• blogging for dollars

    Guy Kawasaki writes his own blog -- well, except that one really popular post

    This is why people love Apple executive turned venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki, whether or not he knows what he's talking about. At a Commonwealth Club event, Kawasaki was asked about his insanely popular "Ten Ways to use LinkedIn." Watch him squirm for a minute before 'fessing up: LinkedIn flack Kay Luo provided Guy with his talking points for the post. "I really needed a post — it was four days!" Guy, next time feel free to raid our inbox. We get more helpfully-already-written posts than we'd ever imagined possible.

    2:40 PM on Fri Nov 21 2008
    By Paul Boutin
    843 views, 1 comment

    Latest by shiwsup: A simple "Thanks to Kay Luo at LinkedIn for her assistance with this post" would have covered it. more »

  • great moments in pr

    LinkedIn chairman avoids layoff talk in BusinessWeek

    Reid Hoffman's heft regularly makes reporters turn to their thesauri for polite terms for "fat." BusinessWeek, to keep the tone of a new profile appropriately flattering, writes of his "expansive body." But the article is anything but expansive in its probing of LinkedIn's business. It focuses instead on how Hoffman is trying to figure out survival strategies for his portfolio of startups. Nowhere are LinkedIn's own layoffs mentioned. Instead, Hoffman implies that the employees he put out on the street should use the site to seek new careers: "Every individual is a small business." Not an expansive one.

    3:40 PM on Thu Nov 6 2008
    By Owen Thomas
    1,187 views, 4 comments

    Latest by jeffthechimp: Sausage Linked-In. more »

  • confirmed

    LinkedIn founder cancels trip for layoffs

    LinkedIn, the richly funded business-networking website, is indeed laying employees off today. (No numbers available yet; if you know more details, please send them in.) But we know of at least one person who's skipping sticking around for the cuts: Reid Hoffman, the company's chairman and cofounder. He's in Japan, speaking at a conference. A convenient absence. Hoffman is described by his underlings as generous and kind, but we hear he didn't oppose the layoffs. We also notice he wasn't kind-hearted enough to cancel his trip and console his employees in person. Update: We're now told Hoffman did cancel his trip to Japan for the conference, at the last minute.

    11:20 AM on Wed Nov 5 2008
    By Owen Thomas
    4,726 views, 12 comments

    Most discussed well-seasoned: you owe Reid, who is a genuinely good guy, an apology. Just correcting your bad reporting isn't enough. more »

  • rumormonger

    LinkedIn to start layoffs today?

    A tipster reports high drama at LinkedIn, the business-networking site. The company is funded in part by Sequoia Capital, the Valley's new high priests of doom and gloom — and, our source claims, Sequoia has told all of its portfolio companies to cut costs by 10 percent. LinkedIn's big-hearted chairman, Reid Hoffman (shown here), reportedly doesn't want to lay people off, but he and CEO Dan Nye are said to be engaged in a power struggle over this and other issues. Layoffs could come today — possibly an exercise in cleaning house rather than a reaction to the economy, though we hear LinkedIn has been missing financial milestones. Here's the tip: More »

    10:00 AM on Wed Nov 5 2008
    By Owen Thomas
    2,608 views, 4 comments

    Latest by sggrf: they should stick to being a recruitment site. most of their new things are gimmickly and unwelcomed. more »

  • layoffs

    LinkedIn recommendation = you're fired

    The old way to tell you're about to be fired: Your boss comes up to you, claps you on the shoulder, and acts all chummy. The new way to tell you're about to be fired: Your boss leaves a glowing recommendation for you. Revision3's Damon Berger got one from CEO Jim Louderback five days before he was laid off from the online-video startup. Damon, you should have gotten a clue when Louderback wrote that you could be "a great front-person for any organization."

    2:00 PM on Mon Oct 27 2008
    By Owen Thomas
    2,920 views, 8 comments

    Most discussed Drunken Economist: Heh. Here's what LinkedIn recommendation numbers mean: 5 recommendations: Epilson. Put the blinders on this guy, he's 'dependable' but unimaginative. Probably more »

  • meltdowns

    Nasdaq tumble stops LinkedIn stock sale plan

    Conventional Valley wisdom: The chaos in the public stock markets won't affect private companies, right? Wrong. In August, LinkedIn had set plans to let employees sell some of their shares to investors. Interest in the company had been keen, given its stated plans to wait to IPO rather than sell out. But the stock-sale plan was conditioned on the Nasdaq index staying above a certain level. It has since fallen through that floor, meaning employees will no longer be able to sell their shares. And we hear Bain Capital, a major LinkedIn investor who's backing the stock-sales plan, has the right to walk away if the Nasdaq doesn't recover by mid-October.

