BoomTown’s Video Interview With LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye (November 2007)
by Kara Swisher
Posted on June 18, 2008 at 12:00 AM PT
Back in November, I did a video interview with LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye (pictured here) about the fast-growing, in-play business social network.
We talked about the future of LinkedIn and what it all means.
As BoomTown noted then, LinkedIn was the “‘professional’ social network, the serious cousin to the party-hearty twins of MySpace and Facebook.”
But that more dour productivity image certainly did not prevent it from getting a very happy $1 billion valuation yesterday, for what essentially is a business classified service with online presence and connection elements woven in.
And with $53 million in new funding, of course, it’s instantly a hot-ticket item!
As we reported earlier, the money will be used for acquisitions and corporate development, presumably to grow the service into a worldwide behemoth.
That is probably a good thing, as the LinkedIn IPO is further out, said Chairman Reid Hoffman, the serial entrepreneur who founded the company.
He noted to BoomTown in an interview that such an event was not “in the immediate future.”
In addition, that behemoth valuation does leave behind, for now, all the acquisition rumors that swirled around LinkedIn, which had interest from News Corp. (NWS) (owner of Dow Jones and this Web site too) and others.
Now, it is a small company with a very big price tag.
Thus, LinkedIn, which is profitable and had $100 million in revenues this year, is on its own with a nice new bag of cash to help it get along.
Here’s my interview with Nye from late last year:
