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LinkedIn CEO on 'grown up' social networking
Q&A: LinkedIn CEO, Dan Nye

By Tim Ferguson

Published: Thursday 28 February 2008

Online business network, LinkedIn has almost 20 million members worldwide and recently opened its European office in London.

During 2007, LinkedIn doubled in size in all of its major regions including Europe and signed up its millionth UK member in October, making Blighty the largest market outside the US.

silicon.com spoke to LinkedIn CEO, Dan Nye, about LinkedIn's future plans, Facebook and social networking trends.

On the difference between LinkedIn and Facebook
Dan Nye: LinkedIn and Facebook are very different services. LinkedIn is the world's leading professional network, Facebook is a social network. There's certainly overlap but if you look, the average LinkedIn member is 41 years old and has $109,000 in household income. They are professionals using it for professional purposes. It allows people to gather unique and valuable information, contact and communicate and manage their relationships in a very scalable way and reach out to people in a very effective way. So LinkedIn is all about making the professional more productive.

Broadband from A to Z

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A is for ADSL
B is for BT
C is for Cable & Wireless
D is for Dial-up
E is for Education
F is for Fibre
G is for Goonhilly
H is for HSDPA
I is for In-flight
J is for Janet
K is for Kingston
L is for Landlines
M is for Murdoch
N is for Next generation
O is for Ofcom
P is for Power lines
Q is for Quad-play
R is for Remote working
S is for Satellite phones
T is for Trains
U is for Unbundling
V is for VoIP
W is for WiMax
X is for Xbox
Y is for YouTube
Z is for Zombies

Benefits of LinkedIn over Facebook?
We're about to hit 20 million members and we add 1.2 million users every month, so 300,000 people join every week. And these people are joining because they're all professional and because they're all over the world - half of them are in the US and half of them are outside the US. What it's doing its allowing knowledge workers around the world to find and work with each other in this global economy in which we all live. So it's in many ways fulfilling the promise of the internet by creating efficiency and allowing anybody to participate in the global economy no matter where they are or where they live.

People use LinkedIn to do searches. If you go into the advance search field for example, you can say I'm looking for a product manager who's trained in agile software development in Silicon Valley. If you put those search terms in you're going to find thousands of product managers in Silicon Valley who are trained in agile development. Then you might want to say let's narrow the search, so I'm looking for a product manager who's in the internet industry in Silicon Valley who's trained in agile development. And then you can put in names of companies you're interested in and get the list of folks who claim that they're experienced in that and you can reach out to them. So we have an advice network.

The type of thing I'm describing to you, you can't do it on Facebook. Facebook's designed differently. LinkedIn is where one presents his professional self so that you can be found and so that you can leverage your relationships to accomplish a task.

Do you have a Facebook account?
I do. You can see me riding on my tractor. I think that's an example of the difference…

Other key LinkedIn features
Another thing we have is an advice network, it's called LinkedIn Answers. So if you're interested in how many people live in London, you go to Google and you can find that out but if you're saying where should we build our European headquarters and what are the pros and cons of various choices, you can get advice from other professionals.

So the question are served up to people in your network and then it's also served up to people inside of LinkedIn who are interested in a subject like international business. Your friends want to give you advice because they're your friends and the others want to give you advice because they want to help you, they might be consultants who know something about it - and there are also people competing. What happens is they're competing to get best answer, again to further enhance their professional self. The more times you get a best answer designation, that adds to your profile. All of that says this person knows what the heck he's talking about in this area.

There's also job posting job links on LinkedIn and so we know that people are searching for jobs and they're networking their way closer to the person that posted the job, they're getting introduced by friends who know the person that posted the job who add credibility and say this person's good.

LinkedIn user views?
All the time we hear about candidates who found the perfect job on LinkedIn, we hear about companies who hired the perfect person on LinkedIn. We hear stories about companies who didn't hire somebody because of the reference checking they were able to do on LinkedIn, so you can find people who worked with somebody or went to school with somebody. So people are doing better reference checks because of LinkedIn. And then we also hear about candidates who are able to reference check their potential bosses or companies and they don't end up choosing those companies because of it. It's as much finding the dream job as avoiding the disaster.

We just heard a story about a hedge fund manger in Boston. He was trying to learn about an investment opportunity in India. His company spends $1m per year on market research tools and none of the tools were able to help him find experts to find out more about the investment opportunity. He found [through LinkedIn] 13 people who had worked for that company or worked for competitors in India and he reached out to them on the network and ended up communicating with them, learning enough about the opportunity that he made a $50m investment and by the end of the year, it was worth $300m.

Read what Dan Nye has to say about LinkedIn's future and other networking tools like Facebook on page two...