to grow dramatically – up 900% over the last two years (although they won’t say what their actual revenue is). When Hoffman stepped down as CEO in 2007 he said the company needed a different leader to grow it further. Now, he says Nye has done that job and it’s time for him to take back the reins.
The addition of Weiner is also quirky, and may explain the changes. Weiner was likely expecting a CEO role as his next job. He’s now second to Hoffman. Perhaps the company is using the interim period to see how he can handle himself leading the company. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Weiner take the CEO job at LinkedIn sometime in 2009, or else leave the company.
It seems everyone is having problems around the world, im sure they will come out fine, the real question on my mind is, what is going to happen with Net Neutrality?
Net Neutrality will be eliminated for video, but will remain for some basic level service like text html pages, IM, email.
Thanks for taking the time to answer my question, all the best my friend!
Hoffman said at a Dow Jones conference this year that he contacted something like 20+ recommenders for Nye. He even contacted recommenders of the recommenders. Guess that approach ain’t too effective. So much for using LinkedIn as a recruiting tool. I never thought the LinkedIn recommendations were anything more than serendipity anyway.
ranks right up there with the eBay crazy shipping scammers. http://tinyurl.com/4rdhmc
They charged someone to send me an InMail and yet I don’t get any money for it. LinkedIn, my time is not free.
I guess this frees up Dan Nye to returning as Science Guy.
Why the need for venture capital? Can’t they more than fund their own growth by now? Or is the business model still an unproven?
Reid’s a rockstar, they’re in good hands
Good scoop!
“Taking back the reins” is a reference to the reins used to direct a horse. A reign describes a king’s rule.
huh. ok. i’ll fix that. don’t you know you’re supposed to call me fat, unethical and stupid while correcting a typo? not sure what to do with a straight up comment like this.
now that’s funny, right there
(nice catch glenn, nice riposte mr. A)
Michael, Are you suffering withdrawal symptoms?
Oh that’s me too, I just post those comments anonymously…
And rain is soon water under the bridge.
Shocking. I thought they were locked and loaded with Nye. They have a great property that does not to seem to get the most of it’s assets.
I thought Nye was pretty sharp. I am shocked.
Hundreds of millions in VC funding but yet only 11.2 million monthly visitors?
Kinda pathetic.
Traffic != sales. Please get that through ur thick head.
Check LinkedIn’s reputation here…
https://www.idn...mp;entityType=2
Changing a CEO isn’t something done lightly, esp so short after closing an investment round. Something’s up here folks. It might not be bad, but it isn’t a stable environment, but then again, that’s expected in start ups. LI is a smart company – let’s see the next chess move.
The fact they don’t reveal their revenues or at least % of customers who pay their premium fees is telling in an of itself.
a simple case of a ceo getting bucked.
all that funding, they are not a startup anymore.
StageLocator.com – take it!
The sound of deck chairs being dragged around the Lido Deck of the Titanic is about as annoying as nails on a chalkboard.
I wonder how the current unemployment environment affects LinkedIn. Since no one is hiring, my bet is that their traffic could take a big hit, cause that site is useless without jobs. Facebook they aint
I would disagree. I think that now would be the best time for an unemployed user of LinkedIn to lean hard on the contacts that he/she might have made on the website. If I were out of work, and my mortgage payment was due in two weeks, my full-time job would be finding another job, which my LinkedIn network might facilitate.
“Now, he says Nye has done that job and it’s time for him to take back the reigns.”
This is the strange part – I’ve never seen a CEO ‘parting’ for having completed a job successfully.
Although that smells a little I think they are on a good path no matter which CEO they choose for now.
One unfounded rumor that circled ’round Yahoo when Jeff was buying up the search businesses (Inktomi / Goto) was that Jeff had a presentation in front of the C level staff (at the time, he was SVP of “Search” and Marketplace, pre – the 2004-2008 re-org every three month craziness.
Rumor has it that he was saying that it was hard, technically challenging and he could use some help on the technology side. Then CTO Farzad Nazim (you know, Zod) chimed in “I’ve been a bit disconnected from the whole search business, but, I aim to get dialed in again given the nature of the challenge”…this was 2003, before I got there, so no way to know for sure or not.
Jeff saw it coming, imho, and made some pretty awesome moves while I was there and before…he’d be a great leader to take LinkIn to the next level, assuming they hand him the “reign” in early 2009.
