LinkedIn's CEO is Jeff Weiner, previously a Yahoo! Inc. executive. The company was founded by Reid Hoffman and founding team members from PayPal and Socialnet.com (Allen Blue, Eric Ly, Jean-Luc Vaillant, Lee Hower, Konstantin Guericke, Stephen Beitzel, David Eves, Ian McNish, Yan Pujante, and Chris Saccheri).Founder Reid Hoffman, previously CEO of LinkedIn, is now Chairman of the Board. Bhushan Kasvekar is Vice President of Products.LinkedIn is headquartered in Mountain View, California, with offices in Omaha, Chicago, New York, London and Dublin. It is funded by Sequoia Capital, Greylock, Bain Capital Ventures,Bessemer Venture Partners and the European Founders Fund. LinkedIn reached profitability in March 2006. Through January 2011, the company had received a total of $103 million of investment.
In 2003, Sequoia Capital led the Series A investment in the company. In June 2008, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and other venture capital firms purchased a 5% stake in the company for $53 million, giving the company a post-money valuation of approximately $1 billion.
In 2010, LinkedIn opened a European headquarters in Dublin, Ireland, received a $20 million investment from Tiger Global Management LLC at a valuation of approximately $2 billion, and announced its first acquisition, Mspoke, and improved its 1% premium subscription ratio.
In October 2010 Silicon Valley Insider ranked the company No. 10 on its Top 100 List of most valuable start ups. As of December 2010, the company was valued at $1.575 billion in private markets.
It was reported that LinkedIn earned $154.6 million dollars in advertising revenue alone in 2011. This number was actually higher than that of Twitter who earned $139.5 million dollars respectively.
In early January 2012, LinkedIn announced it would be expanding its offices into the Financial District of San Francisco. LinkedIn expects to move into its 57,120 square foot office space sometime in the Spring of 2012.
LinkedIn’s fourth-quarter 2011 earnings soared. Shares rose 9.5% to $83.68 in premarket trading on the day of the announcement, due to the company's increase in success in the social media world.
In early May, LinkedIn announced its 2012 Q1 numbers were up 101% to $188.5 million compared to $93.9 million in Q1 of 2011. Revenue for Q2 was estimated to be between $210 to $215 million.
In June 2012 cryptographic hashes of approximately 6.4 million LinkedIn user passwords were stolen by hackers who then published the stolen hashes online. In response to the incident, LinkedIn asked its users to change their passwords. Security experts criticized LinkedIn for not salting their password file, and instead using a single iteration of SHA-1.
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