CHAPTER 1THE HISTORY OF LINKEDIN
LinkedIn has well over 600,000,000 members and is growing every single day.
The network started off in the living room of co‐founder Reid Hoffman (previously on the board of Google, eBay and PayPal). LinkedIn's founders were Reid Hoffman, Allen Blue, Konstantin Guericke, Eric Ly and Jean‐Luc Vaillant.
Launched officially on 5th May 2003 it was mainly used for professional networking and connecting job seekers with employers. At the end of its first month of operating it had just 4,500 members. In 2004 they added a key new feature, the ability to upload your address book and invite people to connect with you. This helped boost membership to 1,217,647 members.
In 2005, they launched jobs and also paid subscriptions. As the team and platform grew, so did members, growing to just over 4,000,000. The year 2006 was the first year that LinkedIn turned a profit and was also the year that they added the recommendations feature (one of my personal favourites) and also the ‘People you may know’ function.
Between 2007 and 2008 membership continued to grow and reached over 33 million members. Then, in 2009, as membership grew past 55 million, Jeff Weiner joined as President and CEO. After settling in, moving into 2010 saw LinkedIn grow past 85,000,000 members, 10 office sites and over 1,000 staff.
In 2011 things started to get very serious as LinkedIn got listed on the New York Stock Exchange at a value of $45 per share. They had now grown to over 135,000,000 ...
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