40 Fun Facts About LinkedIn

Which tech giant bought LinkedIn in 2016 in what was then its largest acquisition ever?

Microsoft paid $26.2 billion in cash, and LinkedIn stayed its biggest purchase until the Activision Blizzard deal of 2022.

LinkedIn's official history says the company began in 2002 in which part of Reid Hoffman's home?

Living room is where LinkedIn says it began, skipping the garage of Silicon Valley legend. The site went live months later, on May 5, 2003.

Which daily puzzle did LinkedIn launch in 2024 alongside its first games Pinpoint and Crossclimb?

Queens was one of LinkedIn's first three games, which refresh every day, time each solve and let players compare scores and streaks across their network.

What color is the #OpenToWork frame that LinkedIn job seekers can add around a profile photo?

Green is the color of the #OpenToWork ring, and showing it is optional: members can instead signal recruiters only, which adds no frame to the photo.

On which stock exchange did LinkedIn shares start trading in May 2011 under the ticker LNKD?

NYSE trading in LinkedIn began on May 19, 2011, eight years after the site launched. The LNKD ticker lasted until the company was sold in December 2016.

Which country blocked LinkedIn in 2016 for not storing its citizens' data on local servers?

Russia's block followed a Moscow court ruling that was upheld in November 2016, and LinkedIn's app was pulled from the country's app stores two months later.

LinkedIn engineers named their open-source key-value data store after which Harry Potter villain?

Voldemort was built for highly scalable storage, but LinkedIn moved all of its systems off it by about 2018 and later announced a replacement called Project Venice.

What happened to LinkedIn's share price on its first day of trading in 2011, after an IPO at $45?

It more than doubled: LinkedIn closed at $94.25, up 109 percent, after touching a 171 percent gain during the day.

LinkedIn paid a $13 million settlement in 2015 for sending members' contacts repeated what?

Reminder emails were the problem: the court found members had agreed to one invitation going to their address book, but not to the two follow-ups sent in their names.

LinkedIn announced in November 2023 that its worldwide membership had passed which milestone?

1 billion members arrived about twenty years after launch. LinkedIn had needed more than a year to sign up its first million, a mark it reached in August 2004.

Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn after serving as a top executive at which dot-com era startup?

PayPal hired Hoffman as chief operating officer in 2000, and its sale to eBay two years later freed him to start LinkedIn and back other young companies.

Reid Hoffman was among the first investors in which rival social network, launched in 2004?

Facebook's first financing round included Hoffman, who had also arranged the meeting between Mark Zuckerberg and the round's lead investor, Peter Thiel.

Reid Hoffman was an early donor to which AI lab, later leaving its board in 2023?

OpenAI counted Hoffman among its first donors, and he resigned his board seat in March 2023 to avoid conflicts with his own AI investments.

Which LinkedIn feature, added in 2012, lets a connection vouch for a listed skill with one click?

Endorsements were criticised as meaningless, so in 2016 LinkedIn began highlighting the ones that come from coworkers and mutual connections.

On LinkedIn, which label appears beside the name of a friend of one of your direct connections?

2nd-degree is the label for people linked to someone you already know, and LinkedIn lets you invite them with the Connect button on their profile.

Which kind of LinkedIn member data was stolen from about 6.5 million accounts in a 2012 hack?

Passwords were taken in scrambled form, but experts faulted how weakly LinkedIn had protected them, and in 2016 another 100 million logins from the same breach surfaced.

In which country did LinkedIn shut its localised site in 2021, replacing it with a jobs-only app?

China had a censored local version of LinkedIn from 2014, and the jobs-only app that replaced it, InCareer, was itself closed in August 2023.

Which European capital has hosted LinkedIn's international headquarters since it opened in 2010?

Dublin got the office in 2010, and by late 2016 LinkedIn was planning 200 more hires there to bring its Irish workforce to 1,200.

Which online course site did LinkedIn buy in 2015 and later rebrand as LinkedIn Learning?

Lynda.com cost about $1.5 billion and dated back to 1995, when animator Lynda Weinman started it to support her books and classes.

Which reaction can LinkedIn members give a post, alongside Like, Celebrate, Support, Love and Funny?

Insightful is meant for a post that makes a great point or shares helpful advice, and LinkedIn suggests using it on posts about tips and tricks.

