Sequoia Capital ''Links In'' with $4.7 Million Investment
...MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 12, 2003--LinkedIn, the premier provider of professional networking tools for hiring managers, job seekers and professional service providers, today announced that it has secured Series A financing of $4.7 million. The investment was led by Sequoia Capital, the venture investors behind well-known Internet brands such as Yahoo!, Google and PayPal. Sequoia Capital is also an investor in Plaxo, the leading contact updating tool.
Through the real-world business successes of its users, LinkedIn has demonstrated that even established executives increase their business effectiveness and career success by using a referral-based professional networking tool. LinkedIn not only enables professionals to discover inside connections they never knew they had, but also allows them to receive referrals to deal makers, hiring mangers and other highly sought-after executives through the people they already know and trust.
Sequoia Capital's investment underscores the significant business opportunity involved in re-engineering several large and existing markets. For example, employers and employees will spend nearly $8 billion this year to find each other through the Internet, classifieds and recruiting firms. While online job boards have become popular, they rarely work for job seekers, and hiring managers are overwhelmed with resumes and "cold" emails from strangers. LinkedIn is the only tool that mirrors the most successful process for finding a job and hiring employees and contractors: it allows both job seekers and hiring managers to find each other through referrals from their real-world connections.
"The business potential for social software is quite limited. In contrast, LinkedIn is squarely focused on trusted business referrals, which is how business gets done and for which real money gets spent every day and all over the world," said Mark Kvamme, partner at Sequoia Capital. "LinkedIn provides both patented and effective technology that has the power to transform hiring--very much in the way PayPal re-engineered the transfer of money and Google dramatically increased the utility of the Internet for individual consumers and professionals." Kvamme is joining LinkedIn's board of directors.
LinkedIn's management team is led by CEO Reid Hoffman, who co-founded SocialNet in 1997 and was most recently the executive vice president of PayPal. "We are very pleased with the rapid adoption of LinkedIn among hiring managers, venture capitalists and executives from public companies in a broad set of industries," said Hoffman. "It is particularly gratifying to see that it took less than two months for LinkedIn to help hiring managers not only reach top talent through referrals, but also interview and hire them." ...
TheFeature :: Mobile, Social, and Trustworthy?
By Howard Rheingold
...What if you could say to your mobile media, some time in the near future: "I'm in this airport for the next hour and a half. Is there another engineer from my company, member of my sorority, hometown neighbor, relative, or colleague in the vicinity who wants to have a cup of coffee and kill some time?" or "I'm driving to the office in five minutes. Who along my route is going exactly where I'm going right now, and is guaranteed by someone I trust to be trustworthy?" or "Which of the strangers on this train shares more than three friends in our address books?" The problem is not computing power or wireless capability, but a software and social challenge. The social challenge has to do with what you have to disclose to strangers about yourself in order to find like-minded strangers and win their trust without compromising your privacy, and conversely, what you need to know about nearby strangers in order to trust them. The software challenge is to use computing and communication capabilities to negotiate possible compatibilities on an ad-hoc, peer-to-peer basis, without bothering the users too much -- if your people-finder beeps at you every fifteen seconds, you aren't going to use it for long. The social challenge is trying to quantify such ineffable notions as affinity and reputation in a manner computing devices can use.
A group of researchers at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories' Information Dynamics Lab, Bernardo Huberman, Stephen Sorkin, and Josh Tyler, have produced a working model of a Nokia 3650 phone that runs a Symbian C program that does not attempt to solve the reputation problem, but does allow people within bluetooth range of each other to discover if they have the same preferences without revealing them to each other. "Just what you need for the phenomenon of discovering in real space if you have a community," Huberman noted when he told me about their recent work. This video narrated by Sorkin, demonstrates how nearby phones negotiate possible affinities in the geographic vicinity by testing for similar attributes such as common address book entries or any other specified attributes...
K-Collector"Sequoia provides a series A financial investment in LinkedIn " again it seems that they have excellent eye for what will become 'big' in the next few years. Incidentally, I was just reading an article in next week's Business Week (ed. 17 November) in the article "The Gold in Google's IPO goes to..":
"Google could also represent one of the biggest VC payoffs of the decade. Its two most prominent backers, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital, ponied up a little more than $10 million each in the summer of 1999, according to venture data and people familiar with Google's financing. Through these investments, each firm owns an estimated 10% of the search giant, they say. That means they could pocket $2 billion apiece - a staggering 20,000% return on investment [based on $20 Bn valuation]"
In other words, keep an eye on LinkedIn..
Posted by: Erik van Bekkum at November 13, 2003 09:03 AMerik... i would love to keep an eye on linkedin... except, when i posted this last evening i could not access their website, and this morning their domain name resolves to a 'parked free at godaddy.com' message... bad timing on their part.
that said, yes, sequoia capital does have a knack for landing exceedingly hot properties... i've met with them and they have a brilliant team...