VentureBeat - Latest Comments in LinkedIn’s chief executive steps down

Re: LinkedIn’s chief executive steps down

Matt Marshall — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 12:28:15 -0000

Fair enough, thanks for clarification guys. Reid, your email told me about your update and said "I've hired a new CEO; he starts Tuesday" and then gave me a link to Dan's profile. Automated or not, the email still came across as personal. Guess that's a good thing.

Re: LinkedIn’s chief executive steps down

Reid Hoffman — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 11:43:42 -0000

Matt: your story has a few inaccuracies in it. Most centrally, you imply that we sent you a direct eMail. Actually, we did not. I simply updated my Linkedin profile, since one of the uses of the Linkedin profile is staying in touch with the variety of people that matter in your professional life â€“ e.g. you. Linkedin then sent you an automated eMail letting you know of the change in my status. This is one of the uses of a Linkedin profile; the others include being able to publish it so that search engines can find you directly; and so that former colleagues and classmates can find you as well.

Frankly everyone who knows me â€“ say has had dinner with me â€“ knows that the CEO job has never been my aspiration. I want to build products and businesses that improve millions of peoples lives; any particular job is just the price I have to pay in order to accomplish those goals. As a company builds, the CEO job becomes more and more about building an organization where most of the substantive problems are solved by people in the organization â€“ the CEO recruits, manages, empowers, and organizes those people. Personally, I prefer working directly on the problems and less on the organization. So, I recruited a world-class guy at building organizations, and gave myself a role working on some of the central problems. End result: Linkedin should get a great organization and a great product by the end of the year. This year our focus is on showing every professional how to use us effectively to become faster and more effective in their work and professional lives.

This is written from the road, so will try to follow up on this more later.

Re: LinkedIn’s chief executive steps down

David Cowan — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 11:25:41 -0000

Matt
You've got it backwards. Reid didn't do this on our insistence--our only condition of investment was that Reid stay with the company after hiring the CEO.

Re: LinkedIn’s chief executive steps down

Courtney — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 09:31:55 -0000

Great company with an outstanding future. Congradulations to Nye!

Re: LinkedIn’s chief executive steps down

Jason — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 01:49:16 -0000

Wow, this is a total shocker! I'd thought that Mr. Huffman is gonna take LinkedIn public sometimes this year, or get bought up by GE (parent company of CNBC), Fox (who's planning to launch a Biz channel soon), Bloomberg, or even possibly eBay, etc...

"realized LinkedIn needed to scale, which means giving more attention to management issues, something that isnâ€™t his strength. â€œHis passion is in the product."

That's a such a classic, selfless act, it's hard to find such personalities in the Valley. Anyway, best luck to him :)