Matt Raible was just let go from there: http://raiblede...din_cuts_10_a_k
What a shame. If they are “doing so well” why’d they get rid of guy like that who eats technology for a living.
LinkedIn is a growing and improving company. For as long as these changes will keep on making LinkedIn a great professional networking site, I’m in all support for it.
jeff weiner is a total dickhead and a fraud. his team meetings were daylong clusterf**ks where nothing was accomplished. he was definitely part of the reason why yahoo is where it is today.
i completely agree with “purpled out” about his assessment of jeff weiner…he was known at yahoo as an arrogant yet articulate guy with no operational experience and nothing more than terry’s golden boy…jeff is completely responsible for the yahoo search business mess. he drove many talented employees out of yahoo because of his abrasive, hostile nature. i feel sorry for the employees at linkedin…
i also agree with purpled out. i worked for Jeff weiner’s group for almost two years. he’s smart and articulate – but so is my daughter’s high school teacher. that doesn’t mean she’s qualified to lead a large group of people… and neither is jeff. he has no idea how to delegate, hold people accountable, or keep a large project on target. siphoning every available resource from other parts of the company to launch panama late and completely de-scoped doesn’t make you good. it only makes you one of the main reasons yahoo just laid off another 1500 people. nice hire, terry.
I agree, Weiner is an arrogant jackass. He’s so full of himself he drove the search business at Yahoo into the ground…no operational experience. Smart guy, but a complete egomaniac. If he becomes CEO, you’ll see a mass exodus at Linkedin.
can’t agree more here. all style, no substance.
Weiner is a disastrous move for LinkedIn. If I were an employee there, I would come in tomorrow and see if the company will buy back some of my stock. This thing can only get uglier from here.
I think it is great step.
http://www.oxyshopping.com
No disrespect Kevin, but your website seems a tad on the cluttered side my friend, would you like to contract me out so I can fix your layout and streamline your SEO a bit?
i’m just goin to assume LinkedIn is seriously losing profitability in this economy… or at least reallly pessimistic about the direction they are going.
first they layoff 10% without considering the talent like Matt Raible, spam their members trying to hire like crazy (turns out I wasn’t the only one in my group that got the invite), and now this “management shakeup”.
where’s linkedin’s community evangelist at?
While Matt is certainly talented, he’s possibly a bit too independant or entreprenurial minded to fit well within a company that needs to downsize. I don’t know Matt except from his blog, but my experience has been people like him don’t tend to last very long in corporate gigs anyway.
I posted about this, too, in my blog, http://www.lionblog.co.cc/
Trackbacked, as well.
—–
Visit the Z-Portal Search Engine, at: http://www.z-portal.uni.cc/
Oh good to see him back, I’m sure he can do wonders again.
Probably the best person for this company since it has gone down the drain with previous CEO doing not a whole lot to make it a successful on most of the terms.
Official Preview
http://www.officialpreview.com
Jeff Weiner? Really? REALLY??
Awww…
Weiner is smart, but also very arrogant. Doesn’t at ALL seem to be the right fit for the “next level”, especially since he has no real impressive operating experience.
Dan, on the other hand, is an awesome operator, but definitely lacks the strategic chops of Weiner.
I always thought Hoffman/Nye would be a rock solid long term combo. Hmmm…. something smells fishy.
When you’re a self-annointed god like Hoffman, nothing is going to be good enough.
I don’t know Weener, but I think he does a fine job of looking exactly like “Stark the evil sweatshop operator” as played by Dylan McDermott in The Cowboy Way. http://www.ange...ott/cowboy.html
Here’s to perpetual 5 O’clock shadows.
LinkedIn makes most of the money from paid job listings. Since economy is taking a nose dive, so is their revenue, I guess. Sure there’ll be traffic, which may even be increased temporarily. But these are social networking traffic, which we all know, are much less valuable.
11m world-wide monthly visitors without significant unconventional (non-ad) revenue is hard to justify a 9 figure valuation. There were talks by recruiters about an IPO within a year, which is highly unlikely now.
I think that LinkedIn is fortunate enough to have raised enough money to survive the “nuclear” winter. It’ll soar, when economy recovers though.
Weiner is one of the best (if not the best) senior Yahoo! execs I had the opportunity to listen to, while I was there.
This can only be good for LinkedIn ! Congrats!
Rehashing what I’ve said before on this, I find the sub-current of job postings within the Groups function to be fascinating. Is this Linkedin Jobs grey market?