    11:34 AM on Mon Oct 6 2008
    By Owen Thomas
    1,919 views, 3 comments

    Latest by michaellamb: what about facebook? aren't they set to start selling soon too? more »

  • your privacy is an illusion

    LinkedIn shuttle throws employees' privacy under the bus

    A correction on our previous post about LinkedIn's financial woes: Contrary to our tipster's assertions, plenty of LinkedIn employees use the company-provided shuttle bus from San Francisco to Mountain View. The bus even has its own Twitter account. That account is private — but it links to a public, annotated route map on Google Maps. CEO Dan Nye and marketing VP Patrick Crane, among others, have their home addresses listed. Other employees have left notes, in plain view, about their commuting preferences. "Your privacy is our top concern," LinkedIn's privacy policy states. But if the company is so slapdash about guarding its own employees, can it really be trusted to protect users? Here's an embedded version of the map: More »

    9:00 AM on Thu Oct 2 2008
    By Owen Thomas
    1,890 views, 6 comments

    Latest by QADude: Looks like their twitter has been Valleywagged! It no longer exists. more »

  • rumormonger

    LinkedIn: "Where the PR is hot but the business is not"

    A LinkedIn tipster tells us that even as the all-business social network raised $53 million from Bain Capital and other investors in June, at a $1 billion valuation, it sought to pull in another $25 million from Goldman Sachs and failed. More damningly, he claims that CEO Dan Nye lied on-air when he told Fox Business earlier this summer that the company is profitable. Inside the company, it's known that LinkedIn has "now missed every financial objective set by Bain Capital after investing in us." The missed targets are not a secret, the tipster tells us, because paranoid managers spend a lot of time blaming each other in front of the minions. "It's a shame, "our tipster writes, "because it was a good company before it became so full of false confidence that it passed on the window of opportunity that was there to sell for good money." The best bit: LinkedIn now has its own commuter bus, like Google and Yahoo, running from San Francisco; it's not widely used by employees, so some joke that the bus exists so managers can throw colleagues under it. The full rant: More »

    1:00 PM on Wed Oct 1 2008
    By Nicholas Carlson
    4,740 views, 15 comments

    Most discussed michaellamb: yeah, sad. Is there Any web2.0 hyped company that's really making money on their own (and I don't mean millions more »

  • iphone

    Apple's iPhone chip plans leaked on LinkedIn

    A senior chip design manager from PA Semi, Wei-han Lien, let a little light shine on Apple's plans for future generations of the iPhone and iPod by listing "Manage ARM CPU architecture team for iPhone" as his current gig on LinkedIn (Lien's profile has since been scrubbed from the site). CEO Steve Jobs had already let it be known that new Apple subsidiary would be working on chips for the popular mobile devices, and now we know that they will be basing designs on the same ARM architecture that Samsung licensed for the current batch, though with Apple's own proprietary improvements. PA Semi was known for crafting highly efficient, low-power chips. Other features, such as graphics and video processing and multi-touch controls, can also be embedded directly in CPU. Tighter integration with the surrounding electronics in the entire chipset can also be achieved with a custom design. As for PA Semi's role in supplying defense contractors with the company's famously efficient designs, not to worry — a contractor says he'll be able to provision chips popular in military applications for "four to five years."

    8:20 AM on Tue Sep 16 2008
    By Jackson West
    603 views, Comment

  • rumormonger

    Insider alleges massive turnover at LinkedIn

    LinkedIn's jobs page gives off the impression that life at the business-networking website is one nonstop Rock Band jam session. But a clearly disgruntled, entertainingly foulmouthed tipster says that backbiting is the real office entertainment of choice. The company's operations department is "like a fucking morgue" after a "housecleaning," he says. Lloyd Taylor, the company's vice president of technical operations, a splashy hire from Google last year, seems to have generated more than his fair share of complaints. In company meetings, CEO Dan Nye and founder Reid Hoffman describe the ruckus as "culture changes." Embarrassingly for a company which says it helps employers vet job candidates and is trying to break into the recruiting business, these problems sound less like culture clashes and more like plain old bad hires. The tip: More »

    3:00 PM on Mon Sep 15 2008
    By Owen Thomas
    4,190 views, 7 comments

    Latest by istherelifeonmars: Well Whaddya know - the very same thing is happening at Adbrite - another Mark Kvamme/Sequoia backed more »