Which LinkedIn feature was scrapped in September 2021, under a year after its worldwide rollout?

Stories reached every LinkedIn member in October 2020 and was gone eleven months later, while an older casualty, the Answers forum, had lasted about six years.

A phone app LinkedIn bought in 2011 scanned which paper items and turned them into contacts?

Business cards were the target of CardMunch, the app maker LinkedIn acquired in January 2011 and still listed among its own apps two years later.

Which former Yahoo executive led LinkedIn as CEO from 2009 to 2020, through its IPO and sale?

Jeff Weiner arrived as interim president in December 2008 and, after 11 years as chief executive, moved up to executive chairman in June 2020.

Which software company's rival bids in 2016 drove up the price LinkedIn's eventual buyer paid?

Salesforce kept pushing its offer even after LinkedIn agreed to negotiate exclusively with its buyer, and the final price came in about 22 percent above the first plan.

Which site for hosting presentations did LinkedIn buy in 2012 and then sell to Scribd in 2020?

SlideShare launched in 2006 as a kind of YouTube for presentations, and LinkedIn paid about $119 million for it before passing it on eight years later.

Which Silicon Valley investment firm led LinkedIn's Series A funding round in late 2003?

Sequoia Capital led the round within months of the site's launch and kept buying: in 2008 it joined a deal that valued the five-year-old company at roughly a billion dollars.

What name did LinkedIn give its 2012 plan to map every job, skill, company and worker worldwide?

Economic Graph was set as a ten-year goal by LinkedIn's chief executive, and its data later showed New York City which tech skills were most in demand.

Which invite-only LinkedIn program, launched in 2012, features leaders such as Richard Branson?

Influencers began in October 2012 as a showcase for well-known leaders sharing professional advice, and by 2016 the list had grown past 750 names.

Which widely used data-streaming software was built at LinkedIn and open-sourced in early 2011?

Apache Kafka was named by co-creator Jay Kreps, who liked the novelist Franz Kafka and reasoned that a system optimised for writing deserved a writer's name.

LinkedIn's court battle with analytics startup hiQ Labs became a landmark case about which practice?

Web scraping won the first rounds, when an appeals court let hiQ keep harvesting public profiles, but hiQ was later found in breach of LinkedIn's user agreement and settled.

Reid Hoffman went to Oxford as a Marshall Scholar to earn a master's in which subject?

Philosophy at Wolfson College followed a Stanford degree in symbolic systems, and Hoffman was later made an honorary CBE partly for his services to the Marshall scheme.

Which business podcast launched in 2017 with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman as its host?

Masters of Scale opened with Airbnb's Brian Chesky as its first guest, and the show committed to an even split between women and men among its guests.

Which 2012 career book by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha treats every worker as a business of one?

The Start-Up of You urges readers to act as chief executive of their own career, and it became a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller.

What rating does LinkedIn's profile level meter give once every recommended section is filled in?

All-star takes seven sections, from a photo to a summary, and once a member reaches it LinkedIn stops showing the meter on the profile at all.

Which Hamburg-based rival to LinkedIn was founded in 2003 as the Open Business Club?

XING took its present name in November 2006, weeks before it became the first Web 2.0 company to go public in Europe.

What was Reid Hoffman's first startup, a 1997 site for online dating and matching up similar people?

SocialNet also tried to pair up people such as golfers looking for partners nearby, and two colleagues from it later helped Hoffman start LinkedIn.

Leaked Edward Snowden files showed which country's spies used fake LinkedIn pages to hack Belgacom?

United Kingdom agency GCHQ ran the breach from 2010 to 2013 under the code name Operation Socialist, luring the Belgian telecom firm's engineers to the bogus pages.

Which news reader app, built by two Stanford students, did LinkedIn buy for $90 million in 2013?

Pulse began as a class project at Stanford's design institute, and LinkedIn retired the original app at the end of 2015 after folding it into its own.

In 2012 LinkedIn paid about $4 million for the patents of which social news site as it was sold off?

Digg was sold in three parts that July, and its brand and website fetched only $500,000 from Betaworks, far less than LinkedIn paid for the patents.

Which venture capital firm, founded back in 1965, named Reid Hoffman a partner in 2009?

Greylock is one of the oldest venture firms, and Hoffman used his seat there to back dozens of artificial intelligence startups.