Most folks seem to opine on Linkedin Jobs as a major revenue source. I’m not sure that’s truly the case and I’m not sure that Groups is something that should be “free” forever.
I still find Linkedin to be another great resource for research on companies, people, their published professional past, etc. I hope the shakeup brings them back to the core services — the Applications are starting to reach borderline annoying in the UI — or finish their thoughts and invest time in refinement of features.
Linked in sucks anyway.
BTW, I just read Arrington’s PR Embargo post.
I’m putting the entire T3chlvsive blog back up but renaming it to techscreamer.com
I’m setting up a paypal interface that will let PR people write unlimited posts for $50 a year membership.
T3chlvsive had several hundreds of articles and was 50,000 or higher on Alexa before I shut it down for job reasons.
If you are interested in bypassing Mike and Schonfeld, please check out techscreamer.com tomorrow night. I just have to get the blog back up on the server and code the paypal payment gateway. It should be one of the top tech blogs again in no time.
I may have it up tonight, I dunno. I’ll try. I just got the techscreamer.com domain. We had several exclusives including Tyler Cavell’s secret cousin. Techcrunch’s fall from grace with the Newscorp deal and much more.
They’re will be thousands of paid subscribers at that cheap a rate for sure. Gimme about 5 hours to get the blog back up and set up the gateway if you wanna join.
“quirky” is a kind word, MA. Two relevant things that weiner is that nye is not are 1) experienced in consumer internet, and 2) highly highly political. One of Weiner’s equally political suck-ups from Y! days has been at LinkedIn for over a year, and likely helped him orchestrate this move via the board. Hoffman doesn’t really have much interest in being CEO – it’s not his passion, and he’s not so ego-driven – so this is clearly a test-run to see if Weiner can grow into the CEO role sometime next year.
For those predicting the demise of Linkedin, it won’t be so quick (look how long Y! took – even five years ago the magic was long gone). And it probably won’t happen at all , nor does it deserve to– Linkedin is a valuable service with a lot of potential still left, and even amidst the numerous questionable strategy and management changes over the past year, has continued to grow. Maybe not as much as promised (who is?), but with multiple revenue streams and a useful product, the company’s fine for a while. Karma’s a long term type thing.
The real near-term fear is for the Linkedin employees. They’ve already had the opportunity to see how “nasty” Y!-style politicians can be, not to mention useless and self-promoting, but now that the Y! coterie is growing take cover: the worst is yet to come.
Linkedin cut 60 employees in November…
I knew heads would roll if they didn’t fix my login.
Maybe now I’ll finally be able to access my account.
In case Weiner doesn’t work out, I hear CMC is available, for the right price of course.
What LinkedIn is missing, twitter has: engagement.
What Twitter is missing, LinkedIn has: revenue.
Both are about people.
Maybe the two should merge into one.
Weiner is a TERRIBLE product guy. Anyone that knows his will think this is true. Plus — can you name anyone besides him and Sue Decker with more blood on their hands due to the total Search disaster at Yahoo?
The Overture purchase and integration is probably the biggest piece of the “total Search disaster”. The blame there probably lies with DanR, Ted Meisel, and Phu, not with Jeff. Overture wasn’t moved under Jeff until Meisel left in late 2005, which is really when things there started to fixed — of course that was too late.
One has to wonder about a company where they can’t answer an email, let alone a phone.
I loved their recording though… have a safe and happy holiday.
I did call to report that my identity had been stolen and misrepresented on their website. That I have been stalked and currently have a 5 year order for protection, for myself and my children.
Our personal information on a public forum, is not only, not good- it is very dangerous.
Frankly- I hope the VC’s.. lose their money.
Any company that will not post a customer service number- can’t respond to a customer in a couple of days.. let alone weeks. Is just plain going to eventually fail.
These CEO’s- leaders, are the only money makers- short-term gains, for themselves. Just another- smoke and mirrors, internet eventual flop.
Ponzi schemes really.
Anyone can do this- Nice GUI- storage space.
Nothing to it. They were just one of the first, is all. Name recognition.
As for a business networking product. NO- can’t think of anyone who is currently employed and successful, that would want everyone they ever went to college, highschool, had a job. Even wanting their names and contact information listed. “wanna be my friend?”
No- most successful people, have enough friends!
It would be interesting.. to look them up. The board, and the VC’s.. wonder how many people they are friends with.. vouch for.. recommend.
I would bet… even the VC’s investing in this company.. Don’t use it themselves. That is a clue.