Have you heard that Linkedin is going to be announcing layoffs [Wednesday]? Happy holidays I suppose. how much time do their employees have before they need to pack up their desks?
Linkedin runs scared during the down turn of the economy. If they've just raised all that money why are they doing layoffs? Or are they just cleaning house?

Linkedin last year canned their superman and then fired a director for comments made to a female employee....what else is going on behind those doors?

The CEO, is he really incharge or is Reid still incharge, you should ask the employees. They have a habit of hiring executives that have no experience in what they are suppose to be doing at linkedin. Let's take a look at the recent vp of hr Arvind, what hr experience does he have? Was he hired because he's a friend of reid? do they hire the right people to do the right jobs? Have you looked at their directors or vps?

I have close connections to the company. Sequoia is telling all their companies to get rid of 10% of their employee base. Reid doesn't want to, but can he stand up to Sequoia? Can the money LinkedIn raised disappear? Are they running scared with their tales between their legs? So what will they do, is this just the beginning? Why are they still hiring if they are doing layoffs? Who's on the top of the list? Any of their heavy execs? With offers just accepted by people to go to Linkedin should they be worried about the choice they've made? The new apps they released last week were weak. They had so many bugs in the new apps, and weren't even able to release all of them because of the bugs. Who's doing the QA work at Linkedin? Rumor is they lost their QA director recently too.

What the fuck is going on over at LinkedIn again? They've lost 2 more directors in the past 30 days, for what looks like STUPID reasons. Simple crap like reprimanding employees for fucking things up. They lost their Director of Operations a few days ago, their Director of IT a couple of weeks back and Director of Business Operations. I've got it on good authority that there were some other housecleaning items done in the past few weeks as well within their Operations team. It's like a fucking morgue.

Word is that the employees are taking the upper hand with complaints against management, and that upper management is all too happy to get rid of people just before they hit their 1-year stock vesting. Don't get on the shit list of upper management or your time will come.

One guy in particular keeps coming up with people I talk with — Lloyd Taylor. he's the guy who came over from Google. And the door couldn't have hit him in the ass fast enough, and now that he's being told to go back and "play nicely" with the Google team, he's finding that he has no friends over there. They won't even deal with him any more. It sure looks like his frustration is being taken out on his management team.

I was present during a recent all-hands meeting where Dan and Reid made repeated references to "culture" and "culture changes", speaking as if they know they're changing in the wrong way. But this isn't the way to deal with it.

I hold so little hope for them any more. Just fucking sell to someone and get this over with already.

Dieting and exercising suck. You are not going to have fun. The science is simple: eat fewer calories than your burn. Start quantifying. I use FitDay to track calories. Run a 1,000 calorie per day deficit. Go easy on the drinking. Take up smoking — a zero-calorie alternative. Eat one serving. Drink more coffee, an appetite suppressant. Low-fat ice cream has around 120 calories per half cup. After two weeks, your stomach will shrink. Step two is exercise. It's awful. Use an elliptical machine. Treadmills make you run. One hour per day, hard. You should be close to vomiting. Easy, huh?

(Photo by mandj98)

Previously:

• A is for Adelson, who cofounded Digg


• B is for Botha, who sold YouTube big


• F is for Fitzpatrick, and "hookers and blow"

I've heard that Tim O'Reilly, Mitch Kapor, Reid Hoffman and Mark Zuckerberg will be on that flight. Basically, every Davos attendee from the Bay Area except me managed to hitch a ride back with Google.

With LinkedIn projected to earn 2008 revenue between $75 million to $100 million, former LinkedIn exec Keith Rabois, now at Slide, told the paper Hoffman and company need to go public sooner rather than later.

"Right now, LinkedIn just doesn't seem to be at the center of the Internet universe and an IPO would be an amazing marketing opportunity," he said.

Others aren't so bullish. After CEO Dan Nye said the company would only sell for "a lot more" than $1 billion, Silicon Alley Insider guffawed, noting that career site TheLadders.com recently poached LinkedIn's former head of corporate sales, Brendon Cassidy, with ease. Would he have stayed if he believed in LinkedIn's revenue upside? That's the question the Herald should have asked Rabois.

The venture is called the Zynga Game Network and it's the company behind social network apps such as "casual games" Poker, Attack, and Battleship. So far, Zynga makes all its money by promoting other applications, earning 50 cents each time a user installs one on their profile.

Pincus told the New York Times Zynga has already broken even and has not yet tapped into any of its venture capital. Users click on about 50,000 links to application install pages each day.

Let us know when Coca-Cola buys ad space. Until then, the Facebook application platform will remain a viable economic ecosystem like the Hapsburgs were a model of genetic diversity.

Say you arrive early for a meeting at Coupa, and you need to find a spot to get some work done. Here's your guide to downtown Palo Alto's alternative hotspots, plus a map from Gridskipper. You may not find as many power players — but at least you'll find a power plug.