Getting Big, Changing Perceptions

Early on, Linkedin allowed new members to invite all their contacts to join the network with a few clicks— greatly boosting its vitality but leaving some people with a spammy impression of the service.

Russell Glass, Linkedin VP of product (2014–2017); CEO, Headspace Health:

When Linkedin figured out that you can incentivize people to bring their contacts in and help them join the network, that was kind of a game changer in the growth curve. Rabois: Reid was the one who made the decision to invest a team in [enabling] uploads from Microsoft Outlook address books. At the time, almost everybody, certainly in Silicon Valley, ran on Outlook email. That is the way we did business.

Adam Nash, Linkedin VP (2007–2011); Wealthfront CEO, cofounder, Daffy:

Your relationships are a big asset in your career, and we could help people a lot more if they were better connected. The flip side was that sending a Linkedin invite to someone you didn’t mean to send it to could really be a negative experience. Guericke: We would send out a reminder that your invitation was going to expire. And some people were like, “Oh yeah, I forgot to accept this invitation—i meant to, I was just going into a meeting.” And some were like, “That’s annoying!”

Originally, members’ profiles were visible only to other members. In 2006, Linkedin boosted growth by making user information public and allowing it to be found via search engines— giving people who weren’t ardent business networkers a reason to join the service.

Rabois: Normal people were aware that friends, family, and potential dates would be googling them. So it made it a little bit more intuitive to a normal person why a Linkedin profile could be valuable.

The service grew from 30,000 users in October 2003 to 3.8 million in October 2005 to 8 million in April 2006. It launched its first major monetization efforts—such as charging employers $95 per job listing and offering premium accounts that allowed recruiters and others to contact members they weren’t connected with—and revenue jumped from $1.1 million in 2005 to $32 million in 2007. But even as the service scaled, there was skepticism about the very concept of a businessfocused social network.

Hoffman: If you wind all the way back to 2003, it was like, “Oh, aren’t you advertising disloyalty if you put your [résumé] online?”

David Sze, partner at venture firm Greylock, which led Linkedin’s Series B funding round in 2004:

A big moment early on was when major banks limited access to Linkedin on company-owned computers. They said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, we don’t want anyone on this. We don’t want anyone out there with their profile out in the world.”

Hoffman: Part of the thing that Linkedin was doing was getting people psychologically comfortable with having a professional identity. Because pre-linkedin, a public professional identity was something for bloggers, or a very small number of people who’d set up a website, or journalists.

Arvind Rajan, Linkedin (2008– 2014), VP, managing director; cofounder, Cricket Health:

I remember there was some interview

with Mark Zuckerberg where he said that having a separate professional and personal identity reflects a lack of integrity. A lot of people thought that was the case.

Kay Luo, Linkedin senior director of corporate communications (2006– 2010):

For many years, Linkedin never had photos on the website. And there were two camps in the company on that. There was the camp that said, “No, if you put photos, it’s going to turn into a dating site.” And then there was the other side that felt like it’s part of your professional reputation and brand.

Ly: If we introduced that feature too early, it could have gone wrong in so many different ways. It was carefully introduced at the right time.

Nash: We really nudged people: “Not you and your friend at a beach party. You want a headshot.”

Not everyone instinctively grasped Linkedin’s utility or used it as intended.

Chris Selland, founder, research firm Reservoir Partners and veteran business development executive:

There was this whole thing for a while where people called LIONS [Linkedin Open Networkers] would just basically blast everybody and say “Connect with me.” I remember that almost killed it for me. It’s like, “I don’t know you. What’s the value?”

Luo: We had what Reid called “the rock-star problem.” If you’re someone a lot of people want to connect with, you have a different experience than a typical user. And it would probably be a fairly spammy, low-value proposition to you.

Guy Kawasaki, tech-industry evangelist, author, and influencer:

I understood why people would want to get to me, but I didn’t have the need to get to millions of people, not initially, because I wasn’t trying to apply for a job. So it was a little asymmetric.

Luo: Guy was not shy about bashing Linkedin. So one of the first things I did was help him draft a post on 10 ways you can use Linkedin. He ended up publishing that post on his blog, and it became the mostread post he had ever published.

Kawasaki: I completely changed my mind.